A free eBook – 4X4 for Nons
|
A little while ago, I posted an study about the over-lap between Major Depressive Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. The last sentence of this study was “In the meantime, the clinician treating major depressive disorder would be wise to assess for borderline personality disorder, even as currently defined.” That was because the study found a large correlation between the two disorders. Today, I was reviewing an article by Marsha Linehan called “Two-Year Randomized Controlled Trialand Follow-up of Dialectical Behavior Therapyvs Therapy by Experts for Suicidal Behaviorsand Borderline Personality Disorder” which I had planned to write something up about. I’ll have to do that later, but the reason these thoughts of MDD and BPD came to mind is that in the first paragraph of Linehan’s article she states:
“SUICIDAL BEHAVIOR IS A BROAD term that includes death bysuicide and intentional, nonfatal, self-injurious acts committed with or without intent to die. It is associated with severalmental disorders, including depression, substance dependence, and schizophrenia. Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is 1 of only 2 DSM-IV diagnoses for which suicidal behavior is a criterion.“
The emphasis is mine. I thought “what’s the other disorder that suicidal behavior is a criterion?” The answer: Major Depressive Disorder. So, today I am posting the DSM criteria for Major Depressive Disorder. It’s fairly long and I’ve included the “Major Depressive Episode” to clarify. If you’d like to get the full criteria, follow the “continue reading” link.
Continue reading Major Depressive Disorder and BPD →
“Much of it comes from self-destructive behaviors that are used to stop the horrible pain of dysphoria; anxiety, rage, depression and despair. When an individual behaves out-of-control, in a manner that’s inconsistent with their beliefs or normal choices, terrible self-hate develops. Additionally many individuals had low self-esteem and related problems since childhood and are in an environment that causes self-hate to flourish.” – from the interview
Bon: I found an interview with Dr. Leland Heller about Borderline Personality Disorder. He does a good job explaining the pain associated with the disorder… Here are some excerpts. The entire interview can be read here.
Diagnosing Borderline Personality Disorder And Finding Treatment That Works
Dr Heller: Good evening, It’s great to be here. I have a way of explaining the Borderline Personality Disorder in layman’s terms that might be useful. It’s how I explain it to patients and their families.
Imagine you had a pet dog and it runs into the street and by accident it’s hit by a car. The dog’s leg is broken and it limps off into an alley to lick it’s wounds. A friend of yours sees the dog and comes over to help. The dog is now feeling trapped and cornered – a “wounded animal” – and misinterprets the friend’s attempts to help. The dog snaps at the friend’s hand who is trying to help. The BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) is a malfunction in the brain’s trapped or “cornered” animal area. Under stress, a seizure develops in that area. That’s why under stress, while raging, a borderline will say to him or herself: “Why am I doing this” – yet be unable to stop it. It’s a seizure – nerve cells firing inappropriately and out of control.
David: And the cause of Borderline Personality Disorder?
Dr Heller: The BPD has many causes including head trauma and brain infections, but it appears that emotional hurts literally damage the brain. Most likely the brain’s support cells – the 90% of brain cells called “glial cells” – are damaged by traumas, causing the person to overreact to stress once puberty strikes. During puberty the brain’s limbic system goes into “overdrive” and adolescents are at their highest risk of seizures in their lifetime. “Sticks and stones may break my bones…but names cause brain damage.” So does incest, abuse, severe trauma, head injuries, attention deficit disorder, and other causes.
David: From my understanding, one of the biggest difficulties facing individuals who have BPD is maintaining stable relationships. This is a great cause of consternation for those people who are on the other side of the relationship. What causes this?
Dr Heller: There are a number of problems. The three most significant are 1) inappropriate mood swings; 2) misinterpretation of motives; and 3) remembering those misinterpreted motives as real. Oftentimes self-fulfilling prophecies occur, and self-hate eventually leads to a significant other coming to the same conclusion – that the individual isn’t worth being with.
…
janet: Would you please tell us more about the self-hate characteristic and how that damages the BPD or his/her relationships?
Dr Heller: Much of it comes from self-destructive behaviors that are used to stop the horrible pain of dysphoria; anxiety, rage, depression and despair. When an individual behaves out-of-control, in a manner that’s inconsistent with their beliefs or normal choices, terrible self-hate develops. Additionally many individuals had low self-esteem and related problems since childhood and are in an environment that causes self-hate to flourish.
crazy32810: How is self-injury related to BPD?
