last week, my CPN (Community Psychiatric Nurse) was away so i had to see one of her colleagues. in the last year i have finally been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) after years of discussion between that and bipolar disorder. needless to say over the years the reactions i have had have not been great, there seems to be a complete variety of responses to someone who has BPD, most of them unhelpful and demeaning to the person with the disorder. the responses have varied from being viewed as a hopeless nasty patient who cannot be helped and shouldn't be touched with a barge pole to a difficult attention seeker who needs to ust grow up get on with their life.....this time i was told i had a developemental problem and he felt i needed a holiday away from myself.
this is a nice idea on principle, a little more difficult in principle....can you ever truly get a holiday away from yourself? he also said he felt i was way too serious for my age and i needed to have more 'fun' in my life....that is true, i am serious in many ways and yes i don't have a lot of 'fun' but then neither do a lot of 23 year olds who have spent the last 8 years with their head down the toilet and trying very hard by default to end their lives.....
in his words, i didn't have an illness because i didn't have schizophrenia or bipolar type 1, those, he pointed out, are 'organic' in origin. this got me thinking. in a system that has so much power over people's lives, it worries me that there is still so much based on such small information (or personal preudices). the truth is we don't know the causes of mental illness, we also don't know what falls into true mental illness and what doesn't. before 1973, homosexuality was still regarded as a mental illness by the dsm. yet nearly 40 years later there is still a significant proportion of the psychiatric community who believe homosexuality to be an indicator of mental illness even if they don't believe it to be an illness in itself which is horrifying.
living in the hell that can be mental illness, it's truly bewildering and confusing.....it's compounded by having a system that provides no consistency. how are you supposed to make sense of internal chaos when the outside is just as chaotic?
dsm V is coming out i believe next year.. then BPD will be evaluated on a spectrum, i think this is gonna bring a lot of change as to how personality disorders will be perceived and treated.
ReplyDeletebut honestly, how much consistency is there to be expected from any kind of empiric (aka experimental) science? diabetes today is not what it used to be 40 years back, either. so what are these people experts on? i think there are some good ones out there who really, truly want to help people get better. in my own experience, these will also be the ones most aware of the changes within their professional framework.