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All to Know About Borderline Personality Disorder - alsanabel

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If you’re worried you might have a complex-and often misunderstood-mental condition called borderline personality disorder, it's treatable


https://alsanabel.qa/en/all-to-know-about-borderline-personality-disorder/

Your emotions, moods, and behaviors are all over the place, and you can’t seem to control or soothe them. To cope with your shifting emotions, you act in self-destructive or impulsive ways. You might want to harm yourself or behave recklessly. Perhaps one day, your best friend seems like the most perfect person in the world, and the next day you suddenly decide that he or she is your enemy. The bottom line is that you may not be able to hold on to stable relationships or even to a reliable sense of yourself.

These are some of the many facets of the complex and often misunderstood mental health condition called borderline personality disorder (BPD). If you have been diagnosed with BPD or feel as if some of these characteristics describe you, there is help available. BPD is now considered a highly treatable condition, and many people with BPD are able to lead happy and productive lives. While the spectrum of BPD varies in severity, with some people needing more intense intervention and others getting better over time, everyone with BPD can greatly benefit from evidence-based treatments.

What Is Borderline Personality Disorder?

The history of how the medical community viewed BPD is a story of misunderstanding, but the story has a happy ending. In the 1960s and 1970s, BPD was a diagnosis given somewhat indiscriminately, often to patients who were considered especially difficult, according to Francis Mondimore, MD, an associate professor in the department of psychology and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins Medicine, director of the Mood Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, and the co-author of Borderline Personality Disorder: New Reasons for Hope. “It also acquired this idea that it was something that was basically untreatable, and there was really not much you could do for these patients,” Dr. Mondimore says.

The decades that followed came with a surge of research that cleared up many of the misunderstandings surrounding BPD and the people living with it. “The thinking of borderline personality disorder went from ‘these are the worst of the worst patients that you really can’t do anything for’ to ‘this is a very treatable problem.’ And with treatment, people actually do very well,” says Dr. Mondimore.

Borderline personality disorders tend to emerge during the teen years. Based on studies, we know that BPD patients often seek treatment around age 18, but their symptoms usually begin years before that. As they age, most people with BPD get better. Self-harm and thoughts of suicide are often a more pervasive problems in younger people. The impulsive behaviors that many display early in the course of BPD are considered the most likely or first to fade with age and maturity.

“It’s a condition of youth that usually begins early in adolescence and peaks during late adolescence or the early young adult years,” explains Joel Paris, MD, a professor in the department of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. “But by 30 or 35, most people are better—even if they’re untreated—and some people will be able to manage the symptoms and move on to have a good life, although treatment probably makes that go faster.”

Who Gets Borderline Personality Disorder and Why?

About 1.4% of adults in the U.S. are estimated to be affected by BPD. Doctors used to think that BPD affected women more than men, but more recent research has revealed that men and women develop it equally. However, women do make up a greater proportion of the people who seek treatment. Women and men also seem to develop different symptoms. Some studies have found that BPD in men is more likely to reveal itself through anger, violence, and substance use, while in women it’s more likely to cause issues related to emotional eating, changes in mood, depression, and anxiety.

While there aren’t significant differences in the prevalence of BPD among races, there is some evidence that BPD is diagnosed—possibly overly diagnosed—almost twice as often among lesbian, gay, and bisexual people compared to heterosexual people. According to one study, this may be because doctors diagnosing the problem are unable to properly differentiate between the ways that these groups may have to cope with stress surrounding their identity and fitting into society, and legitimate symptoms of BPD.

There is no simple explanation for why people develop BPD. “You’re talking about this collection of problems that grow out of one another and reinforce one another, and to look for simple answers and simple causes is frustrating because they’re not there,” says Dr. Mondimore.

Borderline Personality Risk Factors

Research has found that certain factors may play a role in fueling BPD or raise the risk of getting it:

  • Having a family member with BPD
  • Changes in the brain that affect impulse control and emotional regulation
  • Trauma, including a history of abuse, abandonment, unstable relationships, or other adversities, especially during childhood

While these factors seem to be associated with a higher risk of getting BPD, they are not at all definitive. Many people with these risk factors will not get BPD, and many others get BPD without having them.

It is particularly important to recognize that childhood trauma is not the main or only cause of BPD, according to D. Bradford Reich, MD, the assistant medical director of The Pavilion at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard. “I’ve seen the evolution of the way that these patients see themselves, and I think to understand themselves as being borderline is in some ways more helpful to them than seeing themselves as trauma victims,” Dr. Reich says. “And some are, but there are plenty who’ve never been traumatized. They were just born with this really hypersensitive temperament that they had difficulty regulating from day one.”

Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms

There are many possible symptoms of BPD, and their frequency and severity can all vary from person to person. Some people may be able to prevent symptoms or keep them at bay by staying away from circumstances that trigger their symptoms, while unavoidable occurrences may trigger others.

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