borderline personality dissorder?

Question

what is the real meaning of (BPD) ive had it for awhile and i suffer with depresiion that doent last long ,it goes away and comes back?
it sux!

Answer 1

I was diagnosed with BPD 3 years ago.

Borderline personality disorder affects how people feel about themselves, how they relate to others and how they behave.

People with BPD often have an unstable sense of who they are. That is, their self-image or sense of self often rapidly changes. They typically view themselves as evil or bad, and sometimes they may feel as if they don't exist at all. This unstable self-image can lead to frequent changes in jobs, friendships, goals, values and gender identity.

Relationships are usually in turmoil. People with BPD often experience a love-hate relationship with others. They may idealize someone one moment and then abruptly and dramatically shift to fury and hate over perceived slights or even misunderstandings. This is because people with the disorder have difficulty accepting gray areas — things are either black or white. For instance, in the eyes of a person with BPD, someone is either good or evil. And that same person may be good one day and evil the next.

In addition, people with BPD often engage in impulsive and risky behavior. This behavior often winds up hurting them, whether emotionally, financially or physically. For instance, they may drive recklessly, engage in unsafe sex, take illicit drugs or go on spending or gambling sprees. People with BPD also often engage in suicidal behavior or deliberately injure themselves for emotional relief.

Other signs and symptoms of borderline personality disorder may include:

Strong emotions that wax and wane frequently
Intense but short episodes of anxiety or depression
Inappropriate anger, sometimes escalating into physical confrontations
Difficulty controlling emotions or impulses
Fear of being alone


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Answer 2

If you're a true borderline then the book I Hate You Dont Leave Me would be of tremendous help to you. A borderline is overly sensitive and sees everything in black and white. It's either "all good" or "all bad" and there is no in between. A major symptom of borderline's is "cutting" (slashing one's body to release pain) however, being a cutter doesn't necessarily mean your are a borderline personality. I too was diagnosed with BPD 10 years ago. Either they got the diagnosis wrong or I recovered. I'm not sure which. Below is an excerpt from the book:

Editorial Reviews

Review
Library Journal : Touted as the only book of its kind, this is a firsthand account of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). An accountant and mother of three, Reiland (a pseudonym) tells the poignant story of her life, which included all-too-familiar episodes of anorexia, promiscuity, impulsiveness, suicide attempts, institutionalization in a mental hospital, and often unrelenting, anger-intensive, violent, and unpredictable behavior. This is not intended as a text for treatment but a story of how one person lived with and overcame an affliction that many professionals view as untreatable. What results is a gripping, fast-paced narrative that's often hard to put down and will no doubt inspire sufferers and caretakers to march on. It is a story based on stark reality and hope, much like Steve Hamilton's I Want My Life Back. Recommended for all public and academic libraries as a complement to treatment guides like Jerold J. Kreisman and Hal Straus's I Hate You, Don't Leave Me. Melody Ballard, Washoe Cty. Lib. Syst., Reno Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Book Description
Borderline Personality Disorder. "What the hell was that?" raged Rachel Reiland when she read the diagnosis written in her medical chart. As the 29-year old accountant, wife, and mother of young children would soon discover, it was the diagnosis that finally explained her explosive anger, manipulative behaviors, and self-destructive episodes- including bouts of anorexia, substance abuse, and sexual promiscuity. With astonishing honesty, Reiland's memoir reveals what mental illness feels like and looks like from the inside, and how healing from such a devastating disease is possible through intensive therapy and the support of loved ones.

Answer 3

BPD is a very hard illness to treat. If you were diagnosed with it, then you need a different or better doctor. It should have all been explained to you. Depression can be part of it.

Pursue getting help for this. Don't take the "definitions" given and see if you fit all of the signs. You probably won't fit them all. Are you sure you had a correct diagnosis. I know it is hard for the patient to tell, but if that is all you were told then you need to seek further help.

Answer 4

Are you sure it isn't a case of being BiPolar? I would see a doctor/psychologist; he might be able to give you a better answer than us.

Answer 5

BPD, bipolar disorder, is a hoax. Stop taking your meds (thru a doctor's supervision of coarse) and get right with God. God can and will heal you if you give it up to Him! Praise God for the healing He can do.

