61–70 of 99 posts
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.
Luckily, nobody is doing that. The claim is that BPD is too broad. If there were separate, narrower diagnoses, we might also be able to treat them better.
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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 goi…
Honestly, that sounds a lot different from BPD, like a separate disorder altogether. Sorry, I don't mean to belittle what you go through, it sounds terrible. But I have to "defend" people with BPD against it, because I have people close to me with that affliction. What you describe sounds more like a very narcissistic person instead.
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Honestly, that sounds a lot different from BPD, like a separate disorder altogether. Sorry, I don't mean to belittle what you go through, it sounds terrible. But I have to "defend" people with BPD against it, because I have people close to me with that affliction. What you describe sounds more like a very narcissistic person instead.
Sounds more like histrionic personality disorder, but I am not qualified to diagnose and even if I were it would be unethical to do so over a web forum.
People are going to read this, and then when they meet someone who they know has BPD somehow (for example when getting close in a relationship), they are going to think that that person can become that delusional. That's not what happens.
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Its quiet type BPD to be specific: https://psychcentral.com/disorders/borderline-personality-di...
I am familiar with the symptoms. I still think you deal with an actual narcissist, not with someone with BPD. The symptoms may have some overlap, but it's different. For example, where in that article do you see that people with BPD can be so straight up delusional that they think they "own the town"? Notice that the words "lie" or "lying" do not even appear in the article. In my experience, presenting a BPD-afflicte…
However, you kinda have to be there but she didn't arrive at owning the town all at once but a series of escalations over years.
It all started a few years after we moved in. She started claiming the property line was further back and I corrected her. Unable to admit she was wrong she started going off on me, I let it go because it didn't matter. Then a few years after that the neighbors redo their backyard, cutting down a few old, mostly dead trees. This set her off. Those were "her trees" and they housed a cornucopia of wildlife (they didn't).
First it was the property line claim from before, so she hired a survey company, the neighbors property line is actually a few feet in from where I thought it was. So she was way off.
She then spent six months looking at pixalated maps and essentially having pareidolia. None of her claims about the maps made any sense but she argues they prove she is right and "Since in 1900 when this was built they forgot to add a line here so we own all of our town". She only has made that claim a few times and I think understands others find it odd, but I'm pretty sure she believes it.
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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,…
> I read that it’s kind of like if you had no skin and thus all your nerve endings were exposed. That seems to be exactly right. However, it also seems that, with some intelligence and introspection, people can totally learn how to deal with that and live a normal life. It's hard for me to tell whether the symptoms actually subside, or whether they are just perfectly capable of dealing with them. From what I've been…
Part of it is certainly that. It's not strange that some attempt to self medicate with strong psychedelics like mescaline, I heard a few successful stories but it can also go terribly wrong.
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…
As the article points out, the diagnostic features of BPD are common to a bunch of different conditions. There have been decades of research trying to establish a reliable "borderline" factor that would set the condition outside existing categories of disorder; they've all failed. What makes that especially pernicious is that, tracing all the way back to the era of Freud, BPD has been viewed as essentially untreatabl…
I've got the impression that BPD, unlike other personality disorders (or things labelled as such), isn't actually considered essentially untreatable, at least not nowadays. BPD probably has a notorious reputation, possibly because of the potentially emotionally taxing nature of living with or treating emotionally unstable people, and perhaps because it could be difficult to treat. But no modern factual source I've come across has considered it untreatable.
Even a superficial source such as Wikipedia says the majority of those who have been diagnosed achieve recovery over time [1]. I've also read from reputable sources [2] that in 5 or 10 years the majority of patients no longer fulfil the diagnostic criteria.
That doesn't invalidate what you're saying, of course. The symptoms do overlap with a lot of other disorders (which is also true of many other psychiatric diagnoses, which is why differential diagnosis is important). And the very fact that just about every other thing that's called a personality disorder is considered nearly untreatable (and stable over time), while BPD isn't, is probably a reason to consider whether it should belong in the same category.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorde...
[2] the ones I remember are non-English but I haven't got the impression that they differ from Western mainstream
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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…
sometimes a tree can't function without a mushroom and vice versa, a true symbiosis
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I am familiar with the symptoms. I still think you deal with an actual narcissist, not with someone with BPD. The symptoms may have some overlap, but it's different. For example, where in that article do you see that people with BPD can be so straight up delusional that they think they "own the town"? Notice that the words "lie" or "lying" do not even appear in the article. In my experience, presenting a BPD-afflicte…
She may have something more, she isnt honest with anyone including therapists so its certainly possible. However, you kinda have to be there but she didn't arrive at owning the town all at once but a series of escalations over years. It all started a few years after we moved in. She started claiming the property line was further back and I corrected her. Unable to admit she was wrong she started going off on me, I le…
BPD-afflicted people are terrified to be abandoned, for one thing. Why would someone who lives that way actively antagonize the people around them? Yes, the emotional feedback loop if not broken out of can make people with untreated BPD show strong emotional reactions (anger, depression, crying) in the moment, but they snap back out of it, are usually ashamed afterwards, and don't press on with what can only be described as nonsense.
What I love about this article is it makes us question the thing we all think we can't question: the validity of the diagnosis itself.
What if the whole thing is wrong? What if it is this "easy" thing clinicians invented because they just got frustrated with how insanely certain patients acted when their underlying neuroses became so severe that they progressed into something closer to psychosis? What if focusing on a BPD diagnosis masks underlying conditions that are much easier to recognize and treat? What if it is just underlying disorders advanced to the Nth degree, that all somehow converge on a similar behavior set (much like psychosis), despite a differing underlying cause, and that focusing on that similar behavior set rather than on those underlying disorders is what causes BPD to be so untreatable?
A BPD diagnosis is often hopeless. There are no good drugs for it, and talk therapy works poorly. Almost all the comments here on HN from people who have someone with BPD in their life reflect this reality, and how terrible BPD is.
This article actually gives me hope for my sister. It gives me a new perspective on how we have been trying to help her, and why it might not be working.
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> filial piety Interesting addition, and not one that a lot of people who had shitty childhoods would say is appropriate to include.
> Interesting addition Only interesting in ~ 2023. Was a standard addition for millenia...