Blow Your Stack Saturday: Ditch the Borderline Personality Disorder Diagnosis

Image by John Hain from Pixabay

I honestly think the "borderline personality disorder" diagnosis needs to be eradicated. This iffy diagnosis is mostly applied to women. When I read the theory that "borderline personality disorder" is actually a form of complex PTSD, it hit home with me. "Borderline Personality Disorder" is the latter twentieth-century hysteria. I wrote a piece about a traumatic incident that happened to me when I was fifteen and realized that a lot of the acting out I did in my teens could be traced to this incident. However, a lot of it could also be traced to the bullying I endured through my entire fucking childhood and teen years.

I also propose that the word "bullying" be stricken from the lexicon and replaced with a more accurate term:

Abuse.

I was inspired to write this after reading a post on The Mighty regarding borderline personality disorder.

https://themighty.com/2020/02/confirmation-bias-diagnosis-from-psychiatrist/

Free Use Image by Open Clipart Vectors on Pixabay

Fat Friday #9: Psychology, Psychiatry, Fatphobia, and Misogyny

I have rapid cycling type 2 bipolar disorder. I have paradoxical reactions to most medications. I am a big woman.

I was told to “just stay on” Zoloft, which made me feel like my brain had grown tiny hands and was trying to pick its way out of my skull. I didn’t stop feeling the hands picking at the inside of my skull until I quit taking the Zoloft, against the doctor’s orders.

Effexor made me manic and psychotic as well. I normally do not experience psychosis or full manias.

Most counselors and doctors have gone the “weight loss is the be-all and end-all route,” even though I have serious endocrine problems and weight loss is extremely unlikely. I am food insecure. I don’t even eat three meals a day. I’m still big. Even though I told them to stop pushing weight loss because it was triggering anorexic behaviors. Obviously, I can’t be happy until I’m a petite delicate flower who is pleasing to the male gaze.

Psychology and psychiatry are absolutely misogynist. These doctors don’t care if their patients are happy. They want women to be pleasing to the eye and obedient.

Shrinks: I don't trust them damn crooked vultures.

Sly Speaks: Why I Noped Out of my Hysterectomy

I'm 53 years old and I have a history of sexual trauma and issues with my endocrine system including my reproductive system. I have PCOS. I have a degree of endometriosis, and I have polyps and fibroids in my uterus. The fibroids are small, not some grapefruit-sized thing.

I avoided having pelvic exams for close to 30 years because of past sexual trauma and fear of being shamed for being a larger person. I finally found a doctor I could trust to be honest with about my plumbing problems, so to speak. I see her quarterly because of my endocrine issues. When I told her that I had my "annual period" and was hoping this would be the last year for that mess, she said that wasn't normal and referred me to a gynecologist.

The gynecologist was a very sweet person who made me feel at ease. She never shamed me for my size. She did a D&C, which sucked because I felt like someone had been up in my business with a cheese grater, but I wanted to rule out cancer. The biopsy showed that I have simple endometrial hyperplasia with no cellular atypia. My risk of developing uterine cancer is 1.6% greater than the risk for someone who has no hyperplasia.

Hyperplasia is par for the course in someone with diabetes and PCOS. I produce too much estrogen. My primary care doctor is having me try a bio-identical progesterone, which may reverse some of the issues with my plumbing. One can always hope.

I was scheduled to have a hysterectomy, but I canceled the night before. Let me be clear that I'm not fanatical about women keeping their uterus come hell or high water. My son's best friend's mother had such horrible endometriosis that it had invaded her digestive tract. Some people have fibroids the size of a full-term fetus. There is no reason that these people should be forced to keep an organ that is malfunctioning to that degree. But this is not my case.

I always had miserable periods from hell and was glad when they came to an end. Initially, I was gung-ho to get rid of my reproductive organs, but after doing some research I realized I might be trading one problem for another (i.e. my incontinence could get significantly worse) and the inside of my hoo-hah could turn into the Great Southern Desert for the remainder of my life. In the end, it didn't seem worth it to undergo major surgery for a 1.6% higher risk of possible uterine cancer down the line.

Although two of the doctors involved in the process are women themselves (the person who would have done the surgery is a man) and they were all respectful to me, not a single one of them said a thing about the downside of having a hysterectomy. I think that doctors are taught to have this attitude that post-menopausal women are no longer able to have children, so why not just take the uterus out? But major surgery comes with risks. For me to agree to it, the risks have to outweigh the benefits, and they simply do not in this case.

~Sly Has Spoken~

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