Answer 6

Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is one of the most controversial diagnoses in psychology today. Since it was first introduced in the DSM, psychologists and psychiatrists have been trying to give the somewhat amorphous concepts behind BPD a concrete form. Kernberg's explication of what he calls Borderline Personality Organization is the most general, while Gunderson, though a psychoanalyst, is considered by many to have taken the most scientific approach to defining BPD. The Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines and the DIB-Revised were developed from research done by Gunderson, Kolb, and Zanarini. Finally, there is the "official" DSM-IV definition.
Some researchers, like Judith Herman, believe that BPD is a name given to a particular manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder: in Trauma and Recovery, she theorizes that when PTSD takes a form that emphasizes heavily its elements of identity and relationship disturbance, it gets called BPD; when the somatic (body) elements are emphasized, it gets called hysteria, and when the dissociative/deformation of consciousness elements are the focus, it gets called DID/MPD. Others believe that the term "borderline personality" has been so misunderstood and misused that trying to refine it is pointless and suggest instead simply scrapping the term.


What causes Borderline Personality Disorder?
It would be remiss to discuss BPD without including a comment about Linehan's work. In contrast to the symptom list approaches detailed below, Linehan has developed a comprehensive sociobiological theory which appears to be borne out by the successes found in controlled studies of her Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.
Linehan theorizes that borderlines are born with an innate biological tendency to react more intensely to lower levels of stress than others and to take longer to recover. They peak "higher" emotionally on less provocation and take longer coming down. In addition, they were raised in environments in which their beliefs about themselves and their environment were continually devalued and invalidated. These factors combine to create adults who are uncertain of the truth of their own feelings and who are confronted by three basic dialectics they have failed to master (and thus rush frantically from pole to pole of):


vulnerability vs invalidation
active passivity (tendency to be passive when confronted with a problem and actively seek a rescuer) vs apparent competence (appearing to be capable when in reality internally things are falling apart)
unremitting crises vs inhibited grief.
DBT tries to teach clients to balance these by giving them training in skills of mindfulness, interpersonal effectiveness, distress tolerance, and emotional regulation.

Kernberg's Borderline Personality Organization
Diagnoses of BPO are based on three categories of criteria. The first, and most important, category, comprises two signs:

the absence of psychosis (i.e., the ability to perceive reality accurately)
impaired ego integration - a diffuse and internally contradictory concept of self. Kernberg is quoted as saying, "Borderlines can describe themselves for five hours without your getting a realistic picture of what they're like."
The second category is termed "nonspecific signs" and includes such things as low anxiety tolerance, poor impulse control, and an undeveloped or poor ability to enjoy work or hobbies in a meaningful way.

Kernberg believes that borderlines are distinguished from neurotics by the presence of "primitive defenses." Chief among these is splitting, in which a person or thing is seen as all good or all bad. Note that something which is all good one day can be all bad the next, which is related to another symptom: borderlines have problems with object constancy in people -- they read each action of people in their lives as if there were no prior context; they don't have a sense of continuity and consistency about people and things in their lives. They have a hard time experiencing an absent loved one as a loving presence in their minds. They also have difficulty seeing all of the actions taken by a person over a period of time as part of an integrated whole, and tend instead to analyze individual actions in an attempt to divine their individual meanings. People are defined by how they lasted interacted with the borderline.

Other primitive defenses cited include magical thinking (beliefs that thoughts can cause events), omnipotence, projection of unpleasant characteristics in the self onto others and projective identification, a process where the borderline tries to elicit in others the feelings s/he is having. Kernberg also includes as signs of BPO chaotic, extreme relationships with others; an inability to retain the soothing memory of a loved one; transient psychotic episodes; denial; and emotional amnesia. About the last, Linehan says, "Borderline individuals are so completely in each mood, they have great difficulty conceptualizing, remembering what it's like to be in another mood."

Gunderson's conception of BPD
Gunderson, a psychoanalyst, is respected by researchers in many diverse areas of psychology and psychiatry. His focus tends to be on the differential diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, and Cauwels gives Gunderson's criteria in order of their importance:


Intense unstable relationships in which the borderline always ends up getting hurt. Gunderson admits that this symptom is somewhat general, but considers it so central to BPD that he says he would hesitate to diagnose a patient as BPD without its presence.
Repetitive self-destructive behavior, often designed to prompt rescue.
Chronic fear of abandonment and panic when forced to be alone.
Distorted thoughts/perceptions, particularly in terms of relationships and interactions with others.
Hypersensitivity, meaning an unusual sensitivity to nonverbal communication. Gunderson notes that this can be confused with distortion if practitioners are not careful (somewhat similar to Herman's statement that, while survivors of intense long-term trauma may have unrealistic notions of the power realities of the situation they were in, their notions are likely to be closer to reality than the therapist might think).
Impulsive behaviors that often embarrass the borderline later.
Poor social adaptation: in a way, borderlines tend not to know or understand the rules regarding performance in job and academic settings.