Dr Heller: We all injure ourselves to stop noxious neurological sensations. Interestingly we do it in a linear manner, ripping the skin. A common noxious neurological sensation is the toxins released with an insect bite. BPD dysphoria is about as bad as it gets. The pain is horrible. Many individuals have broken major bones and declared the pain of the fracture was nowhere as severe as dysphoria. When an individual with the BPD discovers that self-mutilation, or other techniques of self injury, work to temporarily stop the pain of dysphoria – they’ll do what it takes to stop it. This is no different than the individual with a fracture wants pain medication. I broke my shoulder last December and I tried to deal with it without taking narcotics. I was foolish and wrong. The pain was so bad it needed to be treated medically. Once individuals with the BPD have their chronic symptoms stabilized, and have safe medication options that work for dysphoria, the self-destructive patterns are no longer needed to stop their pain.
One of my twitter followers posted the original Daily Star article about Amy Winehouse and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Of course, I’d had Amy on my Celebrities with Possible BPD list for many years. If you want to read all of my articles about Amy Winehouse click here. I have no idea why the title includes ‘Mental Illness’ in quotes. Maybe it was because they were quoting the relative or maybe it brings up the question as to whether BPD is an actual mental illness. Here is the text of the article (and my comments below):
TRAGIC AMY WINEHOUSE HAD ‘MENTAL ILLNESS’
TROUBLED Amy Winehouse suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness, a relative has revealed.
The talented soul singer could have been struck down by the little-known Borderline Personality Disorder.
Sufferers have feelings of anger, emptiness, shame and guilt and become emotionally volatile.
And it can also push them into substance abuse and eating disorders, both of which Amy succumbed to.
Yesterday a member of the Back To Black star’s family said: “It was never diagnosed, because unfortunately she would never agree to a proper diagnosis.
“I’m not an expert, but from what I’ve read on Borderline Personality Disorder it kind of fitted with her.”
Meanwhile Amy’s dad Mitch, 61, said he wished his daughter, who died in July aged 27, had sought counselling.
He said: “She never stopped trying.
“She hated the way she was when she was drunk and when she was ill.
“And you know, the way I look at it, she died trying.
“She didn’t give up. She died trying to make her- self better.”
This article, although short, points out several interesting things about people with BPD. Since there’s no guarantee she had it, I’m going to generalize a bit. First of all, it is tragic that BPD is “little known” because it is much more prevalent than bipolar disorder. The article says: “Sufferers have feelings of anger, emptiness, shame and guilt and become emotionally volatile. And it can also push them into substance abuse and eating disorders, both of which Amy succumbed to.” This is very true. A person in extreme emotional pain will do anything to stop the pain. The article ends with “She died trying to make her- self better.” I’d like to amend that statement to “She died trying to make feel her-self better.” That’s the nature of the disorder and that’s what many non-BPDs do not understand. It’s all about his/her feelings (IAAHF) and not about controlling, manipulating or calling for attention.
| List Price: |
$13.98 USD |
| New From: |
$9.27 In Stock |
| Used from: |
$7.99 In Stock |
Release date December 6, 2011.
|
|
An article from pain.org regarding BPD, emotional lability and Opiate Abuse:
The medical borderline: personality characteristics that promote increased risk of opioid misuse
Geralyn Datz, Melissa Bonnell, Toni Merkey, Todd Sitzman
Forrest General Hospital, Hattiesburg, MS, USA,
University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg, MS, USA, Advanced Pain Therapy, PLLC, Hattiesburg, MS, USA
Purpose
 Opiate Abuse Undiagnosed or untreated psychiatric comorbidities may contribute to medication misuse. In particular, personality disorders may place patients at risk for medical nonadherence, via negative coping styles. Patients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) utilize medical services more frequently than those without BPD and are less likely to adhere to medical regimens. Patients with borderline traits have greater incidences of risky behavior, including abuse of prescription medications. We examined a large outpatient sample of chronic pain patients being screened for appropriateness of long-term opioid therapy in order to determine correlations between high-risk behaviors and personality type.
Method
Participants were 96 patients who were assessed in an outpatient pain management program. Participants were administered the Millon Behavioral Medicine Diagnostic (MBMD), which measures psychosocial assets and liabilities that affect treatment response, and the Screener and Opioid Assessment for Patients with Pain – Revised (SOAPP-R), which is a measure designed to predict aberrant medication-related behavior. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to evaluate which psychiatric indicators of the MBMD would predict total SOAPP-R score. Each analysis adjusted for age, gender, duration of pain, and number of pain sites.
