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I have borderline personality disorder (BPD). AMA.

Patorick

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Patorick

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http://www.smh.com.au/comment/dan-v...ife-of-suicidal-thoughts-20170220-gugyiq.html

If you feel locked in a box, or cannot see your way out, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. MensLine Australia is on 1300 78 99 78. If you sense that someone needs help, tell them you'll be there for them. Let them talk. Look for any sign of light getting into their box, and focus on that. Encourage them to seek professional help. And if you'd like to learn more about how to identify the signs that someone needs support and how to help them, consider becoming a Lifeline volunteer or doing a four-hour accidental counsellor course. You can make a real difference.

astokes@fairfaxmedia.com.au
 

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What do you think of people with BPD? Why is there so much stigma surrounding it?

https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-t...PD-Why-is-there-so-much-stigma-surrounding-it

Daniel Maigler, Managing partner at Campus Coaches

Written Apr 8

When I think of BPD I sigh and I feel tired. I remember being in grad school to become a social worker and an excellent professor I had for my class on clinical diagnosis told us that the DSM was pretty useless if you just looked at the lists of symptoms within it. He said as a clinician you get a feel about what you are dealing with based on your experience and you use the DSM to make sure you asked yourself all the right questions and you ruled out everything else it could be before you decide on a course of treatment.

What he told us about all personality disorders, not just BPD, was that in his experience that biggest diagnostic factor was nothing in the book but how he felt when the client left the room. Like all the energy had just been sucked out of him. Nothing I ever learned in any class in any school turned out to be more true of my own experience.

I have had several clients who were misdiagnosed in hospital settings as BPD. I knew they were not because they were able to take responsibility for their actions and see their own role in things.

Before DBT therapy came along BPD was a psychological death sentence, a glowing toxic warning label to other clinicians to say "don't bother, this one isn't sick, this is how he/she is wired and they are not getting any better."

Now we know that isn't true. We know that all personality disorders, particularly BPD can get better, but if you are working with a BPD client you are going to have to earn your money. They tend to have a huge history of pain and betrayal and broken relationships that you are going to have to work against and through to earn their trust. Then once you do you are going to have to shed their transference and help them to realize they can form trusting healthy relationships outside the safety of the office.

In truth, a couple of my all time favorite clients dealt with BPD. It was a factor in their life but it did not ultimately define them. Perhaps I have such fond memories of them because the journey was such a struggle for both of us.

So I do not think of BPD people as bad, but I do think of them as exhausted and exhausting, and I hope every single one of them can find a therapist who will go the distance with them and see them smiling on the other side.
 

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So, yeah, this happened.

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Wagga advocate shares his journey with borderline personality disorder

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By Rochelle Brown

@rochelleebrown1

13 Apr 2017, 4:24 p.m

http://www.dailyadvertiser.com.au/story/4597753/patrick-faces-battle-within/?cs=148

Wagga’s Patrick Flynn hasn’t stepped out for a social event in more than 10 years.

Suffering from borderline personality disorder, he struggles with day-to-day social interaction, forcing him to lose those closest to him.

“The intensity of my emotions makes it borderline – you’re always really angry, sad, desperate or lonely,” Mr Flynn said.

“No matter what triggers it, the emotion is all you can focus on.”

First diagnosed in 2007, Mr Flynn wants to share his journey to raise awareness for the disorder and help others who may be suffering.

“Part of the disorder is that you don’t feel as though you deserve friends and you believe you’ll hurt people,” Mr Flynn said.

“The big fear is if I let them know who I really am, people will abandon me.”

The disorder has forced Mr Flynn to push friends away, only leaving the house for basic activities, like grocery shopping or a trip to the post office.

Three months ago, Mr Flynn headed to a Wagga mental health support group, triggering a change.

“The meet ups helped me learn acceptance, tolerance, patience and empathy,” Mr Flynn said.

“No matter how bad you’ve got it there’s always someone who is struggling a bit more and needs help.”

Since his meetings, Mr Flynn has taken up yoga, meditation and indoor soccer, trying to focus on other things.

While Mr Flynn’s journey is far from over, he wants to help others find their way, concerned the disorder often goes undiagnosed.

