Seeing The Light At the End of the BPD Tunnel

How to find out whether you have Borderline Personality Disorder.

(TW: Brief discussion of suicide rates)

Photo by My Life Journal on Unsplash

The test for BPD is a nine-step checklist, and I encountered it before I knew it had anything to do with me.

But let me back up. I’d already been watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend for a while. I loved how real the show was, how open and brutally honest it could be.

The show’s mental health arcs aired at the time my own mental health hit rock bottom. This is a coincidence I’ll always be thankful for.

On the show, Rebecca was crushed when she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder — an illness she had never heard of before.

Her distress isn’t surprising when you consider how much stigma a simple Google search can throw at you. Sufferers of BPD have long been vilified in pop culture as “crazy” and “dangerous.” Women make up an overwhelming 75% of diagnosed sufferers. As a result, BPD came to be closely identified with the literal “crazy ex-girlfriend” trope. (Hint: Think Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction and the infamous rabbit boiling incident.) Unfortunately, the stigma is also widely prevalent among mental health professionals. Many refuse to take on patients who have been diagnosed with BPD. And to top it all off, the statistics say that 10% of BPD sufferers die by suicide.

From hopeful to doomed in 0.12 seconds. That’s rough.

Unraveling again, Rebecca goes to her therapist and demands a different diagnosis. She’s adamant that the one she got doesn’t fit her. Her therapist takes her through the 9-point checklist and asks her to think about whether she relates to any of the symptoms on the list.

The BPD Test

1. Fear of Abandonment. Fear of abandonment is wild. It’s a gut-wrenching sensation that kicks your brain kicks into high gear. You would do and say anything to avoid losing the person who’s distancing themselves from you.
2. Unstable Relationships: On-again, off-again relationships that never really seem to go anywhere. Or a series of short relationships that involve little to no commitment, and probably a high level of toxicity.
3. Unclear or Unstable Self-image: This is an interesting one. Most people have (or so I am told) a clear idea of who they are. This gives them consistency in their careers, their personal life, their hobbies, and even the kind of music they listen to. In contrast, a blog post I wrote in 2016 talked about how I am neither one thing nor the other. “You’re constantly on the fence,” said my therapist when we discussed this. She wasn’t talking about literal or metaphorical fences. Rather, what she meant was that my emotions/ personality never settled in one place for any amount of time.
4. Impulsive, Self Destructive Behaviours: Addictions, toxic relationships, a conspicuous absence of self-preservation instincts… These are all things that fall into this category.
5. Self Harm
6. Extreme Emotional Swings: After I started medication, I tried to keep a mood journal. The exercise showed me shifting through 5 different, distinct moods in a 2 hour period. This sort of rapid shifting can be extremely draining, both physically and emotionally.
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness: Hello, darkness, my old friend. The sensation of emptiness was something I had long associated with chronic depression. Unsurprising considering that a very high rate of comorbidity has been observed between BPD and depression. Unfortunately, merely treating someone for depression alone will not improve their symptoms — if they also have BPD. On the flip side, the symptoms of depression have been seen to lift with successful treatment of BPD symptoms.
8. Explosive anger: Rage attacks, huh? Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Explosive anger doesn’t just refer to broadly defined anger management issues. We’re talking short fuses. Where the anger comes on without warning, triggered by a single word or action or event.
9. Feeling suspicious or out of touch with reality: What do you do when you feel paranoid? Especially when nobody else seems to think there’s reason to worry? There also seems to be some correlation between this point and dissociation.

If you exhibit at least 5 of the symptoms on the above checklist, you’re considered eligible for BPD diagnosis.

Watching the episode, I found myself strongly relating to most of the points on the checklist. At the time, I attributed it to the Barnum Effect, helped along by my heightened emotions. So it came as a bit of a shock when I finally asked for a diagnosis a month later and got the same thing.

I often think about how much easier that episode made my own diagnosis moment. I’d gotten to watch the process being depicted onscreen. Any misgivings or fears that I might have had had already been addressed by the show. Someone else (fictionally) went through it so I didn’t have to. CXG made it easier for me to move straight on to the next stage, and start looking at what I could do to change things.