One of the best books out about borderline personality disorder is "The Siren's Dance: My Marriage to a Borderline," by Anthony Walker, a psychiatrist. The detailed descriptions of events will give you a strong appreciation for those persons who live with this mood disorder, or suffer from it on a daily basis.
In the book is an appendix about the term, "borderline." The author writes:
The term borderline is a historical term that many people argue should be changed. These patients were first described in the 1940s by psychoanalysts who theorized that this is a form of pathology lying on the border between psychosis and neurosis. Some clinicians see it as the border between sanity and insanity. Nevertheless, the term is confusing and further has increasingly and unfortunately been used as a pejorative for difficult patients, in particular difficult female patients. In my opinion, a far better term would be self-destructive personality disorder, which would be the psychological equivalent of a autoimmune disorder. Others have proposed emotionally dysregulated personality disorder.
Sadly, it is common--and wrong--to call any woman who is seen as manipulative, especially one who has emotional problems, a "borderline." We have to be careful so as not to misuse the diagnosis. Also, at the end of the day, we all manipulate at some level, and manipulation alone is certainly not enough to make a BPD diagnosis.
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Good timing...there was an article in a recent TIME magazine about BPD.
Here's the link:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870491,00.html
Wow, Sue you need to enter the 20th (no, not 21st century). Women are not our biology. We are sooooo much more. I hope your journey leads you to some self-esteem.
Just a comment.
"Personality Disorder" means that a certain type of personality has been pathologized because their behaviors are uncomfortable to others.
The borderlines experience an overwhelming fear of abandonment... Abandonment in this context doesn’t mean left alone to rebuild their life - which majorly sucks but isn’t the End of the World. Abandonment means that who they are has been taken away from them. They have little "I" so they MUST be part of a "we."
Borderline personality disorder is often confused with bipolar disorder, but they are totally different animals. According to the NIMH (as of April 2007), "While a person with depression or bipolar disorder typically endures the same mood for weeks, a person with BPD may experience intense bouts of anger, depression, and anxiety that may last only hours, or at most a day."
Given that there are rapid-cycling bipolars, there has to be more to it than that.
It's not entirely clear from this that the mood swings of Borderline Personality Disorder are reactions - overreactions perhaps - to immediate stressors. The mood swings of bipolar disorder are less related to individual events and more related to sustained stress.
Not all Borderlines are female. I am in the process of divorcing my undiagnosed BPD husband of 27 yrs. I first learned of BPD a year ago. Everything in my life fell into place as I read the symptoms, diagnostic criterion, and stories of others who had been married to a Borderline.
I wept as I realized that my husband's aversion to mental health practitioners meant no hope for a future with him. He began acting out in threatening and destructive ways in May, and I filed for divorce with a restraining order in June.
Not untypically, he has vilified me and has made himself out to be the victim. He "cannot understand" why I got the RO or how I could "lie" about him and be "so cruel." This after his written and verbal threats concerning his guns, and his threats (on tape) to "destroy [my] personal property and everything inside the house because it all belongs to [him]."
Long story short, BPD destroys relationships. Our 15 yr old daughter is so upset by her dad's outbursts and unpredictability that she has hardly spoken to him since Nov.
Great resource:
http://www.bpdcentral.com/index.php
It's sad when the people you love cannot be a part of your life.
Thank you for bringing BPD out of the closet. There is so much attention and information on Bi-Polar and very little on Borderline. Being borderline is hard enough without all the stigma and taboo surrounding the name. Plus very few people seem to know much about my disability. Hopefully with information comes insight and understanding. I welcome future articles on Borderline Personality Disorder. Keep up the good work.
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