People with BPD often struggle with paranoia or suspicious thoughts about others' motives. When under stress, you may even lose touch with reality—an experience known as dissociation. You may feel foggy, spaced out, or as if you're outside your own body.
Paranoia as a Symptom of BPD
Stress-related paranoid ideation is one of nine possible diagnostic criteria for borderline personality disorder. In one comprehensive study of patients receiving mental health services, 87 percent of participants with BPD reported experiencing the symptoms of paranoid ideation.
Feeling Out of Touch With Reality
Many diagnosed with BPD feel suspicious about events in their lives. They struggle with feelings of suspicion and paranoia about the intentions of people around them.
Recent findings: Both auditory hallucinations and delusional ideation (especially paranoid delusions) are relatively common in individuals with BPD.
Paranoid ideation in BPD is usually triggered by stress. Finding ways to manage stress levels can be an effective way to cope with paranoid thoughts. Some strategies you might try include: Deep breathing: This is a common stress management technique that involves taking slow, deep breaths.
People with borderline personality disorder have a deep fear of abandonment. They compete for social acceptance, are terrified of rejection and often feel lonely even in the context of an intimate relationship. Therefore, it is more difficult for them to manage the normal ups and downs of a romantic partnership.
With borderline personality disorder, you have an intense fear of abandonment or instability, and you may have difficulty tolerating being alone. Yet inappropriate anger, impulsiveness and frequent mood swings may push others away, even though you want to have loving and lasting relationships.
When stressed, people with borderline personality disorder may develop psychotic-like symptoms. They experience a distortion of their perceptions or beliefs rather than a distinct break with reality. Especially in close relationships, they tend to misinterpret or amplify what other people feel about them.
Adult patients with BPD experience a wide range of other psychotic symptoms in addition to AVH, including hallucinations (11% visual hallucinations, 8% gustatory hallucinations, 17% olfactory hallucinations, 15% tactile hallucinations [19]), thought insertion (100%), thought blocking (90%), being influenced by another ...
But people with BPD often have a very profound lack of sense of self, or loss of identity. 1 If you struggle with the feeling that you have no idea who you are or what you believe in, this may be a symptom you can relate to.
People with borderline personality disorder may experience intense mood swings and feel uncertainty about how they see themselves. Their feelings for others can change quickly, and swing from extreme closeness to extreme dislike. These changing feelings can lead to unstable relationships and emotional pain.
People with BPD also have a tendency to think in extremes, a phenomenon called "dichotomous" or “black-or-white” thinking. 3 People with BPD often struggle to see the complexity in people and situations and are unable to recognize that things are often not either perfect or horrible, but are something in between.
Conclusions: Delusions in patients with BPD occur frequently and cause distress. Contrary to tenacious beliefs, hallucinations and delusions in participants with BPD are often present in an intermittent or persistent pattern. Persistent hallucinations can be severe, causing disruption of life.
Many people with BPD feel emotions deeply and find working in a caring role fulfilling. If you are an empathetic person, consider jobs such as teaching, childcare, nursing and animal care.
People with borderline personality disorders are aware of their behaviors and the consequences of them and often act in increasingly erratic ways as a self-fulfilling prophecy to their abandonment fears.
Intense and highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few hours to a few days. Chronic feelings of emptiness. Inappropriate, intense anger or problems controlling anger. Stress-related paranoid thoughts.
Patients with BPD experienced hallucinations with characteristics similar to the more frequently studied auditory (verbal) hallucinations. Higher scores for schizotypy and loneliness indicate that patients with hallucinations had more characteristics of cluster A personality disorders.
Today, near‐psychotic symptoms appear as DSM‐5 criteria in both BPD and SPD. This makes the differentiation of BPD from the schizophrenia spectrum heavily dependent on the detection and registration of the schizophrenic fundamental symptoms.
While researchers are not exactly sure why BPD symptoms decline with age, some experts have suggested some potential reasons, including burn out, learning, and avoidance of relationships. These can be linked to both biological and environmental factors.
It's rare for borderline personality disorder (BPD) and schizophrenia to occur together, but it is possible.
Schizophrenia and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
One study found that both patients with schizophrenia and patients with BPD experience hearing voices. The difference between the two being that paranoid delusions occurred in less than one-third of patients with BPD, compared with two-thirds in schizophrenia.
BPD in particular is one of the lesser-known mental illnesses, but all the same it is one of the hardest to reckon with. (Some people dislike the term so much they prefer to refer to emotionally unstable personality disorder.)
For someone with this type of BPD relationship, a “favorite person” is someone they rely on for comfort, happiness, and validation. The relationship with a BPD favorite person may start healthy, but it can often turn into a toxic love-hate cycle known as idealization and devaluation.
People with BPD may not have a consistent self-image or sense of self. This may worsen obsessive tendencies, since they may find it difficult to see themselves as real or worthy individually, separate from their relationships.