Comparing the Effectiveness of Emotion-Focused Therapy with the Effectiveness of Mentalization-Based Therapy on the Treatment of People with Borderline Personality Disorder

Considering the complexity and importance of borderline personality disorder as well as the relatively high prevalence rate of this disorder in the society, this research was conducted as a comparison of the effectiveness of emotion- focused therapy with mentalization-based therapy on the treatment of people with borderline personality disorder.

The method of this semi-experimental research and the design used to examine the hypotheses in this research was a pre-test-posttest design with an experimental group and a control group. The statistical population of this research consisted of all people with borderline personality disorder who visited two counseling centers in Tehran district 1 in 2019. Therefore 45 people with borderline personality disorder were selected by purposive sampling method and then these people were placed in three groups of 15 (emotion-oriented treatment experimental group, mentalization-based treatment experimental group and control group) by matching method. The experimental groups received 12 weekly 120-minute sessions of emotion-focused therapy and mentalization-based therapy, and the control group did not receive therapy. The data collection instrument in this research was the borderline personality questionnaire by Leishnering (1999). Due to the quantitative nature of the research, data analysis was done using descriptive and inferential statistical methods (covariance analysis test).

The findings showed that emotion- focused therapy and mentalization-based therapy are effective on the treatment of people with borderline personality disorder. Also, the results showed that there is a significant difference between the effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy and mentalization-based therapy on the treatment of borderline personality disorder, and the effectiveness of mentalization-based therapy is greater than emotion-focused therapy on the treatment of borderline personality disorder.

Both intervention methods were effective in improving the symptoms of people with borderline personality disorder. However, the effect of mentalization-based therapy is more effective than emotionfocused therapy the treatment of people with borderline personality disorder.