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Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

journals.sagepub.com

31–40 of 99 posts

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#31

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.

Unfortunately, there is no "turned out to be autism", just as there is no "turned out to be BPD".

We don't have affirmative biomedical tests for these conditions. Until we do, they are just constellations - funny imagined shapes - that we're drawing in a galaxy of traits on display in that person's life. Your picture of a "tree" overlaps about 30% with my picture of a "mushroom". But it's not the case that "First it was identified as a tree but later turned out to be a mushroom".

We pretend that these things are distinct biomedical disorders because it makes it easier to talk about them, easier not to literally murder the person displaying them, and (bizarrely) because it's legally required to classify them in order to bill a therapist/psychiatrist for their treatment, but in reality they're parts of a maladaptive personality that just look very roughly similar to other maladaptive personalities we've seen in the past.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#32
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.

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?

The only constraints on behavior should be literal harm.

We keep trying the “strive for correct personality”; serf, slave, worker, and just end up with with ossified thinkers and banal brinksmanship; ho shit! he broke character! get ‘im!

Put automation to getting bulk materials to stores and let locals “job” be crafting their personal kit.

We’re just enabling rent seekers allowing the professional packaging industry buy up resources to sell us in cute cardboard boxes for high markup so their kids can play Xbox all day

We tried globalism and all these things to try and open the world and “free minds” and we’ve just created an on rails path to ecological collapse.

Longtermism is just religion trying to sound secular.

Like we all said during Oceangate; there’s no escaping physics. Even if we reverse aging … enjoy cancer from wildfire smoke.

This is just puerile madness at this point; adults pouting their mom and dad lied to them.

We are all feeling guilty for all the literal harm and know the only real outcome is at best a massive die off, if not outright end of species.

We’re well into “War is peace” level of delusion.

The best path is intentionally reverse growing, and see what happens.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#33
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

My wife has it, mainly she is unable to conceptualize that she is wrong and thus never learns from experience. For example she started a lawsuit against the neighbors, that she funnels tens of thousands of dollars toward because she thought the property line was further into their yard than it actually is. She recently told me we own the entire town and made some nonsensical statements to justify that belief. I'm going to try to get the lawyer disbarred because he is clearly taking advantage of a mentally ill woman.

She acts out in order to gain attention. From ruining the family finances like in the first example to engaging in affairs and luring men from the internet to appear at the house. She has made false claims against me to the police. Refuses to clean up after herself, leaving huge messes, while complaining about a single item I might leave out. She lies, a lot. She doesn't seem to understand that I don't trust her anymore after all the lies, to her that's in the past even if it was a few minutes ago.

I'm stuck due to my kid and family courts bias in favor of mothers. 14 more years.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#34
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Defined very narrowly by what "functions" are expected of you. Which is of course conditioned on social expectations vis a vis (subjective) value systems which may or may not align to some notion of "correctness", even in broadly utilitarian terms.

i.e. showing up to work, doing well at school, dressing properly, keeping the correct company, filial piety...

> filial piety

Interesting addition, and not one that a lot of people who had shitty childhoods would say is appropriate to include.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#35
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.

My wife had it. Not anymore. Still BPD, but not anymore wife.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#36
I can't find it but Scott Alexander had an essay where he laid out the hypothesis that some of the personality disorders (narcissism and BPD in particular) came about through evolutionary selection. It's notable that the prevalence varies among the sexes.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#37

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

Yeah, but sometimes imperative is just easier.

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My wife had it. Not anymore. Still BPD, but not anymore wife.

My girlfriend had it. Not any more. Suicide...

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#39
post #18
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a close friend whose daughter has it. From what I understand she can’t weigh consequences out beyond about 2 minutes. Current emotional discomfort (like being slightly bored) is over the top painful. She can’t deal with “no” sometimes, like she goes so crazy the police have to be called sometimes. I read that it’s kind of like if you had no skin and thus all your nerve endings were exposed. Sitting would hurt,…

[flagged]

Are you serious?

Re: Borderline personality disorder: a spurious condition?

#40

I can't find it but Scott Alexander had an essay where he laid out the hypothesis that some of the personality disorders (narcissism and BPD in particular) came about through evolutionary selection. It's notable that the prevalence varies among the sexes.

My ex is a geneticist and used to talk about how evolution rewards rape in many situations, including early homo sapiens.

My point is: it doesn't matter whether narcissism or BPD are useful mating strategies. It's slightly interesting in an anthropological sense, but it has no bearing on whether they should be considered disorders and treated as best we can.

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