Lesser-Known Symptoms of PTSD, and Why the Borderline Personality Disorder Diagnosis is Crap

It doesn't, actually. it creates scar tissue.

Free Use image by Alexas Fotos.

https://pixabay.com/illustrations/time-heals-all-wounds-consolation-1087105/

https://themighty.com/2020/04/ptsd-symptoms-we-dont-talk-about/?utm_source=newsletter_mental_health&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_mental_health_2020-05-06&$deep_link=true

This is a good post. One of the things I like to talk about is the theory (which I believe is correct) that "borderline personality disorder," a label that is applied disproportionately to girls and women, is a subtype of PTSD. Everyone labeled with "borderline personality disorder" has a history of trauma. Their behavior doesn't come out of nowhere.

It took me forty years to realize that the main reason behind a lot of the acting out I did in high school was the fact that I had been assaulted by a creepy guy that I agreed to go on a date with. This was 1980, and back then, it wasn't considered sexual assault if there was no intercourse. Without going into details, what this 19-year-old guy did to my 15-year-old self was clearly sexual assault. I kept it hidden and blamed myself for not fighting back harder and for being stupid enough to go out with him in the first place. I knew nobody would take my side and would blame me.

I started cutting class, cutting myself, and doing a lot of drugs. Rather than anyone asking me if anything had happened to me, all I ever heard was "you used to be a good kid and now you're a bad kid. You need to straighten up and fly right." Surprise, surprise, at sixteen I was labeled a "hysterical neurotic" by one of the most inept clowns of a psychiatrist that I've ever had the displeasure of meeting. I was later given the equally useless label "borderline personality disorder." 

"Borderline personality disorder" is the modern "hysterical neurotic." It is a way of writing off girls and women who are acting out because of trauma. It is a label that needs to be retired.

If you're interested in reading the piece that I wrote about the traumatic incident, the link will follow. Fair warning that it isn't pretty and it doesn't have a happy ending.

https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/contests/28/submissions/8426/

Ornery and Sly

Telling it Like it Is

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Sly Fawkes

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Blow Your Stack Saturday: Borderline Personality Disorder and Misogyny

heringstuff

 tervbangs

love how bpd is the new trendy hysteria diagnosis so instead of teaching traumatized young women how to heal themselves, we slap on a relatively meaningless diagnosis until they fully internalize that their issues (i.e. not responding to trauma appropriately in a quiet, subdued, “female” way) are  ingrained flaws they can absolutely never overcome 

 intothelesbiverse

It’s an actual mental illness tho

 tervbangs

it’s a response to trauma. i think it’s more helpful to look at it through that angle (as ptsd or c-ptsd) because healing from that trauma is at the forefront of treatment, as opposed to a bpd diagnosis where a personality disorder is by definition inflexible and unchanging and the focus of treatment is to just treat the side-effects or harmful behavior patterns

 feministvenus

As someone who is studying and working in the field of mental health, I have a few thoughts about this.

First, the DSM-5 is not gospel. Criteria is always changing and some mental illnesses have been removed completely. All a diagnostic label does is describe a set of symptoms.

An overwhelming majority of people diagnosed with BPD are women. As @tervbangs mentioned, many of them have suffered trauma (unfortunately, child sex abuse is a common history among people diagnosed with BPD). Men and women respond to trauma differently. If a man experiences trauma, his set of symptoms is often more in line with a PTSD diagnoses and he is more likely to receive treatment for his trauma. However, since women respond to trauma differently, this trauma is often missed completely and they are diagnosed with BPD instead.

BPD diagnoses often don’t help women. Again I’m echoing @tervbangs, but people can recover from trauma with treatment, but personality disorders are seen as a life-sentence and untreatable. There is an enormous amount of stigma surrounding BPD and many mental health professionals avoid women diagnosed with BPD entirely. Slapping a woman with a BPD diagnoses often results in a game of “hot potato” where the client is bounced from professional to professional. Many people in the field believe that a) women with BPD can’t be helped or b) they’re manipulative, vindictive individuals and are some how responsible for their symptoms.

