Borderline Personality Disorder

Things You Only Know: If you have a borderline personality disorder

My emotional state can change very quickly, pushing me from euphoric happiness to crushing despair within the space of a few hours.

Things You Only Know: If you have a borderline personality disorder

THE DEBRIEF: YOU’LL EXPERIENCE EXTREME EMOTIONS AND MAY GO THROUGH PERIODS WHERE YOU TOTALLY LOSE TOUCH WITH REALITY…

I’m lying in a hospital bed and I have little memory of how I got there. I sit up and suddenly realise that I have my second year university exams in a matter of weeks. The panic hits me. I have to revise. I have to do well. What am I doing here? I remember a blur of booze and pills and tears. I reach for the tube in my wrist and I start pulling it out. I’m pulling and pulling and there seems to be yards of tubing inside me. I finally get it all out and the hospital bed is soaked in blood. I get dressed, blood staining the arm of my coat. I run out of the hospital, get on the bus and go back to my flat to revise.

Borderline Personality Disorder is a mental illness that manifests itself in a range of distressing symptoms and abnormal behaviours. It’s been recently recognised as a disorder of mood that affects how the sufferer is able to relate to other people – if you have BPD, you’ll experience extreme emotions and may go through periods where you totally lose touch with reality. Between 60% and 70% of BPD sufferers will attempt suicide at some point during their lives – which is a terrifying though for me.

Your emotions get really crazy

When I’m explaining BPD to people for the first time, I usually describe it as having overwhelming emotions that are very difficult to deal with. My emotional state can change very quickly, pushing me from euphoric happiness to crushing despair within the space of a few hours. My feelings always seem completely valid to me, when they usually aren’t grounded in reality at all. After a perfectly nice evening with friends, I might still go home and burst into tears because I feel like I said all the wrong things and none of the people I was with really liked me. I have to trust my partner when he tells me that my assessment of the situation isn’t correct, and my feelings aren’t rational. My emotions can feel like huge waves breaking over me, knocking the wind out of my chest and pushing me underwater.

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