“My concern is people could be out there with the disorder but aren't getting treatment,” Mr Flynn said.

“Without treatment it will just get worse and worse over time.”

Mr Flynn said it was important to reach out for help as the disorder was often misdiagnosed with depression, bipolar and other personality disorders.

“You really have to work with doctors to let them help you, it takes a long time to get a diagnosis,” Mr Flynn said.

“You have to be as open and as honest as you can.”

Wagga mental health advocate Samantha Brunskill said it was important to seek support.

“When you step outside and try and stay well it often feels quite isolating, there can be a real sense of shame in different environments,” Ms Brunskill said.

“Having a regular time, like a meeting, without judgement, empowers people to take that same approach outside of the group and stigmatises mental illness.”

Mr Flynn has advised others struggling with their mental health to look ahead and hope.

“Focus on the things you can change and know that feelings aren’t facts,” Mr Flynn said.

“You might feel the world is against you but life does get better.” Samantha Brunskill’s Embrace Mental Health Meetups run from 6pm on the first Thursday of each month, at Romano's.
 
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Selena Gomez on Instagram Fatigue, Good Mental Health, and Stepping Back From the Limelight

March 16, 2017 10:01 PM by Rob Haskell

http://www.vogue.com/article/selena-gomez-april-cover-interview-mental-health-instagram

If you are over 30 and find yourself somewhat mystified by Gomez’s fame, unable to attach it to any art object—apart from several inescapable pop songs and a cameo in The Big Short in which, as herself, she explains synthetic collateralized debt obligations—then you might wish to watch the video for “The Heart Wants What It Wants.” (You will be late to the party; it received more than nine million views in the first 24 hours following its release.) Before the music begins, we hear Gomez’s voice as if from a recorded psychotherapy session, ruminating over a betrayal. “Feeling so confident, feeling so great about myself,” she says, her voice breaking, “and then it’d just be completely shattered by one thing. By something so stupid.” Sobs. “But then you make me feel crazy. You make me feel like it’s my fault.” Is this acting? Is it a HIPAA violation? Either way, there is magic in the way it makes you feel as if you’ve just shared in her suffering. Pay dirt for a Selenator.

Gomez queues up a playlist—Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers—and back in the kitchen, there is a chile relleno casserole to assemble, green enchiladas to roll, and her cheesy potatoes to mix together. As I slip an apron over her mane of chocolate-brown hair, for which Pantene has paid her millions, and tie it around her tiny waist, I wonder whether her legions have felt for years the same sharp pang of protectiveness that I’m feeling at present. Even as she projects strength and self-assuredness, Gomez is not stingy with frailty. “I’ve cried onstage more times than I can count, and I’m not a cute crier,” she says. Last summer, after the North American and Asian legs of her “Revival” tour, with more than 30 concerts remaining, she abruptly shut things down and checked into a psychiatric facility in Tennessee. (This was the second time Gomez had canceled a tour to enter into treatment; in January 2014, shortly after being diagnosed with lupus, she spent two weeks at the Meadows, the Arizona center that has welcomed Tiger Woods, Rush Limbaugh, and Kate Moss.) The cause, she says, was not an addiction or an eating disorder or burnout, exactly.

“Tours are a really lonely place for me,” she explains. “My self-esteem was shot. I was depressed, anxious. I started to have panic attacks right before getting onstage, or right after leaving the stage. Basically I felt I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t capable. I felt I wasn’t giving my fans anything, and they could see it—which, I think, was a complete distortion. I was so used to performing for kids. At concerts I used to make the entire crowd raise up their pinkies and make a pinky promise never to allow anybody to make them feel that they weren’t good enough. Suddenly I have kids smoking and drinking at my shows, people in their 20s, 30s, and I’m looking into their eyes, and I don’t know what to say. I couldn’t say, ‘Everybody, let’s pinky-promise that you’re beautiful!’ It doesn’t work that way, and I know it because I’m dealing with the same shit they’re dealing with. What I wanted to say is that life is so stressful, and I get the desire to just escape it. But I wasn’t figuring my own stuff out, so I felt I had no wisdom to share. And so maybe I thought everybody out there was thinking, This is a waste of time.”

