Borderlines are the patients psychologists fear most. As many as 75% hurt themselves, and approximately 10% commit suicide — an extraordinarily high suicide rate (by comparison, the suicide rate for mood disorders is about 6%). Borderline patients seem to have no internal governor; they are capable of deep love and profound rage almost simultaneously.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870491,00.html
Ok this strikes me as bizarre; who are these people? Are they out there acting like this? How are they employed or in any social relationship? Does anyone have personal experiences with these people?
There are people who fit this diagnosis who can be extremely hard to work with. Part of this can be worker boundaries, I have seen several workers say 'the client doesnt have BPD they’re just traumatised and they NEED me" and end up going through the wringer as a result, ending up with multiple appointments and contacts a week, hospital calls, suicide attempts etc etc.
There are also people who are very difficult to work with who will get given this diagnosis as an ‘explanation’ very quickly but do not really qualify for the formal diagnosis. It has a tendency to be used as a ‘bucket’ for ‘very annoying patient’ in some settings, and totally denied as a possibility in others.
There are people who qualify for BPD who are not particularly hard to work with professionally but struggle with some very difficult feelings and making poor life decisions. Self harm and suicide attempts are some of the diagnostic criteria but it is possible to qualify for the diagnosis without displaying these behaviours.
The wiki article at this point seems to cover things very well.
Yes sassyfras, electrons are in such short supply we all need to do our part.
Here’s another electron saving tip:
If you type every other letter when posting you are saving 50% of the electrons. Save those extra letters for a special occasion.
GQ answer (or maybe it’s a non-answer):
A friends ex was diagnosed as borderline, but most of the odd behavior I saw seemed to be manipulative, so not really sure if the diagnosis was correct or not.
I suspect that would depend an awful lot on the patient and psychiatrist/psychologist in question, honestly.
As to how bad is BPD - well, generally psychologists that focus their practices on this type of patient burn out in about 18 months, which is saying quite a bit.
I have personally met someone with BPD and she is… difficult to be around. VERY difficult.
I think it would be very tough to be related to a person with BPD as your relationship would be a constant roller coaster.
Regardless, there are people out there with this, moving through the world. If you’ve ever met anyone who sets your teeth on edge, makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, etc. they could very well have BPD.
I have not seen either one, but the films “Gia” and “Girl, Interrupted,” both Angelina Jolie roles have some aspect of this. Maybe someone can confirm. Hell, her pre-domestic child-adopting persona seemed a bit in that direction (brother kissing, etc.), although I doubt she is all the way there.
Schizophrenia is an almost wholly genetic disorder, so the drug treatment would take the forefront. AsPD and BPD don’t have any drugs that specifically target those disorders, so some form of talk therapy would take precedence. I’ll bet tranference, or whatever they’re calling it, would we the worst with BPD. BPD is very hard to treat, while AsPD is probably even harder, although they seem to range from “personable charlatan” to “serial killer,” and the treatment will differ depending on type.
From the article…regarding how a borderline paitent viewed jr high/high school.
HOLY FUCK. They are stunted/stuck emoitionally at a jr high Mean Girls stage.
IME, they are not EEEVIL like psychopaths, who are quite calculating in their manipulations.
BPDs tend to be whiny, needy, self-absorbed, self-pitying emotional leeches. Everything that happens to them (and stuff is always happening to them) is someone else’s fault. They perceive themselves as passive flotsam tossed on life’s waves.
They never seem to be able to just get their act together. They self-sabotage then demand pity. By way of example, if you or I left our phone on the train, we would say “Bugger! I’ve left my phone on the train”. We’d go back and have a look for it, grumblingly knowing the chances of it’s being found are remote.
BPD person says “Someone stole my phone!” And then they desperately need you to give them some money so they can replace it, because they just lost their job because they couldn’t turn up on time because they slept in because the TV in the next apartment kept them awake all night… blah blah blah. All expressed with this constant breathless air of crisis and desperation.
They are extremely draining to be around. They always have an excuse for why they couldn’t do something. They are always misprioritising things (in an entirely self-serving way). For example, they couldn’t make it to court because they had to buy their kid’s school books. (The excuse always plugs into some obligation that is easy to sentimentalise and socially difficult to criticise, but is usually BS.)
By way of further example, instead of dealing with their real issues with their probation officer, the time is consumed constantly with process issues like why they were late or why they missed the last three meetings and why it wasn’t their fault.
Do you mean to say that it is a neurological disorder? Because most people who have schizophrenia do not have a genetic legacy of the disease, but its basis in pathological neurology is pretty sound.
Even among people who have a parent with schizophrenia, they only have a 10% chance of acquring the disorder, which means that the environment (including what occurs during fetal development) is hugely important.
And yes, I have heard that schizophrenics are generally better patients than people with BPD. I’d argue that patients with pretty much any of the Axis I disorders make better (or easier to treat) patients than those with Axis II disorders. There’s obviously some overlap between the two, but you get my drift.
Chimera is correct, there are many threads giving examples such as the OP asked for. I don’t think he was worried about electrons, just saying it would be simpler to search for existing stories than it would for everyone to repeat themselves in a GQ thread. sassyfras, do this Google search: “borderline+personality site:straightdope.com” and you’ll get 247 threads with personal examples.
Borderine Personality is like having a parasite. It’s part of you. Craziness can be cured, personality defects can’t.
I knew a woman who had BPD. We were talking about a woman whose 4 year old son was the victim of a murder/suicide by his father. She said “Well, nonody has it worse than me. I had to bury my parents.” It’s always about them.
If Chimera was merely being help, as in offering up “hey there have been some recent threads, you might find those interesting” then great, but this “Search for them rather than asking us all to repeat our stories in this thread” is not trying to be helpful. It’s attempting to tell the OP what to do and making it sound like it’s a burden on the posters of the SDMB because they are being asked to tell their stories again.
Different people see and participate in different threads all the time, potentially posters that did not participate in the previous thread. In addition, a thread can be interactive, reading an old thread is not.
Question for you: Why only a little less “peevish”? Telling a poster there are other threads is great, but is there any logical reason to be “peeved”?
It almost sounds like you and Chimera think that this topic is common enough that everyone that comes into GQ should automatically know that it’s common. If so, I will say that this is the primary forum I’ve hung around since I started looking at the dope and I don’t remember another borderline personality thread, which is why I came into this one, it looked interesting.
There are two current threads in MPSIMS asking about personal experiences with BPD. A lot of us are participating in them heavily. That is all Chimera is pointing out (his ex-wife is BPD, as is my mother.)
There were two threads as of last week, each several pages long. They just weren’t in GQ, because, you know, the question asks for opinions and experiences which is the realm of IMHO and MPSIMS, which, indeed is where you will find the threads should you search.
When there are two multipage topics going as of a few days prior to the new question, yes, people will fairly wonder why you aren’t reading them.
Those who were inclined to share, have done so in the 300+ posts those threads accumulated. The chances of them wanting to add something to your entirely identical new post, are slim.