With proper treatment of trauma, many women initially diagnosed with BPD will no longer meet the criteria. However, the diagnostic label will follow them for the rest of their lives even when it doesn’t apply anymore.

I have had the pleasure of working under counsellors who argue that the BPD diagnoses should be eliminated entirely and instead a sub-category of PTSD should be instated. I 100% agree and believe this would lead to a better outcome for women living with trauma.

 ragingvulvasaur

Someone give me a real scientific study on the links between the trauma of growing up female, the inherent sexism of psychiatry, and the use of BPD Dxs against women!!!!!! It absolutely is sexism against traumatized women and girls. How dare we be emotional, and lash out in response to trauma instesd of being good quiet girls? Boys with the same “symptoms” arent Dxd with a personality disorder. Theyre shrugged off because boys are supposed to lash out, be moody, and fuck everyone in sight.

 irate-badfem-harpy

They’ll tell you reassuringly “bpd is the only personality disorder that you aren’t born with” but can’t put together that maybe it’s because we’ve been traumatized that we act the way we do, that maybe our self destructive behavior is a result of being made powerless, that our impulsivity is a result of being conditioned to expect small erratic bursts of chaos and pain for seemingly no reason at all, that we don’t have a definite sense of self because we haven’t been able to be anything but surviving for a decade or more, that we can’t visualize a future because we were too busy just trying to visualize the day when you escape.

I don’t yet know how to properly articulate or substantiate this but I’m firmly of the opinion that men recover from PTSD more quickly than women because their traumas are different. They drive too fast down main street because they’re still driving like a pipe bomb is gna flip their car if they dawdle for even a second; a thunderclap sends them rolling off their bed and scrambling for their body armor at three in the morning. But they can get past that. They learn that they’re no longer in danger.

What do women learn, when we come forward about our trauma?

“Are you sure it was…”

“Why didn’t you leave?”

“You’re overreacting”

“I know him he wouldn’t do that”

“What did you say that made him so angry”

“No it didn’t”

“You’re lying”

“You must be imagining it”

“You’re trying to ruin his life”

“Attention whore”

We learn we can’t trust grown-ups. There are no good ones who will help us. We learn no one wants to help us. So we must deserve it then. So we just survive because if we kill ourselves we might fail and then we’ll get in even more trouble. So we endure. Kind of. And if we break, then we must have deserved that too.

 heringstuff

It’s totally the modern hysteria, which doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who really suffer from it.

Personal experience/rant…

Keep reading

 slysfreespeechspace

I have type 2 bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and ADD. Having a diagnosis helped me find ways to cope with the manifestations of these conditions, but health care professionals tend to be unwilling to research the why behind them. It’s easier to try and medicate a patient into a semblance of normalcy.

I feel like my borderline personality disorder manifested from feeling like I was unheard and unloved in my childhood. At this point in my life, I tend to only form very superficial relationships with people for fear that they will abandon me and I tend not to trust people’s motivations.

I agree with feministvenus that the BPD diagnosis should be eradicated and BPD should instead be made a subtype of PTSD because that's what it is.

Making BPD a subtype of PTSD would also remove it from the "personality disorder" stigma. There are people who claim that BPD is "the little sister of antisocial personality disorder," which it isn't. People with BPD generally know that something's wrong with their behaviors. People with antisocial personality disorder do not.

Exposure to Porn and PTSD in Girls and Women

Image by Alexas_Fotos from Pixabay

This post may be a bit of a hodgepodge. Bear with me.

The following are comments on a post at Feminist Current regarding PTSD in female adolescents caused by repeated exposure to online pornography. Comments from The Real Cie are my thoughts.
People with mental illness as a whole are being let down by the mental health system.
People with PTSD are being let down by the mental health system.
Women and girls are being let down by the mental health system.
The mental health system needs to be overhauled. However, in a society where people with disabilities are made pariahs and forced into poverty and health care is placed out of reach for many people, I don't foresee changes coming anytime soon.

Pet peeve time:
The word "womxxn" makes my eyes go crossed and my brain go stabby. There are no "womxxn". There are only women. Stop doing this!

Sarah aka Anemone • a day ago

minor correction: Bessel van der Kolk is male.

