Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is:
• a condition involving difficulties in regulating emotion
• characterized by severe emotional turbulence, including unstable mood swings, impulsivity and instability, poor self-image, and stormy personal relationships, and can manifest into destructive behavior, such as self-harm (cutting) or suicide attempts
Signs and symptoms (adapted from the National Alliance on Mental Illness)
• Frantic efforts to avoid being abandoned by friends and family
• Unstable personal relationships that alternate between idealization and devaluation
• Distorted and unstable self-image, affecting moods, values, opinions, goals, and relationships
• Impulsive behaviors that can have dangerous outcomes, such as excessive spending, unsafe sex, substance abuse or reckless driving
• Suicidal and self-harming behavior
• Periods of intense depressed mood, irritability or anxiety lasting a few hours to a few days
• Chronic feelings of boredom or emptiness
• Inappropriate, intense or uncontrollable anger—often followed by shame and guilt
• Dissociative feelings—disconnecting from your thoughts or sense of identity, or “out of body” type of feelings—and stress-related paranoid thoughts. Severe cases of stress can also lead to brief psychotic episodes.
More information on Borderline Personality Disorder
National Alliance on Mental Illness, on BPD
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy for Borderline Personality Disorder [link no longer available]. An article by Dr. Martha Linehan, the originator of DTB therapy
Borderline-Personality-Disorder-Candida-Moreira-RCC An article by Candida Moriera, RCC – BCACC