Hell, gods help you if they fall in love with you even if you don’t feel the same…
Fortunately I have known some people with it who did the work in DBT and are awesome, but I’ve got plenty of mental scars from folks with it that didn’t.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD). Its a very hard condition to live with and very stigmatized, even within mental healthcare (some therapists refuse to see patients with BPD). I have a friend with the condition and I love her very very dearly; she works her ass off to manage the condition, which I imagine is a little easier now that she knows she has the condition and can understand a bit more what’s going on and what might be productive in improving things.
The reason its relevant is that a large component of BPD is relational volatility. And additionally, an unstable or fluctuating sense of self, persistent feelings of emptiness, relational paranoia, intense emotions and difficulty regulating them resulting in emotional volatility, impulsivity, and higher risk of suicidality and other impulsive high risk coping strategies (dangerous driving, risky sex, self harm).
Though in the perspective of my friend there are also other large components of the condition that are less often engaged with or discussed because they aren’t what affect other people, which she feels has been much of the focus in how people try to adress BPD, rather than the patient’s experience of distress, not all of which is relational. For example psychosis is very common in people with BPD but very rarely discussed. She has explained BPD as being, in some ways, like a cocktail mixture of other personality disorders.
It’s also my understanding though, that when the patient is seeking to adress the condition (which is not always easy with personality disorders), BPD is very responsive to treatment, which is really cool :)
Please take all of this with several grains of salt, this is intended to be a rough overview because my love for my friend gives me an interest in talking about the condition compassionately, but I’m not a researcher or healthcare professional. I just care about my friend a lot, and much of the therapy I’ve done (DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy) was developed in part as a treatment for BPD
I have a transmasc friend who developed BPD because of transphobia (he’s from Chile, where there’s a really conservative culture [thus sexist, transphobic, homophobic, etc.] and associated bullying).
Recently, my older sister went to the psychiatrist with me for the first time in her life, and she apparently likely has BPD, and maybe is autistic as well.
So I can only agree with you. I hope people become more aware and learn more about mental health issues so they grow more empathetic and the stigma decreases.
Yeah I’ve had friends who got their BPD under control and are awesome. On the other hand I have some mental scars that I’m working on in therapy from two people with it who fell for me.
I think it’s important we be compassionate to folks with it, but also acknowledge the harm they often do before treatment. The volatility is brutal on both ends of it and can easily lead to them pressuring people into things they don’t want and other very damaging behaviors.
I had a stay in a rehab facility for 3 months after having severe psychiatric issues, and there i met a bunch of borderliners who were also on rehabilitation there. They really don’t have it easy, but it was good to see how much they improved when getting adequate care. As you say, as with any severe psychiatric disorders, the patient has to want to get better, which includes even realizing that something is wrong.
These things are the largest barriers for successful treatment in many psychiatric conditions, e.g. paranoid schizophrenia which suffers from abysmal compliance rates, often leading to a cycle of “on meds -> feeling well, but the meds have side effects -> dropping the meds to get rid of the side effects -> back to the start, but with the idea that the doctors want to poison me”.
As you say, as with any severe psychiatric disorders, the patient has to want to get better, which includes even realizing that something is wrong.
To be clear, with many psychiatric disorders, the disorder itself can influence the patient to not want to get better. For example, a patient who is responding well to treatment but stops taking their meds because their condition makes them believe that the meds are the problem.
Yeah, after i read my comment again i edited it to reflect that - you are absolutely right. And from personal experience with psychiatric medication, i can fully understand it. One of the medications i was on when depressed to the point of being suicidal was Quetiapine, and you feel absolutely dead inside. It was preferrable to the state i was in before, but for someone who isn’t depressive as fuck this can be a negative thing.
And there is always the issue with psychiatrists thinking they always deal with people that are non-compliant when issues arise. I have been suffering from sleep disorder where i would be so tired during the day that things just fell out of my hands because i fell asleep for fractions of seconds during the day (so called somnolence), and abnormal nightmares/night terrors (normal nightmares you have nearly forgotten at the point of waking up. I was able to recite the complete plot incl. small details days after these, and they were horrific.) up to the point that i had a phase where i simply did not want to go to sleep anymore, resulting in a phase with recurring sleep paralysis.
I was complaining about this to my psychiatrists, who responded by prescribing me sleeping pills - but those only caused me to be disoriented when i woke from my nightmares, and being completely lethargic on the next day. During this time (a duration of around 8 years) I was on a pretty high dose of Duloxetine, also known as Cymbalta in the US as a mood stabilizer to prevent sliding back into depression. But what none of my psychiatrists informed me about was that Duloxetine has pretty common side effects on sleep, including somnolence and abnormal nightmares. A few months back I was reading up on my medication by random chance, and saw the list of common side effects.
