Why is BPD a serious condition?

• Individuals with BPD experience intense feelings of self-hatred, anger, depression, or anxiety. These feelings are often scary, overwhelming and difficult to control. In the midst of intense emotions, individuals with BPD can act impulsively to alleviate emotional pain, selfsoothe, or communicate emotional distress.

• Sadly, up to 10% of people with BPD die by suicide.

• 80% of those hospitalized with BPD have engaged in self-harm, including behaviors such as self-cutting, burning of the skin, self-hitting, self-biting, head banging, scratching, skin carving, and needle sticking. The emotional pain they are experiencing feels so intolerable that self-harm is a way of coping to relieve their intense psychic pain.

• Sometimes, people accidentally inflict more harm upon themselves than they intended.

• These concerns should be responded to with extreme compassion, on par with any other serious medical disorder. Friends, family, clinicians, and community members can help by validating their experience of emotional distress, providing a safe environment, and help them to access the appropriate level of treatment and support needed for recovery.

• Between 1-2% of people will develop BPD in their lifetime. All genders are equally affected. 50-80% of individuals with BPD struggle with substance use disorder.

How are people living with BPD affected by this condition?

People say BPD can feel like...

• Driving a vehicle that is accelerating and the brakes aren’t working

• Riding an emotional roller coaster with ups and downs multiple times in one day

• Constant shame, worthlessness, and self-loathing without an identifiable trigger

• Going through life like a raw nerve

WHAT IS BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER (BPD)?

A complex condition characterized by extreme difficulty regulating emotions, distress, and confusion about their sense of self, unstable relationships, and impulsive behaviors. Individuals are diagnosed with BPD if they meet five or more of the following criteria, as listed by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM):

1. Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment

2. Unstable, intense relationships where individuals alternate between idolizing and disliking individuals in their life

3. An unstable self-image or sense of self

4. Impulsivity in at least two areas that can be damaging

5. Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, threats, or self-harm

6. Affective instability (irritability, anxiety, etc.) that can last a few hours, but rarely more than a few days

7. Chronic feelings of emptiness

8. Intense anger or difficulty controlling anger

9. Stress-related paranoia or severe dissociative (out-of-body) symptoms The DSM also introduced a new way of describing BPD and other personality disorders that mentions difficulties with identity, self-direction, empathy, and intimacy as main concerns.