On August 15, Gomez uploaded a photo of almost baroque drama: her body collapsed on the stage, bathed in beatific light. Whether this was agony or ecstasy, it drew more than a million comments from fans (who have handles like “selena_is_my_life_forever”). It would be her last Instagram post for more than three months. She flew to Tennessee, surrendered her cell phone, and joined a handful of other young women in a program that included individual therapy, group therapy, even equine therapy. “You have no idea how incredible it felt to just be with six girls,” she says, “real people who couldn’t give two shits about who I was, who were fighting for their lives. It was one of the hardest things I’ve done, but it was the best thing I’ve done.” She stayed for 90 days, making her first post-treatment appearance last November at the American Music Awards, where she collected the trophy for Favorite Pop/Rock Female Artist and gave a tearful speech about her struggles; it quickly went viral.
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Doll-like and startled in pictures but almost breathtakingly at ease in person, Gomez was once described by her good friend Taylor Swift as “both 40 years old and seven years old.” She grew up in Grand Prairie, Texas, raised by a single mother who was sixteen when she was born. Gomez remembers being asked to feel between the cushions in the car for change so that they could buy Styrofoam cups of ramen. But at age seven, after a few years on the pageant circuit, she landed a role on the children’s show Barney & Friends, which shot in Dallas and recruited talent locally. By twelve she was one of Disney’s young players, plucked out of thousands of hopefuls. At thirteen she moved to Los Angeles with her mother and stepfather, and the following year Disney gave her the lead in Wizards of Waverly Place, a sitcom about a family of wizards who own a downtown Manhattan restaurant. The show was a hit, and Disney did what Disney does, fanning Gomez’s talent across music and movies, with her mother, Mandy Teefey, continuing to act as her manager. (Gomez hired a Hollywood management firm in 2014, after her first mental-health crisis, but she continues to develop projects with her mother and prizes her opinion above all others.) “I worked with Disney for four years,” Gomez says. “It’s a very controlled machine. They know what they represent, and there was, 100 percent, a way to go about things.”
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In retrospect, Gomez’s childhood successes were always tinged with sadness. “My mom gave up her whole life for me,” she explains. “Where we’re from, you don’t really leave. So when I started gaining all this success, there was a guilt that came with it. I thought, Do I deserve this?” Though she has been in several other films since Spring Breakers, Gomez has enjoyed greater success as a musician. And yet the musician’s life exhausts her. On film sets she is buffered by the ensemble and can retreat into her character, but in a concert, all eyes fix upon her. “It’s weird,” she says, “to get up onstage and have everybody know where you were last night.”
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There are no movies in the works and no time pressure from her record label. “For a change,” she says, “it feels like I don’t have to be holding my breath and waiting for somebody to judge a piece of work that I’m doing. I’m not eager to chase a moment. I don’t think there’s a moment for me to chase.” Gomez currently lives in an Airbnb in the Valley and honestly doesn’t get out much, except for long drives with her girlfriends: a realtor, a techie, some folks from church. “I think seventeen people have my phone number right now,” she says. “Maybe two are famous.” She is taking Spanish, which she spoke fluently as a little girl but lost, in the hope of recording some Spanish-language music in the future. She sees her shrink five days a week and has become a passionate advocate of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, a technique developed to treat borderline personality disorder that is now used more broadly, with its emphasis on improving communication, regulating emotions, and incorporating mindfulness practices. “DBT has completely changed my life,” she says. “I wish more people would talk about therapy. We girls, we’re taught to be almost too resilient, to be strong and sexy and cool and laid-back, the girl who’s down. We also need to feel allowed to fall apart.”

She has hardly been posting on Instagram. In fact, the app is no longer on her phone, and she doesn’t even have the password to her own account. (It’s now in the possession of her assistant.) She sometimes fantasizes about disappearing from social media altogether. “As soon as I became the most followed person on Instagram, I sort of freaked out,” Gomez says. “It had become so consuming to me. It’s what I woke up to and went to sleep to. I was an addict, and it felt like I was seeing things I didn’t want to see, like it was putting things in my head that I didn’t want to care about. I always end up feeling like shit when I look at Instagram. Which is why I’m kind of under the radar, ghosting it a bit.”
 

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