Tag: borderline personality disorder

I have managed to progress in my life despite being seen as ‘one of the most severe cases of borderline’ because I reached outside psychiatry for support to people who seen the whole of me and did not blame me for my distress. Surely this is example of a broken system that needs to change. 

I see now that the ‘borderline’ label represents the shadow of our abusive and patriarchal power structures, which have great need to deny abuses (especially sexual), and to pathologize and scapegoat the sensitive, the feminine, and the different.

Psychiatric diagnoses have far-reaching consequences for every area of your life: welfare, employment, health and travel insurance, physical and mental health assessment/treatment, adoption rights, and social stigma, to name but a few. Yet they are just subjective opinions with no scientific basis and can change over time.

I write about the ways in which child sexual abuse and exploitation has been sanitized by prominent academics – including internationally high profile intellectuals – over the last four decades, contrasting this with what is known about the impact of such abuse on the psychological development on those abused and exploited.

It’s World Mental Health Day as we publish this. On this day, while we think of how it is good to talk and that 1 in 4 of us (at least) will experience mental health problems, let’s try to remember some other people too. Let us try to remember the people for whom we pay £200,000 a year to keep out of sight and out of mind. Let us consider whether life at all costs is worth forcing people to live in hell. Let us ponder whether our care can harm people.