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Bipolar Is Not Contagious (neither is Borderline)
When telling anyone that you have a severe mental illness, whether it be Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, Schizoaffective or even Borderline Personality Disorder, they automatically assume you are crazy and they want nothing to do with you. Bipolar Is Not Contagious By REBECCA MOORE ~ 2 min read I can remember as a child not having very many friends. People avoided me right from the beginning of my life. Even my own parents and my brother. They knew something was just a bit off, a bit different and they wanted no part of whatever it was. Had I been given parents who weren’t so ignorant to mental illness, maybe at a…
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Ask a Psychiatrist: How Does Silver Linings Playbook Handle Mental Illness?
Ask a Psychiatrist: How Does Silver Linings Playbook Handle Mental Illness? By Gwynne Watkins It’s to be expected that one (or both) of a romantic comedy’s protagonists will go a little crazy in some way. Silver Linings Playbook takes things a step further: Bradley Cooper’s character, Pat, is newly released from a mental hospital, and his romantic foil Tiffany (played by Jennifer Lawrence) is battling her own demons. Neither, however, has the typical Hollywood version of mental illness, i.e. “My second personality is a prostitute with a Cockney accent!” Pat’s bipolar disorder and Tiffany’s unnamed condition manifest themselves in ways that are realistically, even heartbreakingly mundane; Tiffany texts relative strangers…
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8 Genetically Distinct Disorders Linked to Schizophrenia
Recent findings conducted by a team of researchers at Washington University of School of Medicine now suggest that schizophrenia can be linked to eight genetically distinct disorders that have their own unique symptoms. “Genes don’t operate by themselves. They function in concert much like an orchestra, and to understand how they’re working, you have to know not just who the members of the orchestra are but how they interact,” said C. Robert Cloninger, MD, PhD, one of the study’s senior investigators, in a news release. “What we’ve done here, after a decade of frustration in the field of psychiatric genetics, is identify the way genes interact with each other, how…
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Why Borderlines are NOT Psychopaths
I have often heard Non-BPDs (or family and friends of those with borderline personality disorder – BPD) refer to their borderlines as “psychopaths”. There was the semi-famous story of the divorced husband who was running a blog called “the psycho ex-wife” (read more about that saga here) which had an “arm chair” diagnosis of this man’s ex-wife as having BPD. While she may or may not have BPD, the reference to the word “psycho” is a misnomer. There are several BIG differences between borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. One of the most important is the function of the amygdala – an almond shaped structure in the mid-brain that activates when…
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Emotion regulation strategies distinguish borderline, bipolar II
Outpatients with borderline personality disorder scored “significantly higher than those with [bipolar II] on a number of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies, including difficulty controlling impulsive behaviors. Emotion regulation strategies distinguish borderline, bipolar II By: KAREN BLUM, Clinical Psychiatry News Digital Network Borderline personality disorder and bipolar II disorder share some common features, but the illnesses can be distinguished by patients’ differences in emotion regulation strategies and perceptions of how their parents raised them, according to a report published online in the Journal of Affective Disorders. Forty-eight psychiatric outpatients, half with borderline personality disorder and half with bipolar II, were recruited by Kathryn Fletcher of the University of New South Wales,…
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Happy Victimization: Emotion Dysregulation in The Context of Instrumental, Proactive Aggression
How the role of attachment, amygdala response and the mirror neuron system play out in aggression types in BPD and Psychopathy Here is a snip from a very interesting blog post by William Lu, who was a graduate student in psychology when he wrote it in 2010: I recently read a fascinating book chapter written by William Arsenio titled Happy Victimization: Emotion Dysregulation in The Context of Instrumental, Proactive Aggression. Early in the chapter, the author discussed how according to a study, 4-year-old children tended to predict that a bully would feel happy after pushing around some poor chump on the playground, aka happy victimization (Arsenio & Kramer, 1992). However, at age…