borderline, or extreme (Borderline Personality Disorder)

Member Name: geordieger

Product:	Borderline Personality Disorder
Date:	18/07/01 (1152 review reads)
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How can I explain the condition Borderline Personality Disorder? The best thing I can start with is a passage from a book that I have.

“You’re going along fine and then suddenly WHAM! You’ve hit a brick wall and there’s nowhere to run, no one to understand. You scream, tear your hair out, take over-the-counter sleeping pills to calm down enough to stop crying at night. The next day, you get up, sluggishly. You go to work and get the job done. You might even fake a smile every now and then to keep up the façade to show there is no brick wall in your life. You’re okay. You’re like everybody else. But you’re not. The darkness is back. It has eclipsed your happiness, shaken your confidence, rocked your very nerve endings. Who can you tell about this? Why don’t the lights work when you’ve been eclipsed? You are alone in the dark and you are afraid the sun might never shine again.” (Eclipses, Melissa Ford Thornton, 1998)

That is the experience of a sufferer of Borderline Personality Disorder. I suffer from this debilitating condition. Likened to schizophrenia, the condition is far more damaging, as the diagnosis is a long and frightening process, and misdiagnoses is common. The first diagnoses that Borderline Personality Disorder (from now on BPD) sufferers are usually given is one of Manic Depression, as they are usually severely depressed when they finally get help, and although medication that is prescribed is similar in both cases, the treatment and care that the differing illness require is poles apart.

The symptoms of BPD are fairly complex, and, as mentioned earlier, due to their similarities are often confused with other psychiatric illnesses. The symptoms include:

Desperate efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
Going from one extreme to another within personal relationships.
Being involved in a pattern of unstable or intense relationships.

Having an unstable self-image
Impulsiveness in self-destructive behaviours such as substance abuse, binge eating, over spending.
Suicidal tendencies, and self-harming.
Instability of mood swings, lasting from between a few hours and a few days.
Chronic feelings of emptiness
Intense, inappropriate anger.
Paranoia and severe dissassociative behaviour.

Another characterisation of BPD is an action called “splitting”. This is a situation where the sufferer cannot see two conflicting ideals at once. There is either black or white; there is no grey area in the middle. The borderliner cannot cope with opposing thoughts in their mind.

My situation is one that is painful for me to recollect. I have the above problems, and it taints my view of everyday life. Only last year I realised that when a person left a room they didn’t just “disappear” into a void. I couldn’t understand how someone could still be there when I couldn’t see them. Until that time, I thought everyone was like that, that this was normal. I am a self harmer (read my op on self harming), and regularly think about suicide. I suffer from paranoia, to the extreme that sometimes I cannot leave the house, and I don’t trust my partner or children. I always feel alone, and that I do not have a purpose in life. When I become angry I take it out on myself and injure myself, or do even more damage to my self-image. I also have an eating disorder, which rules my life. My life is a roller-coaster of emotion, and I live from hour to hour never knowing how I will feel next.

Self-injury is common in the borderliner, but unlike other self-injurers a risk of suicide is not weakened by self-harming behaviour. The borderline patient will not see the difference between self harm and suicide, and many borderliners have died when they were self harming by not recognising just how dangerous the action they have taken
was.

Treatment for BPD is usually by medication; I am currently on Venlafaxine (an antidepressant), Carbomazapine (an anti-convulsive drug which stabilises my brain waves) and Chlorpromazine (which is a tranquilliser). I also use Zopiclone (which is a sleeping tablet).

I have also had three periods of hospitalisation, in a psychiatric unit, but in the condition of BPD this is usually discouraged as it can cause more harm than good, due to the BPD sufferers altered perception of reality. BPD sufferers also tend to become institutionalised easier and can seek solace in the hospital, prefering to hide there instead of living real life. The preferable method of care is through a Community Psychiatric Nurse, and I see mine on a weekly basis.

BPD is thought to be caused by a traumatic experience in childhood, such as abuse, problems in parental skills when the Borderliner was young, or similar.

There is still not much advice on BPD readily available, either in the form of literature or Internet websites. The majority of websites are geared to medical professionals. I am hoping to set my own website up to help other sufferers of this condition.

This condition rules the sufferers life, and more is needed to bring this condition into the public eye. Many public figures have been said to suffer from it, the most high profile probably being Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana and Adolf Hitler. The misunderstanding of the condition, and the implications of the name, needs to be explored. A recent American survey showed that the word Borderline did not adequately describe the illness and confused both patients, carers and medical professionals. This condition is one that is so misunderstood that it is criminal seeing that it is more common than most other psychiatric conditions.

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