Maggie's Farm

You're right about that, Buddy. Just back from Lenten small group tonight with church friends (dreadful study materials but we were united in our disgust with curriculum and delight in good company and dessert despite it) St. Francis knew it, in giving we receive. The only thing that heals is God and He always calls those whom He loves to serve others, and in so doing to find at least the owner’s manual for their own salvation....

BPD is a condition that has tormented numerous members of my family, so I was glad to see the post, tho ready to smack “anonymous“ upside his/her middle school boy obnoxious head! People don’t like borderlines, and think they are just willfully choosing to act wacko or bad, and this is part of what makes it so hard for them to get better.

Anonymous should realize that tho very sick, many BPD types are extremely accomplished and make plenty of contributions to the lives of others. They are not all parasites, not all whiners who drag everyone down. Many pass for nomal in many areas of their life. Many artists, dancers, musicians, writers, academics, not just boozing sluts or pain in the ass jerks threatening suicide at most inconvenient times for their nearest and dearest….

Doctors, meds are necessary but not sufficient. They can keep someone with BPD alive long enough for God to get back to work in their life, they can help bring them thru daily walks thru the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Completely unaminaginable to "normal" people or the happy sociopaths who "succeed" in our society.

God begins the work, the spark is fanned sometimes by patient care (usually only by a doctor or minister--family and friends get fed up, often become abusive, give up on the person), but reaching out to others does more good than anything. To be useful, to bring comfort to someone else when nothing can ease one's own angst, that can remove some of the ugly tarnish on a borderline heart.

The guy is brave to admit he has it. One of the most stigmatized diagnoses. Most of the books written about BPD are by psychiatrists who despise and despair of BPD patients getting better (the few who earn a living treating them write patronizingly about them, pleased with themselves for being wiling to treat patients most clinicians refer out ASAP, or else by relatives who detest them ).

Whilst there are all kinds of appealing and flattering things written about bipolar people by the people who earn their living treating them, books that a doctor can safely send a bipolar patient off to read, it is not usually advisable to direct a recently diagnosed BPD patient to the clinical literature as it is so hideously unflattering. If they didn’t already want to kill themselves, the literature would drive them to it. They find it anyway, and it greatly increases their distrust of their clinicians, terrifies them that their families will turn on them and abandon them, and increases their desperate overvaluation of the few ones who treat them with even a modicum of compassion and respect.

There is a whole raft of books written by exes of BPD patients (mostly guys formerly involved with hot babes who turned out to be demons in human form…er….BPD). The advice given to relatives mostly follows an even more vicious form of tough love than the most vindictive counsel in AlAnon about not enabling alcoholics by caring for them or covering for them. This perhaps is understandable given that most people with BPD self medicate with drugs and or alcohol at least in youth. By middle age, those who have survived often sober up and do somewhat better. But if you felt as awful as most of them do most of the time, you’d want anesthesia too.

To be fair, it is so difficult living with someone with BPD that the people around them come to hate them at least some of the time, usually feel guilty for this, so don’t dare admit it, but jump with glee on bandwagons that stress tough love as this gives them the chance to get their whacks in under the guise of “helping” the patient by providing accountability and structure.

I will never forget going to a workshop for family members and there bumping into a member of the clergy from our large and overstaffed former church who was positively terrified of being outed, and who swore us to secrecy and said “of course, I cannot possibly do anything about your family’s pastoral needs so don’t come looking for support from me ever”. Even tho, as a family member who knew himself the dreadful toll BPD takes on family life, the clergy person knew the need for his pastoral care. But refused to give it.

Personal history of abuse (which causes the dissociation) is part of the cause of BPD and usually not touched with a ten foot pole by shrinks unless their patient is rich enough to afford several times a week (which many warn against by those who believe the BPD patient will fall apart under the rigors of it).

Here’s a fairly straightforward summary of the condition: http://www.narsad.org/dc/pdf/facts.bpersonalityd.pdf

And another

http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=By_Illness&Template=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID=54&ContentID=44780

Here’s an abstract on one of the reasons so many borderline patients need better therapy rather than callous advocacy of shock therapy by the unsympathetic (I am not aware of electroshock ever being recommended for this condition, tho it undoubtedly helps many intractably depressed people, and most borderline patients are depressed all the time, some times more extremely so than others)

http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/147/8/1008

If you are still with me, there is a wonderful Kay Jamison quote about what it is like to receive a stigmatizing diagnosis of a condition that will make most people either afraid, contemptuous or patronizing towards one. It was about how she felt being diagnosed bipolar, but it could just as well apply to someone being told they are BPD


“The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice “Manic Depressive Illness.” I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts on his lands and a pox upon his house. Silent, unbelievable rage. I smiled at him. He smiled back. The war had just begun.” Kay Jamison “An Unquiet Mind” (1995)

Hear you, AP. The besetting sin of all politicians (not just liberals) is to come up with simple answers to complex problems. Re: guns, I believe absolutely in a citizen's right to bear arms, etc. I love hunters and gun collectors, have been mugged, have lost people I love to criminals' attacks, believe that an armed citizenry is a good reservoir for national defense (bring back the local militia!) and a check on government tyranny.

I just can't have guns in my house because of the temptation to suicide that they would afford to family members afflicted with what Churchill described his own recurring depression as, "the black dog,"

Fine for Anonymous to want to click past to the babes and the toys. Whatever floats his boat. I do the same thing with the appeals to wear red for this disease or to agonize about the disease of the month. Eliot reminded us that "humankind cannot bear very much reality". Daily life is a struggle, and hard work, and we are all entitled to focus on things that amuse or inspire or enoble us. To enjoy what we can without guiltily brooding about the starving kids, etc. Most of my friends haven't a clue about mental illness and freely grumble in front of me about wackos, boozers, head cases, unawares that they are insulting close to home.

It's only worth making the effort to understand such conditions because there is more and more discussion of crimes committed by people with diagnoses, and this is leading to a very dangerous logical fallacy that others at Maggie's could summarize better than I. Assuming that all people with complicated mental disorders are dangerous and to be avoided and viewed as potential shooters, etc. because a very few do wicked things. Correlation does not mean causality is part of it.

Patina, thanks for the great thing from your aunt. Very wise! I can particularly relate to paying attention to how does one feel upon leaving the company of particular people. Is one lifted up, or floundering on the beach like a sick whale...

My beloved but somewhat erratic and flighty late motherinlaw used to infuriate my husband by refusing to spend time with people who weren't positive (she claimed that it depressed her). WHile her sense of duty and commitment was distinctly underdeveloped, I appreciate her point of view more as I age.

AP, regrets and lost opportunities haunt us,m don't they?! All I do with them is at least vow to try not to make the same mistake again...We all know the thing about fool me once, fool me twice....But the less common flip side of that is how often when we reach out yet again (when people say "why bother!?") to the unloveable or dangerous or tiresome or people my church encourage each other to be kind to despite their being "extra grace required", we find a human being immeasurably better than "the world's" assessment of them. Most of us have been loved and touched and cared for far more than we deserve. When we are able to do the same for someone else, it is so rewarding. The delinquent who finally shapes up, given some constructive work, discipline and faith they can improve. The drunk who stays sober at last. THe shelter dog tamed to kindness. What shrinks sneer at as rescue fantasies are realy no more and no less than our human longing to share the redeeming love of a God who accepts us and works with us to improve us every day that we let Him.