In the social lives of people with learning disabilities, friendships have an important role. Other relationships also have significance. Greater efforts are required to support people with learning disabilities to be able to maintain friendships and follow social pursuits of their own choosing.

This study is an attempt to delineate symptom clusters that may be considered most distinctive of patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Medical records were examined to assess the extent to which each of the eight DSM‐III‐R BPD criteria was present in 89 psychiatric inpatients diagnosed with BPD. Structural analysis revealed three symptom clusters that can explain symptomatology for a majority of the sample. BPD patients can be identified initially by a core factor and separated subsequently into several BPD subtypes based on the patients' remaining symptomatology. A hierarchical diagnostic scheme for delineating BPD subtypes is proposed, and the implications of these findings for a theoretical separation of several BPD subtypes are discussed.

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