how many....

[Merc]

...adults (meanign say 25 and older) have a DX of bordeline (personality disorder)
Just very curious...
how do you feel about the DX?
as in, do you agree, evenm if reluctantly?
and....
i lost train of thougth..
i guessjust experiences of adults with it
sorry if it sounds rude to exclude the younger crowd, i DO apologize
but
i am not 20-something
so am looking for ppl my age with it

romp

[Stellata]

I have borderline traits. So it's not in my official medical diagnosis. I'm kind of glad about that, really. I'm more mixed PD, really - along with the depression and complex PTSD. It's very much an attachment disorder for me. It has got better over the years, with therapy, meds and lots of hard work.
That probably doesn't help you much, sorry......

[shadowedseraph]

I'm 24 if that counts :) and yes i agree with the diagnosis becuase i fit so much of the criteria

xx

[Merc]

thanks you both.
and yeah, i (reluctantly) agree with it too as one of my DX's. I fit everything (except one).
It just...it makes me think of it as a personal flaw rather than an illness if you understnad?
Quite frankily...i hate it.
But i don't really have a choice in it now do i?
thaks again
romp

[butterfly hearts]

I understand entirely how you think of it of a personal flaw.
i'm only 17 by the way, i'm a baby.
I was told once by a professional (although i doubt she deserves that title), that i was acting like a BP, and i just thought to myself after....she was saying it's a bad thing to be borderline personality. I think it is very much misunderstood. All of the young people i know think it is all about attention seeking...they don't seem to understand the attachment, the mood disfunction, confusion, etc.

I know this may be irravivant, just wanted to agree...it is misunderstoon, unfortunately.

[Gauloises]

I'm 24, and I've been told I have it along with various other things.

I don't know - I never pay too much attention to the labels or the diagnoses (is that the plural of diagnosis?) - I don't find it helpful.

[typsee]

I've received the diagnosis of Borderline Personality disorder in the past, but my current t tells me no - she reckons I have Complex PTSD instead (even though it hasnt been added to the DSM yet .... but it will be).

One thing that is pretty amazing I feel, is that once I gave up drinking, my behaviour was alot less chaotic and I no longer fit the diagnosis.

Its kinda strange what an addiction can do to alter your personality - even if you're not actively using the substance, it takes a long time to overcome the behaviour that often is attached to the addiction (ie - what AA call the 'sober drunk').

I wonder why no one accounted for my drinking problems before they decided to slap a very stigmatising label on me so quickly .... .... it took me AGES to live that one down!

[~invisible~girl~]

I don't have any personal experience with this, and I'm a few years away from 25 still anyway, but I wanted to say something anyway... In my psychopathology class the other day, we were talking about the nature of mental illness and what diagnoses really mean and stuff. And I pretty much wanted to say that a lot of it is basically BS anyway, so you shouldn't put too much weight in a diagnosis or let it get to you too much.

There is no objective definition of what consitutes mental illness or even what constitutes a specific mental illness or disorder. Rather, they're things that society has constructed to explain behaviors or psychological process that are distressing to society and/or to the individual experiencing them. And there's no absolute test or a precise known underlying cause for specific disorders, either. So the DSM is more like a collection of lists of behaviors, traits, and "symptoms" that often occur together and often respond to similar treatments, rather than an objective diagnostic test. And of course, deciding which diagnoses you might fit is a subjective judgement by the psychologist, which turns out not to be nearly as straight forward as just checking off criteria (for example, in one study, scientists gave psychologists idenifical fake profiles of patients, listing symptoms of both antisocial and borderline personality disorders, with the only difference being whether they said the patient was male or female, and the majority of "male" patients were diagnosed antisocial whereas the majority of "female" patients were diagnosed as borderline, despite having identical lists of "symptoms"). Also, even just calling something a "disorder" is a subjective judgement, because it relies of deciding what's functional or not, what's adaptive or not, etc., all of which are based on what society has decided is normal or desirable, rather than some objective scientific truth.

So that's not to say that psych diagnoses are entirely invalid, just that they're not as absolute, objective, or defined as people tend to think, and you shouldn't worry too much about what labels they want to give you.

And another thing, despite the name, "personality disorders" are, in fact, considered illness and rather than character flaws or whatever, and people can and do improve with treatment.