Daily Loneliness and Suicidal Ideation in Borderline Personality Disorder

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Loneliness has been linked with suicidal ideation (SI) in people with a Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) diagnosis. However, the temporal dynamics of this association remain unclear: we do not know whether loneliness amplifies SI within clinically relevant timeframes. To fill this gap, our preregistered analysis used a 21-day ambulatory assessment study of individuals diagnosed with BPD (N = 153, 105 with a history of attempted suicide). We tested the hypotheses that within-person, daily loneliness would be linked to same- and next-day SI and that BPD features would strengthen these links. In line with our hypotheses, we found a significant contemporaneous and lagged association between loneliness and SI, yet these links were not significantly amplified by BPD features. Exploratory analyses further suggested that loneliness did not account for the within-person link between daily social interactions and SI, nor did more general personality disorder (PD) features alter loneliness-SI links. The link between loneliness and SI highlights a significant vulnerability to suicide risk and our findings suggest that BPD catalyzes the early stages of the suicidal process by predisposing to loneliness, but not the progression from loneliness to suicidal ideation.