The Diagnostic Interview for Borderlines, Revised
Gunderson and his colleague, Jonathan Kolb, tried to make the diagnosis of BPD by constructing a clinical interview to assess borderline characteristics in patients. The DIB was revised in 1989 to sharpen its ability to differentiate between BPD and other personality disorders. It considers symptoms that fall under four main headings:
Affect
chronic/major depression
helplessness
hopelessness
worthlessness
guilt
anger (including frequent expressions of anger)
anxiety
loneliness
boredom
emptiness
Cognition
odd thinking
unusual perceptions
nondelusional paranoia
quasipsychosis
Impulse action patterns
substance abuse/dependence
sexual deviance
manipulative suicide gestures
other impulsive behaviors
Interpersonal relationships
intolerance of aloneness
abandonment, engulfment, annihilation fears
counterdependency
stormy relationships
manipulativeness
dependency
devaluation
masochism/sadism
demandingness
entitlement

The DIB-R is the most influential and best-known "test" for diagnosing BPD. Use of it has led researchers to identify four behavior patterns they consider peculiar to BPD: abandonment, engulfment, annihilation fears; demandingness and entitlement; treatment regressions; and ability to arouse inappropriately close or hostile treatment relationships.

DSM-IV criteria
The DSM-IV gives these nine criteria; a diagnosis requires that the subject present with at least five of these. In I Hate You -- Don't Leave Me! Jerold Kriesman and Hal Straus refer to BPD as "emotional hemophilia; [a borderline] lacks the clotting mechanism needed to moderate his spurts of feeling. Stimulate a passion, and the borderline emotionally bleeds to death."

Traits involving emotions:
Quite frequently people with BPD have a very hard time controlling their emotions. They may feel ruled by them. One researcher (Marsha Linehan) said, "People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement."
1. Shifts in mood lasting only a few hours.

2. Anger that is inappropriate, intense or uncontrollable.


Traits involving behavior:
3. Self-destructive acts, such as self-mutilation or suicidal threats and gestures that happen more than once
4. Two potentially self-damaging impulsive behaviors. These could include alcohol and other drug abuse, compulsive spending, gambling, eating disorders, shoplifting, reckless driving, compulsive sexual behavior.


Traits involving identity
5. Marked, persistent identity disturbance shown by uncertainty in at least two areas. These areas can include self-image, sexual orientation, career choice or other long-term goals, friendships, values. People with BPD may not feel like they know who they are, or what they think, or what their opinions are, or what religion they should be. Instead, they may try to be what they think other people want them to be. Someone with BPD said, "I have a hard time figuring out my personality. I tend to be whomever I'm with."
6. Chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom. Someone with BPD said, "I remember describing the feeling of having a deep hole in my stomach. An emptiness that I didn't know how to fill. My therapist told me that was from almost a "lack of a life". The more things you get into your life, the more relationships you get involved in, all of that fills that hole. As a borderline, I had no life. There were times when I couldn't stay in the same room with other people. It almost felt like what I think a panic attack would feel like."


Traits involving relationships
7. Unstable, chaotic intense relationships characterized by splitting (see below).
8. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment


Splitting: the self and others are viewed as "all good" or "all bad." Someone with BPD said, "One day I would think my doctor was the best and I loved her, but if she challenged me in any way I hated her. There was no middle ground as in like. In my world, people were either the best or the worst. I couldn't understand the concept of middle ground."
Alternating clinging and distancing behaviors (I Hate You, Don't Leave Me). Sometimes you want to be close to someone. But when you get close it feels TOO close and you feel like you have to get some space. This happens often.
Great difficulty trusting people and themselves. Early trust may have been shattered by people who were close to you.
Sensitivity to criticism or rejection.
Feeling of "needing" someone else to survive
Heavy need for affection and reassurance
Some people with BPD may have an unusually high degree of interpersonal sensitivity, insight and empathy
9. Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms

This means feeling "out of it," or not being able to remember what you said or did. This mostly happens in times of severe stress.


Miscellaneous attributes of people with BPD:
People with BPD are often bright, witty, funny, life of the party.
They may have problems with object constancy. When a person leaves (even temporarily), they may have a problem recreating or remembering feelings of love that were present between themselves and the other. Often, BPD patients want to keep something belonging to the loved one around during separations.
They frequently have difficulty tolerating aloneness, even for short periods of time.
Their lives may be a chaotic landscape of job losses, interrupted educational pursuits, broken engagements, hospitalizations.
Many have a background of childhood physical, sexual, or emotional abuse or physical/emotional neglect.