Borderline personality disorder is mainly treated using psychotherapy, but medication may be added. Your doctor also may recommend hospitalization if your safety is at risk. Treatment can help you learn skills to manage and cope with your condition.
Coping skills for BPD are often centered around learning to manage moments of emotional instability and/or control anger. Some techniques to help in these situations could include: Using stress-reduction techniques, like deep breathing or meditation. Engaging in light exercise, like walking or yoga.
If you have borderline personality disorder, don't get discouraged. Many people with this disorder get better over time with treatment and can learn to live satisfying lives.
Environmental factors
being a victim of emotional, physical or sexual abuse. being exposed to long-term fear or distress as a child. being neglected by 1 or both parents. growing up with another family member who had a serious mental health condition, such as bipolar disorder or a drink or drug misuse problem.
Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness that severely impacts a person's ability to regulate their emotions. This loss of emotional control can increase impulsivity, affect how a person feels about themselves, and negatively impact their relationships with others.
Stressful or traumatic life events
Often having felt afraid, upset, unsupported or invalidated. Family difficulties or instability, such as living with a parent or carer who experienced an addiction. Sexual, physical or emotional abuse or neglect. Losing a parent.
It is commonly believed that some features of borderline personality disorder improve as individuals reach their late 30s and 40s.
Research has shown that the prognosis for BPD is actually not as bad at once thought. Almost half of people who are diagnosed with BPD will not meet the criteria for a diagnosis just two years later. Ten years later, 88% of people who were once diagnosed with BPD no longer meet the criteria for a diagnosis.
People with BPD score low on cognitive empathy but high on emotional empathy. This suggests that they do not easily understand other peoples' perspectives, but their own emotions are very sensitive. This is important because it could align BPD with other neurodiverse conditions.
BPD is not necessarily a lifelong disorder. Many patients retain residual symptoms later in life.
Someone with BPD may go to great lengths to feel something, as well as becoming increasingly withdrawn and avoidant during an episode. Paranoid thoughts of everyone being out to get them and hating them are also common during these times. Episodes can also be extreme highs, bursts of euphoria and positive emotions.
It can be distressing for the person with borderline personality disorder and the people around them, and it is often misunderstood. It is the most common personality disorder in Australia, affecting about 1 to 4 in every 100 people at some time in their lives.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) cannot be cured, and anyone who enters treatment looking for a quick and easy fix is bound to be disappointed. However, with treatment the symptoms of BPD can be effectively managed, monitored, and ultimately reduced in intensity, or entirely eliminated.
Nearly 75% of people diagnosed with BPD are women. Recent research suggests that men may be equally affected by BPD, but are commonly misdiagnosed with PTSD or depression.
Findings from community samples have demonstrated that BPD symptoms and features peak during mid-adolescence and decline during late adolescence and young adulthood [11–14].
Splitting is a psychological mechanism which allows the person to tolerate difficult and overwhelming emotions by seeing someone as either good or bad, idealised or devalued. This makes it easier to manage the emotions that they are feeling, which on the surface seem to be contradictory.
While 2014 research indicates that people with borderline personality disorder often experience co-occurring psychiatric conditions, the exact rate of schizophrenia and BPD comorbidity specifically isn't clear just yet. A 2010 study found that 17.6% of people diagnosed with schizophrenia also met the criteria for BPD.
BPD has been linked to the amygdala and limbic systems of the brain, the centres that control emotion and, particularly, rage, fear and impulsive automatic reactions.
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is highly associated with verbal abuse, emotional abuse, psychological abuse, physical abuse, and/or domestic violence often suffered by those who are non-borderline.
But borderline personality disorder does not develop as a result of those traumas. Instead, it is a combination of genetic factors and childhood experiences (early environmental influences) that cause a person to develop borderline personality disorder.