love how bpd is the new trendy hysteria diagnosis so instead of teaching traumatized young women how to heal themselves, we slap on a relatively meaningless diagnosis until they fully internalize that their issues (i.e. not responding to trauma appropriately in a quiet, subdued, “female” way) are ingrained flaws they can absolutely never overcome
It’s an actual mental illness tho
it’s a response to trauma. i think it’s more helpful to look at it through that angle (as ptsd or c-ptsd) because healing from that trauma is at the forefront of treatment, as opposed to a bpd diagnosis where a personality disorder is by definition inflexible and unchanging and the focus of treatment is to just treat the side-effects or harmful behavior patterns
As someone who is studying and working in the field of mental health, I have a few thoughts about this.
First, the DSM-5 is not gospel. Criteria is always changing and some mental illnesses have been removed completely. All a diagnostic label does is describe a set of symptoms.
An overwhelming majority of people diagnosed with BPD are women. As @tervbangs mentioned, many of them have suffered trauma (unfortunately, child sex abuse is a common history among people diagnosed with BPD). Men and women respond to trauma differently. If a man experiences trauma, his set of symptoms is often more in line with a PTSD diagnoses and he is more likely to receive treatment for his trauma. However, since women respond to trauma differently, this trauma is often missed completely and they are diagnosed with BPD instead.
BPD diagnoses often don’t help women. Again I’m echoing @tervbangs, but people can recover from trauma with treatment, but personality disorders are seen as a life-sentence and untreatable. There is an enormous amount of stigma surrounding BPD and many mental health professionals avoid women diagnosed with BPD entirely. Slapping a woman with a BPD diagnoses often results in a game of “hot potato” where the client is bounced from professional to professional. Many people in the field believe that a) women with BPD can’t be helped or b) they’re manipulative, vindictive individuals and are some how responsible for their symptoms.
With proper treatment of trauma, many women initially diagnosed with BPD will no longer meet the criteria. However, the diagnostic label will follow them for the rest of their lives even when it doesn’t apply anymore.
I have had the pleasure of working under counsellors who argue that the BPD diagnoses should be eliminated entirely and instead a sub-category of PTSD should be instated. I 100% agree and believe this would lead to a better outcome for women living with trauma.
Someone give me a real scientific study on the links between the trauma of growing up female, the inherent sexism of psychiatry, and the use of BPD Dxs against women!!!!!! It absolutely is sexism against traumatized women and girls. How dare we be emotional, and lash out in response to trauma instesd of being good quiet girls? Boys with the same “symptoms” arent Dxd with a personality disorder. Theyre shrugged off because boys are supposed to lash out, be moody, and fuck everyone in sight.
They’ll tell you reassuringly “bpd is the only personality disorder that you aren’t born with” but can’t put together that maybe it’s because we’ve been traumatized that we act the way we do, that maybe our self destructive behavior is a result of being made powerless, that our impulsivity is a result of being conditioned to expect small erratic bursts of chaos and pain for seemingly no reason at all, that we don’t have a definite sense of self because we haven’t been able to be anything but surviving for a decade or more, that we can’t visualize a future because we were too busy just trying to visualize the day when you escape.
I don’t yet know how to properly articulate or substantiate this but I’m firmly of the opinion that men recover from PTSD more quickly than women because their traumas are different. They drive too fast down main street because they’re still driving like a pipe bomb is gna flip their car if they dawdle for even a second; a thunderclap sends them rolling off their bed and scrambling for their body armor at three in the morning. But they can get past that. They learn that they’re no longer in danger.
What do women learn, when we come forward about our trauma?
“Are you sure it was…”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“You’re overreacting”
“I know him he wouldn’t do that”
“What did you say that made him so angry”
“No it didn’t”
“You’re lying”
“You must be imagining it”
“You’re trying to ruin his life”
“Attention whore”
We learn we can’t trust grown-ups. There are no good ones who will help us. We learn no one wants to help us. So we must deserve it then. So we just survive because if we kill ourselves we might fail and then we’ll get in even more trouble. So we endure. Kind of. And if we break, then we must have deserved that too.
It’s totally the modern hysteria, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who really suffer from it.
Personal experience/rant…
I have type 2 bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and ADD. Having a diagnosis helped me find ways to cope with the manifestations of these conditions, but health care professionals tend to be unwilling to research the why behind them. It’s easier to try and medicate a patient into a semblance of normalcy.
I feel like my borderline personality disorder manifested from feeling like I was unheard and unloved in my childhood. At this point in my life, I tend to only form very superficial relationships with people for fear that they will abandon me and I tend not to trust people’s motivations.
I agree with feministvenus that the BPD diagnosis should be eradicated and BPD should instead be made a subtype of PTSD because that's what it is.
Making BPD a subtype of PTSD would also remove it from the "personality disorder" stigma. There are people who claim that BPD is "the little sister of antisocial personality disorder," which it isn't. People with BPD generally know that something's wrong with their behaviors. People with antisocial personality disorder do not.
I went to a psychiatrist once and he immediately put me on Lithium without any testing. I didn't stay on it long and never went to a psychiatrist again. They love their drugs as a first line of defense. Counselors and psychologists have been helpful.
ReplyDeleteWow, that's fucked up. A low dose of lithium helps me, but I don't take anywhere near therapeutic levels, which are one step away from being toxic.
DeleteDoctors put me on Prozac, which made me numb. I sat there staring at my arm one day and considered cutting it, not out of a desire to self-harm but because I wondered if I could still feel. I stopped taking it.
Another doctor put me on Xanax after I was sexually assaulted. It made me sleep for about five hours, and when I woke up, I was suicidal.
Another doctor put me on Effexor, which threw me into a full-blown manic state with psychosis, although I didn't know that's what it was at the time. When I told him it made me feel crazy, he put me on Zoloft. That made me feel like my brain had grown tiny hands and was trying to pick its way out of my skull. When I told him what was happening, he admonished me to stay on it. I refused.
Another doctor put me on Ativan when I was having panic attacks after a laryngospasm ended me up in the E.R. It had a rebound effect, causing a secondary and worse panic attack. I was admonished again to stay on it. I started taking Kava instead.
Another doctor put me on Clonazepam after I started having panic attacks that were happening because it turns out that I can't tolerate Synthroid. It was jacking up my blood pressure and making my heart race. So he put me on propranolol. I have asthma, so that made me feel like I was trying to breathe underwater. That's when he put me on Clonazepam, and I had the worst panic attack I've ever had in my life. I felt like I was dying.
I went off all my medications at that point. It took about three months for things to become normally abnormal. The doctor finally put me on Armour Thyroid instead.
Fucking doctors act like they're gods, but half the time they do more harm than good.
I really have never gotten any help from most counselors. I appreciate the one who helped me figure out that I had type 2 bipolar disorder, but then she started trying to proselytize, and I was done.