Results
Hierarchical regression analysis was used to evaluate which psychiatric indicators of the MBMD would predict total SOAPP-R score. Each analysis adjusted for age, gender, duration of pain, and number of pain sites. Model 1 included demographic variables, duration of pain, and number of pain sites, F(5,91)=5.81, P<.001. Overall, the model explained 24.2% of the variance in SOAPP-R scores. Results indicated that age and number of pain sites significantly predicted SOAPP-R score. Model 2 added the psychiatric indicators of the MBMD. Overall, Model 2 explained 42.7% of the variance in SOAPP-R scores, F(5,91)=6.42, P<.001. Number of pain sites and emotional lability significantly predicted SOAPP-R score over other psychiatric indicators.
Conclusions
Identifying “at-risk” patients for opioid misuse has significant importance in today’s climate of increased scrutiny towards pain medications. These findings suggest personality assessment serves as an effective adjunct to risk stratification. Personality factors such as emotional lability and traits of borderline personality may increase opioid misuse potential. Clinical interview, history taking, and psychological assessment are valid ways pain specialists can assess personality. Prescribing strategies such as prescreening, close monitoring, limit setting, inclusion of psychological support can mitigate risk. Personality traits are key factors that may contribute to aberrant behavior and are of importance to prescribers of opioid regimens.
Physical pain and intense feelings of social rejection “hurt” in the same way, a new study shows.
I would imagine that for people with BPD this physical pain would be even more painful…
Study Illuminates the ‘Pain’ of Social Rejection
 Rejection and Pain ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2011) — Physical pain and intense feelings of social rejection “hurt” in the same way, a new study shows.
The study demonstrates that the same regions of the brain that become active in response to painful sensory experiences are activated during intense experiences of social rejection.
“These results give new meaning to the idea that social rejection ‘hurts’,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross, lead author of the article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “On the surface, spilling a hot cup of coffee on yourself and thinking about how rejected you feel when you look at the picture of a person that you recently experienced an unwanted break-up with may seem to elicit very different types of pain.
“But this research shows that they may be even more similar than initially thought.”
Kross, an assistant professor at the U-M Department of Psychology and faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR), conducted the study with U-M colleague Marc Berman, Columbia University’s Walter Mischel and Edward Smith, also affiliated with the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and with Tor Wager of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
While earlier research has shown that the same brain regions support the emotionally distressing feelings that accompany the experience of both physical pain and social rejection, the current study is the first known to establish that there is neural overlap between both of these experiences in brain regions that become active when people experience painful sensations in their body.
These regions are the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula.
For the study, the researchers recruited 40 people who experienced an unwanted romantic break-up within the past six months, and who indicated that thinking about their break-up experience led them to feel intensely rejected. Each participant completed two tasks in the study — one related to their feelings of rejection and the other to sensations of physical pain. Continue reading Study Illuminates the Pain of Social Rejection →
A while back I received a comment on the article Four Reasons Bipolar is Accepted and Borderline Personality Disorder is Not that was apparently re-posted on a forum for people with BPD. It turns out that many of the people with BPD identified with this comment (more than my post actually). So, I thought I’d re-post this comment as a blog post so that people can read it (in a highlighted sort of way):
I do not think that lying and manipulation are part of this diagnosis. If they seem to be present, look either to another PD or to shame and anxiety as the cause, along with a long history of learning to never overtly state what you needed to be okay, or to express how rotten you felt, as the consequences always seemed to be much worse…
Sometimes it seems as if people hate those that are dx BPD precisely because they haven’t quite gone off the deep end for good. It’s bewildering how many professionals seem to resent them for this too.
They may curl up in a fetal position for hours, but then they will struggle out of bed and go on. They smile at us, while their inner world self-destructs. They might seem as alive as anyone, but -in the best of times- they feel dead inside; and as intelligent and gifted as many of them are, they never realize their full potential. But they would rather die than admit this to the outside world.
Who would today be dx’d BPD? Vincent Van Gogh, Kafka, Proust, Nathanial West, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison…
It’s ironic that they are so often seen as “emotional” when what they lack is a full nuanced range of emotions. Inner tension keeps anxiety coiled, emotionally stressful situations release it, and before they have a chance to think through what they feel, they are overwhelmed by fear and anger and despair. They get mired in their negativity. Studies have shown that those with BPD do not get angry more often than anyone else, but they have trouble leaving it behind when they do. And afterwards they drown in remorse, because these reactions are NOT felt to be syntonic. No one seems to pay much attention to this, but all other “personality disorders” are understood to be PD’s because they are syntonic with the personality. This is radically different in BPD.
