Borderline Personality Disorder

Filmmaker Ida Storm Wants to Change the Face of Borderline Personality Disorder

Forget Winona in ‘Girl, Interrupted’. The young Norwegian spent years recording her own struggle with the illness on video, resulting in the eye-opening documentary ‘Being Ida.’

Filmmaker Ida Storm Wants to Change the Face of Borderline Personality Disorder

by Zing Tsjeng OCT 9, 2015 12:05 PM

Forget Winona in ‘Girl, Interrupted’. The young Norwegian spent years recording her own struggle with the illness on video, resulting in the eye-opening documentary ‘Being Ida.’

When I was at school, there was one easy and convenient way to diss someone’s choice of girlfriend. “Oh, I don’t know about her,” you’d say casually, “she’s a little borderline.” Reared on portrayals of bunny-boiling Glen Close in Fatal Attraction or Winona Ryder in Girl, Interrupted, a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder was easy shorthand for mean teens to dismiss anybody who didn’t fit the usual norms of 15-year-old girl behavior.

Real life is a lot different from the movies. Borderline personality disorder (or BPD, for short) is one of the most misunderstood mental illnesses out there—and it afflicts far more women than men, with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders stating that it is “diagnosed predominantly (about 75%) in females.”

Ida Storm wants to change that. The young Norwegian was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder over eight years ago, but had first started self-harming—a behavior closely associated with the condition—when she was 10. In the throes of her illness, the 28-year-old picked up a handheld video camera and started recording her days and moods, which swooped from great highs to terrifying lows. “I am [a] hopeless, insane, brain-damaged ex-junkie,” she informs her camera at one point.

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