This is such an important subject. I spend way too much time online because I'm isolated 

due to disability and trauma, and I have to say it's actually helped me with some things, 

but it's never the same as healthy in-person relationships. Unfortunately most of us live in large

 cities where it's hard to connect with people. I think we are going to have to redesign cities so 

they are more people friendly, less car-friendly, both in terms of urban design and in terms of 

social structures, so people can connect with more people irl.

That might help with preventing online trauma, but unfortunately, that won't help with trauma

 in the family, which pushes some of us online. I watched a TED video recently (

Watch the video

by Nadine Burke Harris, who talked about ACE scores and how revolutionary it is to know that 

adverse childhood experiences contribute so much to physical health down the road, but when it 

comes to public response, crickets. People find trauma too hard to talk about. I lost my family 

because people find trauma too hard to talk about, so they'd rather push me out than deal with it. 

I guess that's where people who can deal with trauma need to step up.

therealcie  Sarah aka Anemone • 16 minutes ago

"I'm isolated due to disability and trauma."

Me too. People like us are very vulnerable, and I'm fully aware that no-one gives a flying shit.

Hella Dea • a day ago

You know the stages of grief charts.
I would really like one made for womxxn with ptsd.

• • −

  

  
  

  
  

  
  

  therealcie  Hella Dea • 12 minutes ago
  

  
  

  Unless the PTSD is addressed and worked on, I don't know that there are stages for it other than "acute" and "always there fucking up your life forever." 
• Anyway, those are the two stages I've experienced with it, and addressing and working on it isn't as easy as it sounds when there are monetary and other barriers to finding a therapist. When it comes to therapists, I've had bad experiences and don't trust them damn crooked vultures. I've also found that there is a lot of sexism in therapy and often women's trauma is written off as "female hysteria."
• 
  
• Springheeledjim • a day ago
  " Studies increasingly show that the way young people consume social media, 24/7, is not only leading them to feel less socially connected, but also leading them to decreased mental wellness. "
  
  I'd agree with this.
  
  But as the father of a teenage girl who spends much of her life online, I don't necessarily think it's the sexualisation and pornification of the internet that is the biggest problem.
  
  Online bullying ( mentioned only in passing in this article ) is perhaps a bigger problem. And the feeling that everyone else is ' living their best life ' ( as the expression goes ) while you may be suffering from issues of self-esteem and/or worthlessness, or lack of direction... is perhaps a bigger problem still.
  
  I've already agreed on previous threads that young people have too much access to porn, and that it's warping their views on sexuality. I have no intention of revisiting that argument now. And I'm not saying that online porn is not a problem.
  
  But this article seems to be suggesting that it's the main reason why the internet is causing young teens mental health problems. And I don't think that's true.

therealcie  Springheeledjim • 23 minutes ago

Since you've made it clear that you enjoy porn and believe that full legalization of prostitution is a positive thing, I doubt you can possibly understand how porn can very negatively impact a young woman even if she is never drawn into it herself.

My father never treated me as a sex object (thankfully) but he had plenty of adult magazines around. I don't think the early Playboys had a negative impact. Early Playboy had art nudes as opposed to lurid pictures of young women fully spread-eagled and either leering at the camera or looking like a deer in the headlights.

My father's attitudes towards porn made me realize quite early on that all men, even good men like my father, see women as nothing but pieces of ass. It was upsetting, discouraging, and led me to realize that my father would side with creepy men over me, whom I became aware he saw as a second-class citizen. He may not have been aware of this himself, but he did see me and all women that way.

My father would always talk about women in terms of their physical appearance, not their accomplishments. Even as an adult, it was discouraging to me when he referred to Winona Ryder as "that plainest of plain Janes". Being quite a plain Jane myself, it cemented for me that my father saw women as things, not people.

I hope you will at least try to be a little careful of how you present your attitudes regarding women where your daughter is concerned. You may not realize it, but she is probably well aware that her father sees women as objects. You may be a good father in other regards, and I hope I am right in the belief that you do not sexually objectify your daughter. However, a man's attitude towards the objectification of women can have a lifelong impact on his female children. Your attitudes towards porn may be harming your daughter more than you realize.