Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality disorder, or BPD, is marked by volatility, seemingly manipulative behaviors, and crushing anxiety. It’s difficult for family and friends to understand, and for doctors to treat — particularly when it affects women living with ADHD. Here’s what patients and clinicians should know about this less common comorbid condition. …

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is defined by the National Institute of Health (NIH) as a serious mental disorder marked by a pattern of ongoing instability in moods, behavior, self-image, and functioning. Due to this, unstable relationships and impulsive behavior often occur. A person with BPD may experience stress-related paranoid thoughts, …

Borderline Personality Disorder – or BPD – may be among the most stigmatized of mental disorders. Currently, there are rumblings in the mental health field about the negative implications of the term itself, as many consider it misleading and fraught with negative associations. BPD is often undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or treated …

Trigger Warning: This column has content pertaining to topics such as suicide, self-harm and mood disturbances. Until writing this column, I had not told the public about my borderline personality disorder diagnosis and my struggles with suicidal ideation, self-harm and loneliness. However, it is about time for me to put …

Natasha Swingler has lived with complex mental illness from a young age. “I didn’t want to be seen, to be heard. I didn’t really want to exist, I didn’t feel that I was deserving of any form of care,” she says. It would take some time until she would learn …

When something bothers you, do you find that it runs through your mind on an endless loop? Do you replay situations in which you said or did something foolish, like making a bad joke at someone’s expense? Perhaps you were on an online video chat in which you made what …

Black and white. In and out. Up and down. Love and hate. And hate. So much hate. Why did I do that? Why don’t they like me? Why do they like me? Every second of every day the battle rages in my head. Never stopping, never ceasing. Fight and fight …

To my husband, I’m watching you sleep right now. You seem to be at peace, having nice dreams and there’s even a smile on your face. You look five years younger than you normally do! But I know when you wake up, there will be stress in your eyes. You’ll …

Self-sabotage is something most people experience at one point or another — particularly if mental illness makes you feel unworthy or undeserving of good things. But for many folks with borderline personality disorder (BPD), self-sabotage can often be at the forefront of their lives. As Mighty contributor Sheridan Ashby who lives with BPD …

It’s easy to joke around about personality disorders: “I’m really OCD about keeping my house clean.” Or, “Ugh, her mood swings are so bad; is she bipolar?” The truth is, personality disorders—long-term unhealthy and inflexible patterns of thinking—are an all-too-real struggle for roughly 9 percent of Americans, according to the …

Recent findings published in PLOS One shed light on the emotion regulation deficits that characterize borderline personality disorder (BPD). The findings suggest that people with BPD show deficits in adaptive emotion regulation, mindfulness, and self-compassion. One of the key characteristics of borderline personality disorder is a difficulty processing and regulating emotions. Individuals …

By Mark Travers, Ph.D. A new study appearing in Frontiers in Psychology provides firm evidence of a tendency among Borderline personalities to expect the worst of people. Needless to say, this is not a recipe for psychological health and happiness. I recently spoke with the authors of the research, Evelyn Levay and Zsolt Unoka of …

“Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) show intense reactions to perceived abandonment, a high degree of mistrust, and a distorted, negative perception of others,” say the authors of the research led by Evelyn Levay of Simmelweis University in Hungary. “They misinterpret social cues with a pronounced negative bias, or fail …

I decided to write this after I skipped church for the past three weeks, one of which because of Hurricane Irma, and the others were my choice. But if Irma hadn’t decided to send her wind and rain our way, I still wouldn’t have gone. I have borderline personality disorder …

Here today, gone tomorrow. Out of sight, out of mind. Absence makes the heart grow (less) fonder. Many people who live with borderline personalist disorder (BPD) know very well the meaning of these phrases. I’d like to share my story so those without BPD can understand us, too. BPD can involve a …

It took over a year of intensive therapy before I could admit it. In a quiet and almost afraid voice, I finally said it to my counselor: “I can’t remember what I look like.” We were knee deep in a 12-week treatment program for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In therapy, …

When you live with borderline personality disorder (BPD), “recovery” can sometimes feel like an unattainable goal — especially if the yardstick you are using to measure your progress is just an absence of symptoms. But the reality is, recovery is usually an ongoing process, and often is more about learning …

I’ve read a lot of articles and posts about how many people with borderline personality disorder (BPD) have quick changes in mood or emotion, often influenced by the smallest of events or moments in a day. This is very true in my life, and I find myself changing my mood and …

I’ve spent most of my life knowing or unknowingly battling what appears to be my innate need for human connection. For those of us with borderline personality disorder (BPD), fear of abandonment is deeply rooted and here I am in a place, finally, where I can see how much connection …

An “FP” (or Favorite Person) is a person who someone with mental illness relies on for support, and often looks up to or idolizes. Common with borderline personality disorder (BPD), it’s often that someone has a minimum of one FP, but a person can have many. Personally, I don’t think …

One of the more complicated parts of having borderline personality disorder (BPD) is when you develop that intense, unbreakable connection to one specific person: your “favorite person,” or FP for short. An FP can be a beautiful, magical part of someone with BPD’s life: it is often the sole person who …

At the very core of a person with borderline personality disorder (BPD), there is a longing, a yearning, a need to be understood. We are often told we are manipulative, selfish, needy, clingy and that we can never get enough of what we are seeking. It is not manipulation that …

It’s hard to talk about my borderline personality disorder (BPD), but it’s even more difficult for those close to me to understand. I decided to compile this list of my 11 truths of my BPD that also have been hard for me to recognize until now. These are my 11 truths, and …

For those with borderline personality disorder who ride a rollar coaster of emotions almost daily, having a good playlist on hand can help bring you back into the moment and take your brain to a place of calm. And while music certainly can’t erase strong emotions – sometimes it can …