Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe mental illness marked by widespread volatility in emotions, interpersonal connections, self-image, and behavior. This insecurity frequently disturbs family and professional careers, long-term planning, and a person’s sense of self-identity. People with BPD suffer from an emotion control problem, which was once regarded to be on the borderline of psychosis. BPD affects 2% of individuals, usually young women, and is less well known than schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. It decreases the ability of patients to comfortably exist in their social context and achieve their professional goals.
The symptoms that are related to BPD can occur in other illnesses as well. Moreover, the majority of patients with BPD have other disorders such as depression or anxiety. Nevertheless, when the following specific symptoms occur at the same time, and more than 5 of them can be found, the person can be diagnosed with BPD. These symptoms are the fear of being abandoned, low stability of interpersonal relationships, poor or unstable self-identity, impulsivity, self-destructive behavior, mood swings, the feeling of emptiness, uncontrollable anger, and paranoid thoughts.
Patients with BPD are frequently afraid of being left or alone. Ordinary events such as a partner returning from work late or leaving for the weekend can cause intense anxiety. This might result in desperate attempts to keep other people close. They might plead, cling, instigate conflicts, follow their loved one’s whereabouts, or even physically prevent them from leaving. A person with BPD usually has an unstable sense of self. They may feel good about themselves at times, but at other times, they despise themselves or even regard their personality as evil. They most likely have no notion of who they are or what they want from life. As a result, individuals may change employment, friends, loves, religion, beliefs, objectives, and even sexual identity regularly. People with BPD are more likely to engage in dangerous, sensation-seeking activities, particularly when they feel disturbed. They may overspend, binge eats, drive dangerously, shoplift, engage in unsafe sex, or use drugs or alcohol in ways they cannot afford.
Holistic treatment of BPD primarily consists of psychotherapy and its different types. Regardless of the type of treatment utilized, clinical experience reveals that many similar elements drive the psychotherapist (Westbrook & Jackson, 2009). Building a strong therapeutic connection and tracking self-destructive and suicidal tendencies are two of these qualities. Validating the patient’s suffering and experience, as well as assisting the patient in accepting responsibility for their acts, are both beneficial therapies. Because BPD individuals might have a wide range of strengths and limitations, flexibility is an important part of treatment. Managing feelings, increasing thinking rather than impulsive action, lowering the patient’s inclination to split, and placing limitations on any self-destructive conduct are other important aspects of efficient therapy for BPD patients. In a randomized controlled experiment, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) was found to be useful for BPD symptoms in individuals with concomitant substance misuse, while there was no change in the substance abuse itself (Brodsky & Stanley, 2013). These findings show that patients with BPD and drug addiction issues should be urged to prioritize their substance abuse issues.
The conventional treatment for BPD is related to pharmacological drugs that improve some symptoms of the disorder. The potential of particular pharmacological therapies to relieve some symptoms in some BPD patients while failing to do so in others supports the existence of diverse patient subgroups and encourages patients to choose a pharmacological therapy based on their unique symptomatic profile and comorbidity (Ogden & Prokott, 2021). Several basic BPD symptoms, including impulsive symptoms, compulsions, and emotional and addictive symptoms, might potentially be addressed for therapy. Because treatment should eventually target all clinically meaningful symptoms in the particular patient, a sensible pharmaceutical decision would consider which of these symptom categories appear to prevail, as well as concomitant diseases. The main pharmacological groups used for BPD are anticonvulsants, antidepressants, and antipsychotics.
The etiology of BPD lies in environmental, social, and genetic causes. BPD and associated variables are heritable, according to family, twins, and twin family studies, and the genetic effect on BPD characteristics is partly non-additive. Furthermore, evidence for genes determining BPD characteristics on chromosome 9 was discovered in linkage analysis. Genes associated with the serotonergic system, dopamine dysfunction, and monoamine oxidase-A production have been linked in association studies. Multiple studies found a genetic commonality among the four clusters of B mental illnesses, as well as a dimensional assessment of BPD and character features (Krawitz, Jackson & Watson, 2008). There are many studies related to genetic causes of BPD, and they keep occurring.
BPD is typically shown to be more spread in women in clinical investigations, as stated by the DSM-IV, which claims that 75 percent of those diagnosed with BPD were women. This calculation is built on a meta-analysis of 75 research, the majority of which used clinical samples. Several large-scale community studies, on the other hand, found no significant gender differences in BPD (Westbrook & Jackson, 2009). The gender gap in the clinical samples is thought to be due to different base rates of males and females in clinical samples since women are more likely to seek care.
In conclusion, BPD is a mental disorder that is related to various symptoms, including feelings of abandonment, emotional instability, inability to build stable relationships, and others. Genetics is one of the main causes of BPD, along with environmental and social factors. This disorder is more prevalent in women, yet this might be related to women seeking help more often than men. It is treated both with pharmacological treatment and psychotherapy. Moreover, efficient treatment usually requires both of these elements.
References
Brodsky, B. S., & Stanley, B. (2013). The dialectical behavior therapy primer how Dbt can inform clinical practice. John Wiley & Sons.
Krawitz, R., Jackson, W., & Watson, C. (2008). Borderline personality disorder. Web.
Ogden, J. T., & Prokott, J. (2021). Borderline personality disorder (B. Salem Press Encyclopedia of Health.
Westbrook, L. F., & Jackson, M. H. (2009). Borderline personality disorder: New research. Nova Science Publishers Incorporated.
