The BPD diagnosis has been screwing up my life since before I even knew I had the diagnosis, I would turn up into emergency departments as a teenager after overdosing and the nurses would speak quietly amongst themselves, and I would be invalidated by the case management team before being sent promptly home to repeat the process again. I was scared, angry, hurting, suicidal and I had no idea what was wrong with me, but they did they had boxed me and decided I was not worthy of treatment a modern day human rights abuse. No doubt they are having a grand old time exploiting a loop in the mental health act which says personality disorders aren’t a mental illness, I’m sure they get to save themselves a lot of money and time with an overstretched mental health sector that doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon.

I am a lot of things but I am not stupid, if case management comes near me today as a thirty something year old and I have to unfortunately converse with these unempathetic terrible examples of humanity, I will straight up tell them your discriminating against BPD. Then I’ll make a complaint to anyone and everyone who will listen, and I don’t do this for myself I’m big and ugly enough to deal with my own stuff at this point and I have a much thicker skin; no I do this for those of you who don’t who are getting pushed around in the system like a ping pong ball, for those of you who are maybe way too young and inexperienced to even have a voice or stand up for yourself. I imagine young impressionable girls being labelled with this diagnosis who really just need help, who are at a point perhaps where they might actually get better with adequate treatment after a few years but are instead treated like villains.

BPD is a gendered diagnosis that tends to be given mostly to women despite it being proven to also exist equally in men, this may be because the behaviours associated with it such as drug and alcohol consumption, casual sex, conflict in relationships and being forthright with people is often seen to be more acceptable in men. It has been thought by some scholars that BPD is a diagnosis that is a continuation of female hysteria and the witch hunts but actually it’s much worse than that it’s a cultural diagnosis that was originally thought to be an ‘American Disease’. Overseas in countries like China BPD has been strongly brought into question as a legitimate diagnosis and rejected from their DSM, it has instead been called ‘impulsive personality disorder’, this is thought to be due to social protective factors such as greater penalties for drug use, greater focus on social connections and helping others and more of a focus on marriage and family. So there you go, if you remove modern life BPD disappears. But it’s still thought to be the individuals fault of course in an overly individualistic western society that can’t look at itself in the mirror for ten minutes and would rather heap 10 diagnosis on an individual instead of wondering for a split second what is actually going on.

To say I’m angry with how my life has gone because of this stigma would be an understatement, I’ve been rejected from psychiatrists and GP clinics for no fault of my own despite the fact that I don’t have most of the problematic behaviours usually associated with BPD and I’m quiet and polite. This is not acceptable and society needs to do better. But it wont, it wont look at itself in the mirror it’s too painful, it wont accept that women too can drink and have casual sex just like men do and that if that is an issue maybe deal with that issue instead of blaming women for existing in a culture. It wont look at the broken families that are just absolutely everywhere, the rise in mental illness, the government policies that are just destroying people, the health remedies that don’t work, the drugs that make people worse; and above all like a narcissistic family western society can’t stand truth tellers and people with BPD are the ultimate truth tellers from simply daring to exist and so they need to do something about that.

I don’t expect this article to create any changes, because I think all the problems I’ve just pointed out go so deep and are so interwoven with the fabric of societal mess that nobody wants to deal with it. But until then know this our mental health system has blood on their hands with an unacceptable suicide rate among individuals with BPD they are well aware of and they don’t care, they don’t care because they are tired, they are tired and they have no courage.