That right there should raise lots of doubts about what this dx is. Is it part of the affective disorder spectrum? Is a akin to partial seizures in frontal lobe epilepsy? Is it a developmental disorder akin to autism? This is all possible, and perhaps BPD is a dx given to many different people who do not share underlying causes. This should at least stop us from quickly claiming that they CHOSE to feel the way they do. As if they were hell bent on living in hell…
When they do awkwardly, fearfully, try to communicate this pain, when they do reach out for help, they generally do so when their psyche is at it’s most shattered. They will quickly learn that their behavior is not acceptable to anyone. So they’ll go through DBT or through some other behavioral therapy, and sink into so much shame and guilt that lo and behold they will no longer qualify on the DSM for BPD; they will have learned to suffer in silence and to isolate (if they haven’t before – many of those with BPD will never consult a therapist in their lifetime and go through life pretty much invisible), learned to not bother anyone, but the dysthymia, the insomnia, and the dysphoria will still be there, eroding their lives, their aliveness. And as hard as they try, fear will still strike them out of the blue when they least expect it. As hard as they try, they will still plummet down into misery with the least negative emotion. Skinless creatures, they can not tune out human suffering, they can do nothing about the heightened sensitivity that they were born with. Only now no one will know. And so hopefully, thankfully, no one will ever call them “Borderline” again.
People with BPD are in a great deal of emotional pain. Since emotions are immediate and primal, emotional pain is also immediate and primal. As I have said, emotions represent a land-bridge between the body and the mind. Emotional pain manifests itself in both mental and physical ways. If you have ever been depressed or “fraught with grief” over the loss of something or someone important to you, you will know what I am saying in this regard.
Depression and grief can be a trying experience for anyone. You feel pain in every area of your body and mind. Sometimes you will just want to retreat to your bedroom and go to sleep for hours, just to get some relief from the physical and mental anguish you feel. The sleep represents a distraction of both the mind and the body from the experience of complete pain. You might also use alcohol to relieve the pain by “turning off your mind.” Many people “drink themselves into a stupor” and, in doing so, extinguish the pain for a short period. Pain-killers, whether over-the-counter or prescription, can also remove pain by working on the pain at its source (in the brain where pain is actually felt). Once, when I was asked by one of my daughters about how the Tylenol knew to go to her foot (which was in pain), rather than to her head (because she’d taken it for headaches before), I explained that it acts in the brain where she feels the pain, not where the pain actually “is.” In the case of emotional pain, the pain seems to be both in the body and in the mind, but the pain-feeling area of the brain is where these drugs act. See below about substance abuse.
People with BPD are likely to feel emotional pain many times a day every day. Since these emotions are basic (like fear, sadness and anger) the reactions to them are both physical and mental. These emotional pain-states are powerful and have the ability to overpower rational thinking. When you are in pain, regardless of the source, the main reaction of the body and mind is to get out of or to relieve the pain as soon as possible and by whatever means necessary. I used the example of someone who is literally on fire. This person will try to douse the flames in any way, without thinking about the people around her and what harm may come to others if the flames spread. This situation is analogous to a person in deep emotional pain. The person will do anything to stop the pain, which is why my Internet site and Internet list are called “anything to stop the pain” (ATSTP). This “anything” includes self-destructive and relationship-damaging behaviors. Continue reading Ask Bon: Why does my loved one with BPD do such dangerous things? (like cutting, drugs, etc.) →
With a debt of u-opiods and over active u-opiod receptors, could this be the first medication for BPD? I am not a doctor yet when I saw this on twitter I immediately thought of Borderline Personality Disorder:
Extended-Release Opioid Gets FDA OK
By Emily P. Walker, Washington Correspondent, MedPage Today
Reviewed by August 26, 2011 Review
WASHINGTON — The FDA has approved tapentadol (Nucynta), an extended-release oral opioid, to treat severe chronic pain.
The agency first approved the drug for relief of moderate to severe acute pain in 2008. Friday’s approval is for an extended-release pill that chronic pain patients can take twice daily.
The approval is based on a randomized, double-blind, controlled phase III study that tested tapentadol as a treatment for moderate to severe low-back pain and diabetic peripheral neuropathy.