I instantly started halving the dose i took, because my dose was the one cited with the highest incidence of sleep disorder. My nightmares became less and less during the next weeks, and for the first time in years i was able to get a satisfying amount of sleep. Afterwards i talked to another psychiatrist who i knew (but wasn’t the one who prescribed these meds), who - after a few sentences, i wasn’t even able to complete what i wanted to say - acknowledged that she already suspected that i might suffer from the side effects, but since i was the active patient of another psych, she did not want to interfere. (I do not blame her - messing with things that are not really your business is a bad idea in the medical field)
I made an appointment with my psych, and they confirmed that they knew for YEARS that my issues were because of the meds, and that they decided that informing me about this fact might cause me to simply dump the meds and opted for trying to suppress the side effects without success.
I have an avoidant personality disorder, making it very hard for me to trust anyone, but i am one of the few psychiatric patients who know that a statistic does not say anything about a specific patient. I would have tried to work with these meds even with the side effects. I would have tried other medication. But they took the easy way, which resulted in me having dropped the medication (slowly - you can’t just stop these things) and now looking for a Psychiatrist that respects my autonomy. For now, i feel fine because my life circumstances have changed a lot and many of the stressors in my life are gone (and i never was a problem for others, only for myself) outside of getting wet eyes when i watch series that tug on my heart tendons lol. But if i were someone prone to psychosis or paranoid schizophrenia, i would never take anything again. My trust has been violated and abused, just to make their job easier.
I won’t trust any psychiatrist blindly again. This wasn’t a single psych, this is an organisation paid for by the city of Vienna where i had 4 different psychs over the years, with an attached day center for people like me, with ergotherapy groups, movie groups, physiotherapy and so on. It hurts to leave all this infrastructure behind, but being in the center means i have to be a patient of their psychs. None of them considered the damage to my meager trust that i have to actively work for to sustain when they hid the truth from me.
Not as funny knowing he has borderline😔
Dating someone with BPD is an absolute nightmare.
God help you if you fall in love with them.
Hell, gods help you if they fall in love with you even if you don’t feel the same…
Fortunately I have known some people with it who did the work in DBT and are awesome, but I’ve got plenty of mental scars from folks with it that didn’t.
borderline what
Borderline personality disorder (BPD). Its a very hard condition to live with and very stigmatized, even within mental healthcare (some therapists refuse to see patients with BPD). I have a friend with the condition and I love her very very dearly; she works her ass off to manage the condition, which I imagine is a little easier now that she knows she has the condition and can understand a bit more what’s going on and what might be productive in improving things.
The reason its relevant is that a large component of BPD is relational volatility. And additionally, an unstable or fluctuating sense of self, persistent feelings of emptiness, relational paranoia, intense emotions and difficulty regulating them resulting in emotional volatility, impulsivity, and higher risk of suicidality and other impulsive high risk coping strategies (dangerous driving, risky sex, self harm).
Though in the perspective of my friend there are also other large components of the condition that are less often engaged with or discussed because they aren’t what affect other people, which she feels has been much of the focus in how people try to adress BPD, rather than the patient’s experience of distress, not all of which is relational. For example psychosis is very common in people with BPD but very rarely discussed. She has explained BPD as being, in some ways, like a cocktail mixture of other personality disorders.
It’s also my understanding though, that when the patient is seeking to adress the condition (which is not always easy with personality disorders), BPD is very responsive to treatment, which is really cool :)
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/borderline-personality-disorder
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9005124/
Please take all of this with several grains of salt, this is intended to be a rough overview because my love for my friend gives me an interest in talking about the condition compassionately, but I’m not a researcher or healthcare professional. I just care about my friend a lot, and much of the therapy I’ve done (DBT, dialectical behavioral therapy) was developed in part as a treatment for BPD
I have a transmasc friend who developed BPD because of transphobia (he’s from Chile, where there’s a really conservative culture [thus sexist, transphobic, homophobic, etc.] and associated bullying).
Recently, my older sister went to the psychiatrist with me for the first time in her life, and she apparently likely has BPD, and maybe is autistic as well.
So I can only agree with you. I hope people become more aware and learn more about mental health issues so they grow more empathetic and the stigma decreases.
Yeah I’ve had friends who got their BPD under control and are awesome. On the other hand I have some mental scars that I’m working on in therapy from two people with it who fell for me.
