I'm just curious as to whether or not its an ilness that is for life or can you recover from it like you can depression for example? Thanks for your answers.
The way I see it, and from my own experience, is that it is often an attachment disorder. It can come about due to attachment/relationship traumas/neglects when a child is very young. Hence the abandonment fears. It results in struggles with regulating intense emotions, hence self harming, feeling out of control etc. Because one never had a good role model to contain these feelings and make them safe when very young.
I often see it as a particular type of depression and anxiety. So it's somewhat more complex than depression as an individual diagnosis. Recovery usually involves lots of intense therapy, where you can go through the developmental attachment phases that were missed when a child, safely, and have emotions safely contained until it feels possible to feel them, contain them, yourself.
It is said to ease off as you get older, and I've found this to be the case [I have borderline traits]. That may in part be due to ongoing therapy and medication.
So, it can be for life, I would say, if you let it, but if you are determined to develop emotionally, and prepared to work hard, it is possible to achieve remission of symptoms. The feelings may not ever go away completely [abandonment fears etc] but there you get more able to manage them and self soothe. I would say it depends on the depth of the emotional trauma endured.
This is my perspective, others may think differently. :)
^^ The film didnt show a true representative of bpd, then again it was set in the 60s so the diagnosis has changed a bit from them. It is based on a true story, but like i said before the diagnosis has changed a bit.
Bpd from what ive been told is uncurable, its not like depression where a bit of councelling and pills and sorting out your issues can help and ultimatly leave you not needing treatment anymore and leading a full normal life.
Bpd can take up to ten years for the sypmtons to gradualy stop being as intense as they are. Also people are reluctant to treat you with anything else other than drugs and CBT/DBT, becasue of the fact it is an uncurable condition.
Also the fact that if you look up bpd on the web, everythings quite negative and makes you feel like you cant get better becasue of what everyone says.
At the end of the day, its your choice if you want to recover or not, you have to stop reading into the negative side and the whole how you will never get better, becasue as soon as you beilve that you give up trying.
Because really whats the point of trying when you can't get better?
"Its not how long a star shines, what is remembered is the brightness of the light"
With BPD, you can't get given a pill to ease it or make it go away like you can with other psychiatric disorders. But it can be helped by CBT, and other talking therapies.
I know someone who was diagnosed with BPD, and by having lots of different therapy she was re-tested for it and she had recovered.
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back, everything is different…
you once called your brain a hard drive, well say hello to the virus.
BPD needn't necessarily be a negative diagnosis; personally i don't believe any mental illness can be fully "recovered" from; generally speaking things will continue to "lurk" but more so than that, there tends to be a remaining susceptibility to mental health issues.
With BPD, great results have been found following intensive psychotherapy (ie a few hours a day, several days a week as part of an outpatient program). What also helps, with any mental health problem is making sure you're well nourished; so even BPD and some of the symptoms can be helped by making sure you're getting the right nourishment as you can literally starve your brain and without essential nutrients, your brain will actually fail to function properly, that's why even severe conditions such as schizophrenia have had a huge improvement after vitamin and mineral therapy.
The thing with BPD, is that the condition is basically a mental injury; trauma as a result of what the person in question has endured and so recovery does also involve having a stable, safe environment and support. A visible recovery can begin and have noticable results even within a couple of years.
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My heart just needs his smile, that i can't forget, like so melancholy a kiss.
The thing with BPD, is that the condition is basically a mental injury; trauma as a result of what the person in question has endured and so recovery does also involve having a stable, safe environment and support. A visible recovery can begin and have noticable results even within a couple of years.
It was believed for a long time that BPD was hard to deal with cuz it's inbedded in your personality (hence the name personality disorder) but I always thought of that as kinda crap anyway cuz I know people can and will change. A recent research stated that even a thing as a personality isn't as 'constant' and not undergoing any changes as dr's thought for a long time.
Anyway, recovery no, perhaps, but dealing with just who you are, that can be done and everybody changes, it really is true, I changed a lot in a short time, myself.
I haven't officially been diagnosed with BPD (because I'm underage) but I did have some therapy for it last year, called Systems work which was under the CBT umbrella and my BPD (I believe I do have it) was much better, there was a noticeable change that my parents saw too, for about six months, in spite of only doing the treatment a short amount of time.
Basically there is hope out there, it can go into remission or at least get better.
But like everyone else says, you can't really recover, it's part of you.
And all you want is sleep/But all you get it pills
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I don't know if I had what you're talking about, but I was diagnosed with BPD as a teenager. It wasn't so completely ingrained in my life that CBT wasn't effective. I hardly feel the BPD at all, so I don't consider it a current problem. I consider myself "cured". But also, I have my doubts that it was BPD in the first place. I just think I needed CBT to sort out my thoughts.
We talked about BPD in my Psychology classes [that's my major]. Everyone there considered it to be one of the most over-diagnosed personality disorders. Our professor told us that, because of that, the DSM next time around may require you to have more symptoms present than required by the current criteria.
Don't get me wrong, I think BPD is a prevalent problem. But the thing is, almost every woman [except for one] I've met who self-injures has been diagnosed with BPD. This is either an error on the doctor's part [using self-injury as the most important symptom, where as the others are more important, in my opinion], or the difficulty making a diagnosis due to the lack of DSM critera for a self-injury "disorder" in itself.
But to my point, I'm not sure if one would be able to recover, especially if misdiagnosed and the real problem is ignored. I was lucky, I got what I needed out of the CBT that fixed whatever problem I had at the time.