What is Borderline Personality Disorder?
Borderline Personality Disorder is a mental health disorder that affects how you feel about yourself and how you react to the world around you. People who have been diagnosed with BPD have patterns of behavior of unstable intense relationships, distorted self-image, extreme emotions and impulsiveness. BPD can only be diagnosed by a Mental Health expert or medical doctor using the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Addition).How to Know if you have Borderline Personality Disorder
Listed below is the Criteria listed in the DSM-IV used by mental health experts and medical doctors to diagnose BPD:- A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and marked impulsivity beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
- Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.
- A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation
- Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
- Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse reckless driving, binge eating).
- Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior
- Affective instability due to marked reactivity of (e.g., calm intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
- Chronic feelings of emptiness
- Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)
- Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms
