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It’s time to reject the notion that people with personality disorders are beyond help
It’s time to reject the notion that people with personality disorders are beyond help, writes Peter Aldhous FENELLA Lemonsky was 15 when her life disintegrated. She had never been a happy child, but things went from bad to worse in adolescence. Her family had relocated from South Africa to London a few years earlier and she found it impossible to make friends. “I was having mood problems, I was binge-eating and I didn’t know what was happening to me,” Lemonsky recalls. “I would overdose and go to Accident and Emergency. Eventually, I spent time in various psychiatric hospitals, but they didn’t know how to treat me.” Lemonsky had to wait…
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Ask Bon: How do I get my borderline loved one in therapy? What’s the best kind of therapy? How long will it take to cure them?
Q: How do I get my borderline loved one in therapy? What’s the best kind of therapy? How long will it take to cure them? A: Unless your borderline loved one is a minor or you have a court order, you can’t force anyone into therapy. Therapy must be a choice of the person that needs it. It will probably be much more effective if the person with BPD chooses to go to therapy. Yet, therapy is not like sending your car in for repairs. It’s not as if you send the person in to therapy, he/she gets a new part and comes out fixed. That’s not the way therapy…
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Turning the Mind around Social Situations
My emotionally sensitive daughter has been having a problem with one of her long-time friends. This friend has decided to start hanging out with the “popular” girls in school. Unfortunately, these “popular” girls are also the ones that are dating older boys and using substances (alcohol, pot). My daughter doesn’t like these other girls and doesn’t want to be their friend or be involved with them. The problem is that my daughter is taking this “break” personally. She believes that she did something that made this friend “leave her”. OK, so what do you do? I believe the only way to address this situation is to help my daughter “turn…
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BPD: What’s the Cost?
In a recent article/review of Borderline Personality Disorder treatment options and management methodologies, the author quotes the Dr. John Gunderson in the New England Journal of Medicine May 26 issue: “…BPD is present in about 6% of primary care patients and persons in community-based samples and in 15 to 20% of patients in psychiatric hospitals and outpatient clinics,” writes John G. Gunderson, MD, from the Psychosocial and Personality Research Program, McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. “Patients with BPD usually enter treatment facilities after suicide attempts or after episodes of deliberate self-injury. Such episodes result in an average hospital stay of 6.3 days per year and nearly 1 emergency room visit…
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Simon Baron-Cohen discusses empathy and the science of evil
Simon Baron-Cohen has been giving interviews about his new book The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty in which he discusses “mind-blindness” in autism and the lack of empathy in other disorders, including BPD. Here is the text of the interview he gave to Time magazine. I have added emphasis on the part that I find most “telling” about BPD. I have to disagree though that people with BPD have zero empathy. They can behave that way at times, but people with BPD can exhibit a lot of empathy and compassion when their motivation is not IAAHF, pain avoidance or threat reaction. When their emotions become…
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Can therapy actually hurt borderlines?
A brief but detailed excerpt from the article “Progress in the treatment of borderline personality disorder” by Bateman and Fonagy indicating that some traditional approaches to therapy with borderlines can be harmful to the borderline: IATROGENESIS, PSYCHOTHERAPY AND BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER Pharmacological studies routinely explore the potential harm that a well-intentioned treatment may cause. In the case of psychosocial treatments we all too readily assume that at worst such treatments are inert. However, there may be particular disorders where psychotherapy represents a significant risk to the patient. Whatever the mechanisms of therapeutic change might be, traditional psychotherapeutic approaches depend for their effectiveness on the capacity of the individual to consider…