Anything to Stop the Pain - BPD and Non-BPs

Since I did such a detailed analysis of Pete Doherty’s BPD-like behavior, I’d say it’s time to do the same sort of analysis with my other top 5 possible BP celebs. I’m starting with Angelina Jolie, who just bought a house in France for something like $70 million:

Self Injury

In June 2001 Rolling Stone she said that during her very early teens she started “thinking about not wanting to be around. It was when the reality of life set in, the reality of surviving.” Also, Angelina used to hurt herself during her early teens but stopped around the age of sixteen. She explained in a 2000 Maxim article, “You’re young, you’re crazy, you’re in bed and you’ve got knives. So shit happens.” But in 1999 Access Hollywood interview she explained it more in-depth, “I was..trying to feel something….I was looking at different things..thinking romantically about…about blood. I really hurt myself,” and also said, “I was just….a kid. I was like 13, And, I was saying that it is not something that is cool. Its not cool. And I understand that it is a cry for help…”

In a 2000 Jane interview she said, “This person asked me about cutting myself when they saw a scar. I’m very open, but because of that, people think that they know everything about me, and, actually, they don’t know anything. I say things that other people might go through. That’s what artists should do - throw things out there and not be perfect and not have answers for anything and see if people understand. But this person made the cutting sound interesting, like it was something I do now. [For the record, she did, but doesn’t now, and doesn’t endorse it.] And then I met somebody who said they’d seen movies of mine and then showed me where they had cut themselves. I had to explain, first off, not to do that. But it made me really fucking angry at the people who represent me in a way that would get that person to do that and show me. I don’t understand why people would want to use something so damaging. It’s like, let’s make me look ‘cool’ and worry a lot of people in my family.”

Suicidal Tendencies

“Yeah. I was in a New York hotel room,” Jolie says. She was going to use a knife and sleeping pills. In preparation, she wrote a note for the housekeeper asking her to call the police, so that the housekeeper wouldn’t have to suffer the distress of finding her body. Then Jolie spent the day walking around. She almost bought a kimono, then she realized how crazy that was. “I didn’t know if I could pull the final thing across my wrists,” she says. But it was the sleeping pill part of the equation that stopped her, at least on a practical level. Worried that she didn’t have enough, she had asked her mother to mail her some more, and she realized that her mother would feel responsible. She realized something else, too: “That we can make that decision any time. And I kind of lay there with myself and thought, `You might as well live a lot, really hard, and not give a shit, because you can always walk through that door.’ So I started to live as if I could die any day.”

The next day, she went back and bought the kimono.

Did you ever feel that low about living again?

Well, I had felt like that before. When I was thirteen or fifteen.”

Did you ever feel like acting on it?

“Yeah. It’s seems like there’s always been times. This is going to sound so insane, but there was a time when I realized I was going to have to hire somebody to kill me. It comes from a place of … With suicide comes the guilt of all the people around you thinking that they could have done something. With somebody being murdered, nobody takes some kind of guilty responsibility.”

Poor Self-Image

Later, Jolie frets about the ways she’s sometimes talked about. “I am fragile and fucked up. There are lots of things about my life in recent years that people don’t know anything about,” she says. “People assume . . . People have said things about me, they’ve said I’ve slept with my brother, they’ve said that I’m a drug addict and that all I do is get fucked up, and they’ve also made it seem like I’m some slut. I’m far from perfect as a person ….. She shakes her head.

Volatile Relationships

She tells me anyway. It was just before she and Thornton got married. She was sectioned for seventy-two hours at UCLA. “What happened,” she says, “is we didn’t know if we were going to be able to be together.” She pauses. “I remember him driving somewhere and not knowing if he was OK…. We had wanted to get married and then for all these different reasons we thought we couldn’t. We both were just … are just, it’s a beautiful kind of love, but it’s also a little insane, and I for some reason thought something had happened to him and I lost the ability to … I just went a little insane.”

Confused Sexuality

When Barbara Walters asked her if she was bisexual, Jolie responded: “Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel that it’s okay to want to kiss and touch her? If I fell in love with her? Absolutely! Yes!” - July 2003

In an interview with Elle magazine, Jolie said: “Honestly, I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.” - June 2000

Eating Disorder

The tattooed former wild child — who in her younger years battled an eating disorder and self-mutilation and later famously wore a necklace containing a drop of her then-husband Billy Bob Thornton’s blood…

Substance Abuse

A British tabloid newspaper has published images of a video which allegedly shows Angelina Jolie in a “drug den” with a woman who is openly smoking heroin.

The actress is shown in video images published in The Sun newspaper looking disheveled and wide-eyed as she smokes a cigarette and tells the camera of her past drug use. The video captures the star reportedly saying, “I’ve done coke, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, everything.”

Last month, it was reported by the National Enquirer a videotape of Jolie allegedly smoking and snorting heroin had been offered for sale for $70,000. But in this footage, thought to be taken in the 1990s when she was in her 20s, Jolie does not take drugs, telling the camera, “I gave them up long ago.”

Well, that’s it for now. I think an argument can be made for her impulsiveness (married 3 times) and for Brad Pitt’s impulsiveness too. I have to say though, she and Brad have much better management people than some other celebs. You don’t hear much now about her nutty behavior. She has found someone to control the press - something that Britney, Lindsey Lohan and others could learn a lesson from.

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Bon Dobbs :: May.29.2008 :: Celebrities, Borderline Personality Disorder :: 4 Comments »

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