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Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

journals.sagepub.com

21–30 of 99 posts

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#21
post #3

My pet theory is that all personality disorders are essentially ingrained responses to conditioning which could adequately be described as CPTSD, roughly categorized into the different types based on the types of trauma complexes experienced and the learned responses to them.

This sounds somewhat similar to ‘dynamic personality concept’ by Hlomov, which states that a developed personality has 3 parts: schizoid, borderline and narcissistic. All those parts can have different adaptation issues and if one part constantly consumes more energy and starves the others, that’s a personality type. Hlomov often uses a metaphor of 3-headed dragon, like ‘clients borderline head is now talking to therapists borderline head’. Also, in this concept any person can be in a totally borderline state in the moment, if his borderline part is taking control.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#22

This is a BS article that's basically a clinician's pet peeves and grievances. I know three close people with a BPD diagnosis. They had both a similar constellation of personality traits and all three were first medicated with antidepressants to no avail (a common trait in BPD is that it is easy to confuse for major depression). They took BPD-specific drugs and after a few trials and errors their quality of life incr…

I've known two women who were diagnosed with BPD that later turned out to be Autism. Their doctors believe BPD traits developed due to the issues their autism had on their socialisation as kids and teens. Getting on Ritalin massively improved their and their families lives. At least in women I suspect more than a few BDP diagnosis mask autism.

Ritalin! That's interesting.

I have a family member (by marriage, I didn't know her when she was young) who sounds an awful lot like your description. Unfortunately for her getting her "misdiagnosis" "corrected" (her words) seems to have made things a lot worse, at least for family members dealing with her. Splitting behavior doesn't help matters at all. This stuff is so complicated and so hard that we really barely have any handle on any of it. It's important to remember that diagnoses are just words; the map is not, is never, the territory.

But I'd never heard of Ritalin as an option here, so thanks for bringing it up. I'll mention it to that side should it be appropriate....

(Tangent: I need a family with better general mental health, myself included. Anyone know where I can get one? Do they sell them at Amazon or do I have to risk AliExpress?)

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with personality disorders is whether something is a positive or negative is a subjective evaluation. Homosexuality was once considered a personality disorder. We consider narcissism a personality disorder, but we also reward narcissistic tendencies when one's extreme ego matches reality. Is there a single "correct" personality that we should all strive towards?

> Is there a single "correct" personality that we should all strive towards? Functional

Dr. Leo Marvin personality is what the literature is striving for

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#25
post #5

Married to someone with BPD. I guess one can debate what to call her symptom group - but insinuating her challenges don't exist is beyond absurd. After 25 years I could pretty well climb into her headspace. If I lived there, I don't think I could ever find my way out.

Say a bit more about the headspace

She was caught in a perpetual negative feedback loop. It wholly formed her worldview and she was dependent on it for functionality.

She couldn't progress by setting any of it aside because it could never be enough to improve her perspective. And whatever space she created would be quickly overwhelmed by the adjacent bad perspectives.

Progress needs trust (in the process) and trust needs progress. She couldn't generate enough of either.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#26

Married to someone with BPD. I guess one can debate what to call her symptom group - but insinuating her challenges don't exist is beyond absurd. After 25 years I could pretty well climb into her headspace. If I lived there, I don't think I could ever find my way out.

Shitty headline, no one likes being told their lived experience is invalid. However, DSM V does away with the BPD diagnosis for reasons that make sense to me which is what this is about.

Yeah, the headline is very different from the article. The article isn’t arguing that BPD doesn’t exist and that the patients are faking it or something, it’s arguing that the current classification system is wrong.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#27

This is a BS article that's basically a clinician's pet peeves and grievances. I know three close people with a BPD diagnosis. They had both a similar constellation of personality traits and all three were first medicated with antidepressants to no avail (a common trait in BPD is that it is easy to confuse for major depression). They took BPD-specific drugs and after a few trials and errors their quality of life incr…

> They took BPD-specific drugs

Is there any good evidence that there are BPD-specific drugs?

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2015: Pharmacotherapy for borderline personality disorder--current evidence and recent trends

> Abstract

> Drug treatment of patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) is common but mostly not supported by evidence from high-quality research. This review summarises the current evidence up to August 2014 and also aims to identify research trends in terms of ongoing randomised controlled trials (RCTs) as well as research gaps. There is some evidence for beneficial effects by second-generation antipsychotics, mood stabilisers and omega-3 fatty acids, while the overall evidence base is still unsatisfying. The dominating role SSRI antidepressants usually play within the medical treatment of BPD patients is neither reflected nor supported by corresponding evidence. Any drug treatment of BPD patients should be planned and regularly evaluated against this background of evidence. Research trends indicate increasing attention to alternative treatments such as dietary supplementation by omega-3 fatty acids or oxytocin.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25413640/

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2021: Pharmacological Treatments for Borderline Personality Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

> Results

> Of 12,062 unique records, we included 21 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with data on 1768 participants. Nineteen RCTs compared pharmacotherapies with placebo; two RCTs assessed active treatments head-to-head. Out of 87 medications in use in clinical practice, we found studies on just nine. Overall, the evidence indicates that the efficacy of pharmacotherapies for the treatment of BPD is limited. Second-generation antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, and antidepressants were not able to consistently reduce the severity of BPD. Low-certainty evidence indicates that anticonvulsants can improve specific symptoms associated with BPD such as anger, aggression, and affective lability but the evidence is mostly limited to single studies. Second-generation antipsychotics had little effect on the severity of specific BPD symptoms, but they improved general psychiatric symptoms in patients with BPD.

> Conclusions

> Despite the common use of pharmacotherapies for patients with BPD, the available evidence does not support the efficacy of pharmacotherapies alone to reduce the severity of BPD.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8478737/

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#28
post #24

My mom is BPD, she is a text book case. And I have been in therapy for almost a decade because of her emotional abuse. As many others have said, this paper is definitely beyond absurd.

My wife has it. You can go on BPD support message boards and read my experience over and over again written by other people. The stories they tell are all nearly identical to one's I've experienced personally. It's shocking how similar the behaviors are between people who have BPD.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#29

Married to someone with BPD. I guess one can debate what to call her symptom group - but insinuating her challenges don't exist is beyond absurd. After 25 years I could pretty well climb into her headspace. If I lived there, I don't think I could ever find my way out.

How did she get diagnosed anyway? I thought adherents to this personality deny any weakness.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#30

Married to someone with BPD. I guess one can debate what to call her symptom group - but insinuating her challenges don't exist is beyond absurd. After 25 years I could pretty well climb into her headspace. If I lived there, I don't think I could ever find my way out.

Shitty headline, no one likes being told their lived experience is invalid. However, DSM V does away with the BPD diagnosis for reasons that make sense to me which is what this is about.

Borderline Personality Disorder isn't a "lived experience," it's a diagnosis. People may label you, but you are not your labels.
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