Effectiveness of a 24 Hour Phone Line on the Rate of Suicide Attempts in Borderline Patients

Borderline personality disorder is very frequent among psychiatric populations, and chronic suicidality is a major problem in clinical practice with borderline patients. In a lot of countries, suicide prevention centers are available, but most of these centers are not supervised by professionals of mental health, and none is specifically oriented to the borderline population.

The main goal of this study is to assess the effectiveness of a 24 hour crisis phone line on the rate of suicide attempts in a clinical population of borderline patients (the effectiveness of this phone line access on the rate of self-injurious behaviours will also be studied).

In this multicentric controlled trial, 600 borderline patients (men or women, in or out-patients, between 18 and 40 years-old) are randomized in two arms :

• one with treatment as usual
• one with treatment as usual, PLUS one year of access to a 24 hour crisis phone line (with a team of psychiatrists specialized in borderline personality disorder).

All patients are assessed with standardized instruments (interviewers are blind to the patient's status), at entry (T1) and one year later (T2).