Safety was evaluated in 1,100 patients with moderate to severe chronic pain over a one-year period. The drug was found to be safe and effective, according to the company that makes tapentadol, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a unit of Johnson & Johnson.
Tapentadol was also well-tolerated, the company said. Opioids can cause a number of side effects, including constipation, that may cause patients to discontinue their use.
A 2010 phase III study comparing the drug to oxycodone in patients with painful knee osteoarthritis found that tapentadol provided effective pain relief with fewer of the gastrointestinal side effects seen with oxycodone.
“Chronic pain is difficult to manage, and even with the treatments available today, it can be a challenge to balance pain relief with a patient’s ability to tolerate the medicine,” Sunil Panchal, MD, president of National Institute of Pain, said in a press release from Janssen. “People with chronic pain will continue to need additional options, so an approval like this is welcome news for this community and the people who suffer from this often debilitating condition.”
The approval also comes with a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS), similar those approved for other opioids, meant to educate prescribers about the potential of abuse, misuse, overdose, and addiction with extended-release tapentadol.
The CDC estimates that 42 million Americans over the age of 20 suffer from chronic pain.
Here is a quote from Infinite Jest about “depression” or the “Great White Shark of Pain”. I think it helps illustrate the difference between the chronically depressed and those in emotional agony. I see that people with borderline personality disorder are more likely to be in the second category. I have bolded some key points here. The “suicide contract” is exactly the same as a “behavior contract”. With a person in this much pain, it ain’t gonna work.
That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this depression clinical depression or involuntary depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton’s melancholia or Yevtuschenko’s more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.
It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain [(the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around)], a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.
The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who’s being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who’s not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnosis can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it’s a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death suddenly seems more appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who jump from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
But and so the idea of a person in the grip of It being bound by a ‘Suicide Contract’ some well-meaning Substance-abuse halfway house makes her sign is simply absurd. Because such a contract will constrain such a person only until the exact psychic circumstances that made the contract necessary in the first place assert themselves, invisibly and indescribably. That the well-meaning halfway house Staff does not understand Its overriding terror will only make the depressed resident feel more alone.
By (author) David Foster Wallace
| List Price: |
$17.99 USD |
| New From: |
$8.84 In Stock |
| Used from: |
$8.71 In Stock |
|
|
|
Article about a University of Missouri swimmer who committed suicide. She had BPD. Sad, sad.
Missouri swimmer’s suicide might draw attention to disorder
By DAVID BRIGGS
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Sasha Menu Courey loved college life at Missouri.
She was a swimmer with Olympic ambitions but rarely missed a chance to set free a laugh so booming that it seemed to rattle the ceiling of teammates a floor below at Johnston Hall. The sophomore greeted friends — everybody counted as one — as if they were just the person she was hoping to see.
“It was always, ‘Heyyy!’ ” said MU swimmer Caitlin Connor, who met Menu Courey before a home football game their freshman year when she and her roommate from 233 Johnston searched out the source of the bursting cheer in Room 333. “She would talk to you like she had known you her whole life.”
In the classroom, Menu Courey earned a 4.0 GPA her first semester and was already planning for graduate school. The aspiring psychologist had lined up a prestigious internship this summer researching treatment for alcoholism.
“Everything she touched,” said her mother, Lynn Courey, “she was doing great.”
But this spring, Menu Courey fell into the grip of an illness she had kept hidden from the world.
Menu Courey committed suicide June 17 in a suburban Boston hospital. She was 20.
When a series of events one friend described as the “perfect storm” reached a crest, she slipped into a deep depression from which she would never escape.
Menu Courey left the team on March 21. She spent the next 10 days under watch and treatment at the MU Psychiatric Center, where her parents said she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, an illness characterized by extreme emotional instability.
Lynn flew in from the family’s Toronto home to be with her daughter when she was released. By then, however, she said she no longer recognized Sasha. Though Sasha often put on a cheerful front to keep friends and family from worrying, she bore an emotional pain too great to endure.
“We have difficulty understanding, as well, what happened,” Lynn said. “My daughter really had a great will to live, and suddenly she had a will to die.”
Now, Menu Courey’s family is celebrating a life that brought joy to so many while searching for answers and striving to raise awareness of a disorder they knew little about until it was too late. Continue reading Missouri swimmer’s suicide might draw attention to disorder →
|
Loading ...
