This is for purposes of my curiosity and will not be used to treat anyone. The person in question is a middle-aged female family member who seems to have some kind of mental problem.
I am aware of the following:
A lot of difficulty maintaining relationships with other people. She was never married and never held down a job for long. She especially seems to have problems with people in authority.
Extreme defensiveness. If she makes a small mistake, she will engage in a lengthy justification for it rather than just shrug it off.
Extreme sensitivity to perceived slights. She regularly demands apologies for stuff which everyone else has long forgotten.
Emotional blackmail. e.g. telling an estranged family member “if you want to have any kind of relationship with me, you need to hire me to do X”
It is really trendy nowadays to label anyone who is unpleasant and behaves erratically as borderline (one of my friends has twice declared that his ex was a borderline after they broke up with him).
However, I would suggest being cautious in applying these labels to people without guidance from someone who is trained in diagnosing these kinds of problems.
The stuff you mention does sound unpleasant to deal with it, but doesn’t necessarily indicate a true mental illness and wouldn’t be enough to really give someone a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder in a treatment setting.
Sometimes jerks really are just big jerks and don’t fit the diagnostic criteria for a real mental illness. Of course, even in those cases, the person could probably benefit from counseling to teach them how to interact with other people in a more healthy manner. The hard part is getting people like this to accept they have a problem.
I don’t see borderline in what you’re describing at all, unless the way she interacts with people is a lot different than what you’ve posted so far. BPD has a very unique way of dealing with people, involving “splitting”, which means they switch between idealizing and demonizing others (very hot and cold). If she consistently treats everybody like shit, then she’s **not **borderline.
The sexual precociousness and problems with authority point to “victim of childhood abuse, potentially sexual in nature.” But that’s not a diagnosis, of course, and I may be projecting. It’s possible, though. Some people are sexually precocious and weren’t abused, true. But there’s a correlation there.
I could write a book about how fundamentally this disorder is misunderstood, but someone already did. "Splitting’’ is not the only symptom of borderline personality disorder, and it is possible to receive this diagnosis without exhibiting this symptom.
I was under the impression that splitting was necessary (although not in itself sufficient) to diagnose BPD. And every single person I’ve read who talked about their BPD exhibited splitting. Ignorance fought, but OP did just ask for an armchair diagnosis.
If you have a better list of BPD’s diagnostic criteria, or an idea as to what OP’s family member has, I’m all ears.
I kinda agree with you, and of course this is all armchair stuff. But still, I think it’s reasonable to assume for the sake of discussion that this person really is mentally ill. Why? Because whatever problem this person has has caused major disruption in her life. She has been unemployed for 20 years now except for make-work given to her by her family. She has no long term friends and no long-term relationships with anyone except for her parents who support her financially.
Also, it’s hard for me to believe that item #4 above is the product of a sane mind.
Anyway, there is another thing I forgot to mention which is that this individual is very self-absorbed. She pretty much never does anything thoughtful like calling someone on their birthday or sending a present to a child.
