Borderline Personality Disorder?
Question:
Answers:
The fact that the Borderline personality disorder is often found among women makes it a controversial mental health diagnosis. Some scholars say that it is a culture-bound pseudo-syndrome invented by men to serve a patriarchal and misogynistic society. Others point to the fact the lives of patients diagnosed with the disorder are chaotic and that the relationships they form are stormy, short-lived, and unstable. Moreover, not unlike compensatory narcissists, people with the Borderline Personality Disorder often display labile (wildly fluctuating) sense of self-worth, self-image and affect (expressed emotions).
Like both narcissists and psychopaths, borderlines are impulsive and reckless. Like histrionics, their sexual conduct is promiscuous, driven, and unsafe. Many borderlines binge eat, gamble, drive, and shop carelessly, and are substance abusers. Lack of impulse control is joined with self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors, such as suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, gestures, or threats, and self-mutilation or self-injury.
The main dynamic in the Borderline Personality Disorder is abandonment anxiety. Like codependents, borderlines attempt to preempt or prevent abandonment (both real and imagined) by their nearest and dearest. They cling frantically and counterproductively to their partners, mates, spouses, friends, children, or even neighbors. This fierce attachment is coupled with idealization and then swift and merciless devaluation of the borderline's target.
Exactly like the narcissist, the borderline patient elicits constant narcissistic supply (attention, affirmation, adulation, approval) to regulate her gyrating sense of self-worth and her chaotic self-image, to shore up serious, marked, persistent, and ubiquitous deficits in self-esteem and Ego functions, and to counter the gnawing emptiness at her core.
The Borderline Personality Disorder is often co-diagnosed (is comorbid) with mood and affect disorders. But all borderlines suffer from mood reactivity.
From an entry I wrote for the Open Site Encyclopedia:
"(Borderlines) shift dizzyingly between dysphoria (sadness or depression) and euphoria, manic self-confidence and paralyzing anxiety, irritability and indifference. This is reminiscent of the mood swings of Bipolar Disorder patients. But Borderlines are much angrier and more violent. They usually get into physical fights, throw temper tantrums, and have frightening rage attacks.
When stressed, many Borderlines become psychotic, though only briefly (psychotic micro-episodes), or develop transient paranoid ideation and ideas of reference (the erroneous conviction that one is the focus of derision and malicious gossip). Dissociative symptoms are not uncommon ("losing" stretches of time, or objects, and forgetting events or facts with emotional content)."
Hence the term "borderline" (first coined by Otto F. Kernberg). The Borderline Personality Disorder is on the thin (border) line separating neurosis from psychosis.
Other Answers:
you need to look it up. but I can tell you the symptoms overlap with narcissism and sometimes it is hard to differentiate the two,
A personality disorder, in general, means that you have an enduring pattern of impulse control and maladaptive (much different from everyone else) cognition, affective, interpersonal functioning. Meaning that you have a different way of perceiving yourself and the world, your emotions may be more intense or unpredictable, you may have difficulty with relationships, and impulse control problems. The pattern is inflexible and pervasive accords most situations and environments. The pattern causes clinically significant distress and impairment in daily living. The pattern is long and stable, starting with young adulthood (although personality disorders cannot be diagnosed until after 18). Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in particular means that your pattern includes unstable relationships, impulsivity, and problems with self-image and emotion. You may engage in several behaviors or experience different emotions, including:
* Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
* Pattern of unstable and intense relationships
* Identity disturbance and unstable self-image
* Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (spending, sex, reckless driving, etc)
* Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior
* Emotional instability
* Chronic feelings of emptiness
* Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger
* Occasional stress-related paranoia or dissociative symptoms
Of the people with Borderline Personality Disorder that I have met and worked with, I have noticed a couple of other behaviors, not included above, such as attention-seeking, catastrophizing, self-sustaining depression, and drug/alcohol abuse.
Personality Disorders are rarely diagnosed alone, usually there is also depression, bipolar, anxiety, or psychotic disorders present. Medication doesn't really help with BPD, because it is due to how you perceive and behave. If medication is prescribed, it is for the disorders listed above.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) is designed specifically for the treatment of BPD.
"Clients receiving DBT were significantly less likely to drop out of therapy, were significantly less likely to engage in parasuicide, reported significantly fewer parasuicial behaviors and, when engaging in parasuicidal behaviors, had less medically severe behaviors. Further, clients receiving DBT were less likely to be hospitalized, had fewer days in hospital, and had higher scores on global and social adjustment." (reference below)
More Questions and Answers
- do you like yourself?
- Does she have OCD?
- Has anyone here ever known someone who was diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder?
- What are the disadvantages of having an OCD diagnosis in the uk?
- Is Josh Klumas or Jason Hardy the devil?
- Why am I always on the defensive? Whenever anyone says something I always take it the wrong way.?
- What one thing would you like to do before you die?
- How can you emotionally let go if you are unable to? As if you are blocked up inside.?