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Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me
In 1996 the artist Bobby Baker was diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder. Her subsequent struggle to overcome severe mental and later physical illness lasted for 11 years, and was unknown to anyone outside her close family, friends and colleagues. The 158 drawings and watercolours in this book, selected by Bobby from the hundreds more that she created daily as a private way of coming to terms with her experience, are an astonishing record of her slow and harrowing journey to eventual recovery. Moving, startling, shocking and hilarious in turn, these diary drawings reveal the stark realities of living with mental illness and of society’s lack of understanding. No…
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Understanding Emotional Agony Through David Foster Wallace’s Eyes
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…
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Some post-Valentine’s BPDish poetry
Something I stumbled across over the weekend. Talk about “I Hate You. Don’t Leave Me!” Emotional Idiot Maggie Estep I’m an Emotional Idiot so get away from me. I mean, COME HERE. Wait, no, that’s too close, give me some space it’s a big country, there’s plenty of room, don’t sit so close to me. Hey, where are you? I haven’t seen you in days. Whadya, having an affair? Who is she? Come on, aren’t I enough for you? God, You’re so cold. I never know what you’re thinking. You’re not very affectionate. I mean, you’re clinging to me, DON’T TOUCH ME, what am I, your fucking cat? Don’t rub…
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What’s wrong with Jim Carroll?
Alrighty then… this has little to do with my subject (BPD), but I stumbled across a picture on wikipedia yesterday of Jim Carroll. I was writing a post on the ATSTP List about tough love. I will follow up here more on the tough love idea shortly, but I wanted to show how boundaries can be used in tough love, and about how those boundaries are for YOU, not for your loved one. In other words you have to enforce those boundaries for yourself. Boundaries are choices about what YOU will and will not do for/with/about your life and your loved ones. The best example of tough love that I…
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David Foster Wallace and Toxic Self-Consciousness
It was extremely sad to see that David Foster Wallace killed himself last month. He was a talented writer and an excellent observer of the human condition. Apparently, he suffered from major depression and had ceased his medications. Really sad. I was reading an article about him in the current issue of Rolling Stone and found a quote that summarizes my attitudes toward people with BPD’s view of themselves. I’m not saying Wallace had BPD – I really don’t know enough about him to say – but this view of oneself encapsulates the deep feeling of shame that accompanies BPD: There’s good self-consciousness, and then there’s toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-Bedouins self-consciousness.…