Borderline Personality Disorder(BPD) – a Psychological Disorder which is often confused with another Psychological Disorder- Bipolar Disorder.
This article is about ‘Bella Clifton’ and her fight with BPD.
Bella Clifton was a 9-year-old girl when she saw her parents fighting every day and night. Little as she was, in that environment of hostile and distressful, her child-like mind started believing that people leave when we need them the most. Although her parents reconciled after years of arguments and fights but her subconscious mind was still lost in those years of her childhood.
During her teenager days, she lost some of her closest friends and became more & more depressed. She had a feeling of insecurity & fear of rejection. So, she never made very close relationships. She was emotionally imbalanced, full of sadness and the cloud of self-worthlessness thoughts started following her. She even started questioning her existence. Those events made her lonelier. She was feeling empty inside her own.
Borderline personality disorder or BPD is a serious Psychological Disorder, often confused with bipolar disorder. According to the most recent DSM-4-TR lists nine categorical criteria for BPD, five of which must be present for diagnosis.
The nine Psychological criteria are as follows:-
- Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
- Unstable and intense interpersonal relationships.
- Lack of a clear sense of identity.
- Impulsiveness in potentially self-damaging behaviours, such as substance abuse, sex, shoplifting, reckless driving, binge eating, etc.
- Recurrent suicidal threats or gestures, or self-mutilating behaviours.
- Severe mood shifts and extreme reactivity to situational stress.
- Chronic feelings of emptiness.
- Frequent and inappropriate displays of anger.
- Transient, stress-related feelings of unreality or paranoia.
Discussion
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is one of the group B-type of personality disorder. It is common in a psychiatric environment with a recorded prevalence of 20%. In BPD comorbid depression, anxiety spectrum disorders & bipolar illness occur more frequently & the lifetime risk of having at least one comorbid mental disorder approaches 100%. It is more common in women, higher in the urban population. It was originally used in psychodramatic circles to describe people with a marked instability. (source)
People suffering from borderline personality usually have a traumatic childhood experience such as separation of parents, sexual assault, or physical violence. The world of a borderline, like that of a child, is split into black and white. At any particular moment, one is either “good” or “evil”; there is no grey area. Splitting is an escaping mechanism from anxiety. A person suffering from BPD desperately seeks out new relationships; for solitude, even temporary aloneness is intolerable than mistreatment.
BPD is often accompanied by- anxiety, anger, depression, panic attacks, sleep disturbance, episodes of frequent mood swings.
In Bella’s case, it was her traumatic childhood which made her a patient of BPD. At first, she wasn’t ready to go to a psychiatrist but after lots of convincing and arguments with her childhood best friend, she gave in. Bella was prescribed with some mood stabilizer, anti-depressant and sleep-improver. Her psychiatrist recommended her a clinical psychologist and the journey of her DBT session (therapy for BPD) begins.
Thank you so much for this.