I think it’s important we be compassionate to folks with it, but also acknowledge the harm they often do before treatment. The volatility is brutal on both ends of it and can easily lead to them pressuring people into things they don’t want and other very damaging behaviors.
I had a stay in a rehab facility for 3 months after having severe psychiatric issues, and there i met a bunch of borderliners who were also on rehabilitation there. They really don’t have it easy, but it was good to see how much they improved when getting adequate care. As you say, as with any severe psychiatric disorders, the patient has to want to get better, which includes even realizing that something is wrong.
These things are the largest barriers for successful treatment in many psychiatric conditions, e.g. paranoid schizophrenia which suffers from abysmal compliance rates, often leading to a cycle of “on meds -> feeling well, but the meds have side effects -> dropping the meds to get rid of the side effects -> back to the start, but with the idea that the doctors want to poison me”.
To be clear, with many psychiatric disorders, the disorder itself can influence the patient to not want to get better. For example, a patient who is responding well to treatment but stops taking their meds because their condition makes them believe that the meds are the problem.
Yeah, after i read my comment again i edited it to reflect that - you are absolutely right. And from personal experience with psychiatric medication, i can fully understand it. One of the medications i was on when depressed to the point of being suicidal was Quetiapine, and you feel absolutely dead inside. It was preferrable to the state i was in before, but for someone who isn’t depressive as fuck this can be a negative thing.
And there is always the issue with psychiatrists thinking they always deal with people that are non-compliant when issues arise. I have been suffering from sleep disorder where i would be so tired during the day that things just fell out of my hands because i fell asleep for fractions of seconds during the day (so called somnolence), and abnormal nightmares/night terrors (normal nightmares you have nearly forgotten at the point of waking up. I was able to recite the complete plot incl. small details days after these, and they were horrific.) up to the point that i had a phase where i simply did not want to go to sleep anymore, resulting in a phase with recurring sleep paralysis.
I was complaining about this to my psychiatrists, who responded by prescribing me sleeping pills - but those only caused me to be disoriented when i woke from my nightmares, and being completely lethargic on the next day. During this time (a duration of around 8 years) I was on a pretty high dose of Duloxetine, also known as Cymbalta in the US as a mood stabilizer to prevent sliding back into depression. But what none of my psychiatrists informed me about was that Duloxetine has pretty common side effects on sleep, including somnolence and abnormal nightmares. A few months back I was reading up on my medication by random chance, and saw the list of common side effects.
I instantly started halving the dose i took, because my dose was the one cited with the highest incidence of sleep disorder. My nightmares became less and less during the next weeks, and for the first time in years i was able to get a satisfying amount of sleep. Afterwards i talked to another psychiatrist who i knew (but wasn’t the one who prescribed these meds), who - after a few sentences, i wasn’t even able to complete what i wanted to say - acknowledged that she already suspected that i might suffer from the side effects, but since i was the active patient of another psych, she did not want to interfere. (I do not blame her - messing with things that are not really your business is a bad idea in the medical field)
I made an appointment with my psych, and they confirmed that they knew for YEARS that my issues were because of the meds, and that they decided that informing me about this fact might cause me to simply dump the meds and opted for trying to suppress the side effects without success.
I have an avoidant personality disorder, making it very hard for me to trust anyone, but i am one of the few psychiatric patients who know that a statistic does not say anything about a specific patient. I would have tried to work with these meds even with the side effects. I would have tried other medication. But they took the easy way, which resulted in me having dropped the medication (slowly - you can’t just stop these things) and now looking for a Psychiatrist that respects my autonomy. For now, i feel fine because my life circumstances have changed a lot and many of the stressors in my life are gone (and i never was a problem for others, only for myself) outside of getting wet eyes when i watch series that tug on my heart tendons lol. But if i were someone prone to psychosis or paranoid schizophrenia, i would never take anything again. My trust has been violated and abused, just to make their job easier.
I won’t trust any psychiatrist blindly again. This wasn’t a single psych, this is an organisation paid for by the city of Vienna where i had 4 different psychs over the years, with an attached day center for people like me, with ergotherapy groups, movie groups, physiotherapy and so on. It hurts to leave all this infrastructure behind, but being in the center means i have to be a patient of their psychs. None of them considered the damage to my meager trust that i have to actively work for to sustain when they hid the truth from me.
Map drawing skills. He can only find London and France.
You would think “border line disorder” would mean they would be unnaturally good at spotting and drawing lines along borders.
Oh shit I’m so sorry, damn…
That’s awful. I truly hope he’s in a better place with that. It’s not easy to go through. I hope he gets the help he needs.