BPD
borderline personality disorder is a mental illness where a person’s relationships, self-image, & emotions are impaired. it’s often described as having "emotional third-degree burns" or "no emotional skin" because of how intensely people with bpd feel their emotions.
Symptoms
► Distorted & unstable self-image
► Intense & unstable relationships with loved ones, swinging from extreme love to extreme dislike/anger
► Efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment, such as rapidly initiating intimate physical/emotional relationships or cutting off communication with someone in anticipation of being abandoned
► Impulsive & often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, & binge eating
► Self-harming behavior like cutting or burning oneself
► Recurring thoughts of suicidal behaviors or threats
► Intense & highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few hours to a few days
► Chronic feelings of emptiness
► Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger
► Difficulty trusting, which is sometimes accompanied by irrational fear of other people’s intentions
► Constant, unconscious change in one's identity or sense of self by imitating another (fictional or real) person’s behaviors & traits
► Feelings of dissociation, such as feeling cut off from oneself, seeing oneself from outside one’s body, or feelings of unreality
Facts
► 65-70% of people with BPD make at least 1 suicide attempt & 10% of those with BPD complete suicide, this rate is more than 50 times the rate of suicide in the general population
► About 75% of people diagnosed with BPD are women
► Self-injury (cutting, burning, bruising, head-banging, biting) is seen in 75% of patients
► Clinicians have the legal right to turn away BPD patients
► BPD can be caused by genetics or extreme childhood trauma
► People with BPD make up 20% of those committed to inpatient psychiatric hospitals
► In a recent study, over 40% of people with BPD had been previously misdiagnosed with other disorders like bipolar disorder or major depressive disorder