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Cyndi Sarnoff-Ross is a licensed psychotherapist with almost twenty years of clinical experience in the fields of clinical psychology and organizational management br br She has worked extensively with a wide variety of…
FAST FACTS
What is Borderline Personality Disorder?
The term Borderline seems to be used quite often now, and it has become a part of non-therapeutic speech. There have been movies about this disorder, such as "Girl, Interrupted", and television characters that are said to have Borderline Personality Disorder. It is a a term that is often misused to describe a mental illness that results in a certain personality type. People will ask me what it means. What are they on the borderline of? In a sense, the name is actually is misnomer.
The term was coined in the 1930s to describe a mental illness that lay somewhere between neurosis and psychosis. The term really doesn't describe the disorder at all because it has nothing specifically to do with either condition. It is in fact a mood disorder (classified under Personality Disorders in the DSM) that is more common than one may think and can be devastating and disruptive to individuals and families.
The person with this disorder will describe feelings of emptiness and internal conflict. There is an impulsivity component to the disorder that for some can make even normal functioning challenging. There is an emotional hunger and need to connect, typically followed by an angry outburst or accusation that leads to impaired interpersonal relationships. Substance abuse is common among these patients and the impulsivity can result in over spending or other financially chaotic behaviors. In many cases, the person who suffers from this disorder perpetrates self-harm (self-mutilation) and frequent suicide attempts are usually part of the profile.
Clearly these individuals are in a great deal of emotional pain and the fact that others have difficulty remaining connected to them only serves to exacerbate the feelings of loneliness and despair. Even clinicians struggle to maintain a relationship with these clients because of the unpredictable explosive anger that may be directed towards them during treatment. The challenge and the imperative goal are to understand the internal struggle that these individuals feel and to help guide them to a better, more stable place. Consistency in the therapeutic relationship is crucial towards the healing process.
A leading psychologist in the field, Dr. Marsha Linehan has created a treatment approach for people suffering with Borderline Personality Disorder that has been shown to be highly effective. It is called Dialectical Behavior Therapy and it can help patients become aware of their thoughts and assumptions in life and teach them to react in a more effective way. It helps them to change their thought patterns. Dr. Linehan tells her patients, "Your problem is that you don't how to regulate yourself, and I can teach you how." Her success in teaching patients how to self regulate and thereby improve their life and the lives of those who love them has been a great accomplishment in the field of psychology.
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CONDITIONS AND COMMUNITIES:
Anger Management
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Anxiety
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Caregivers
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Depression
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Eating Disorders
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Family Issues
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Healthy Relationships
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Loneliness
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Personality Disorders
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Seasonal Affective Disorder
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Self-Injury
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Regardless of one's take on their etiology, once they are set in place during an individual's developmental years, the coping mechanisms that developed in order to combat the everpresent subjective sense of being under attack are extremely difficult (although not impossible) to "re-wire" -- thus, also, the label Personality Disorder: these cognitive mechanisms become ingrained so early on as to form a constitutive portion of the individual's personality, or identity.
The majority of the time BPD is caused by trauma.There is a great article on BPD on a Time mag from a few months ago.
BPD has been describe as the third degree burn of mental illness as BPDs have no emotional skin, so to speak.Any emotion is felt very intensly and causes great pain.This disorder has the highest rate of suicide than any other mental illness, 1 out of every 10 patients end up commiting suicide.
Is a problem of emotion disregulation, a lot of people with BPD self- injure, some severly.
Is estimated that 2% of the US population has a dx of BPD, but that seems to be rising.
There are a ot of myths about BPD, one is that BPD are manipulative people, BPD act or engage in erratic behaviour, however we do not do it with the intention to manipluate, although people's reactions to our behaviour does cause havoc....I found this bit by a BPD specialist...
BPD is a very real and serious mental illness, and I am not alone. It is not a “personality problem” or just a set of maladaptive ways of coping with the world. BPD is the result of a combination of biological, genetic and environmental causes. It is recognized as a psychiatric disorder in the official guidebook used by mental health providers to diagnose mental illness (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
Finally there has been more studies on BPD and there is now hope, i was DX with it 19 years ago when they though it was not curable.
One thing also worth mentitoning is that BPD mimicks C-PTSD symptoms BPD and PTSD are often present as the same time as BPD is mostly caused me trauma, but not always....
I recommend the latest book on this very sad disorder "The Borderline Personality Disorder survival guide"
WE are consider by many to be bad people and we're not,we suffer from a very painful disorder that is also hard to treat.