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When it’s all about your feelings and what you can do
Participate in a Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) group, where one is taught the four effective stress-reducing skills of distress tolerance, mindfulness, emotion regulation and interpersonal effectiveness. You will learn to cope better. Vital Signs: It is all about me, actually (link) By CLAIRE HUTCHINSON AND TIMOTHY CAMPBELL Let’s face it: We all get stressed sometimes, but why does stress seem to affect some people more than others? Would you say that: » Others know what they are doing and you feel like you don’t? » Others don’t seem to be bothered by life’s little “zings?” » Others are moving toward something positive or away from something negative and you are…
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How 3 Days in The Psych Ward Saved My Life
I had been insecure about the way I looked at 20; now that I was pushing 40, I could only imagine how my slow physical decline would impact my already fragile self-esteem. I was scared—really scared. I had my addiction under control (as under control as I could have it) but my borderline personality disorder, my body dysmorphic disorder and my depression were taking a toll. An article by Amy Dresner from AlterNet: How 3 Days in The Psych Ward Saved My Life I had three-and-a-half years sober when I tried to kill myself by overdosing on Phenobarbital. It was the 4th of July and I’d joke later that I…
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Anxiety sensitivity and borderline personality disorder
Anxiety sensitivity, or the fear of becoming anxious, has been indicated as a factor in the occurrence of panic attacks for a long time. It is believed that many panic attacks are caused or intensified by the fear of anxiety, a self-perpetuating cycle that can eventually leave the sufferer house-bound in an effort to control their environment. New research indicates that anxiety sensitivity may also be indicated as a factor in the development of borderline personality disorder, or BPD. If this is the case, there may be new hope for treating this severe and destructive personality disorder. Anxiety sensitivity and borderline personality disorder: a newfound sympathy? (link) Anxiety sensitivity, or…
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Major Depressive Disorder and BPD
A little while ago, I posted an study about the over-lap between Major Depressive Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. The last sentence of this study was “In the meantime, the clinician treating major depressive disorder would be wise to assess for borderline personality disorder, even as currently defined.” That was because the study found a large correlation between the two disorders. Today, I was reviewing an article by Marsha Linehan called “Two-Year Randomized Controlled Trialand Follow-up of Dialectical Behavior Therapyvs Therapy by Experts for Suicidal Behaviorsand Borderline Personality Disorder” which I had planned to write something up about. I’ll have to do that later, but the reason these thoughts of MDD and BPD…
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Interesting Interview with Dr. Leland Heller about BPD
“Much of it comes from self-destructive behaviors that are used to stop the horrible pain of dysphoria; anxiety, rage, depression and despair. When an individual behaves out-of-control, in a manner that’s inconsistent with their beliefs or normal choices, terrible self-hate develops. Additionally many individuals had low self-esteem and related problems since childhood and are in an environment that causes self-hate to flourish.” – from the interview Bon: I found an interview with Dr. Leland Heller about Borderline Personality Disorder. He does a good job explaining the pain associated with the disorder… Here are some excerpts. The entire interview can be read here. Diagnosing Borderline Personality Disorder And Finding Treatment That…
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Love and Opium. Borderline Personality Disorder and pain-killers
In psychiatry we have a a whole recipe book of diagnoses called the DSM IV-TR, soon to be replaced by the DSM-V. The original DSM was derived from an army handbook used by psychiatrists in WWII, much of which was taken from handbooks developed by German psychiatrists from their observations in the late 19th century. The rest of the army handbook was derived from psychoanalytic thinking — the theories of Freud and his followers. In the DSM I (1952), there were two kinds of illnesses, for the most part, psychosis and neurosis. Psychotic illnesses were defined by a break from reality (as in paranoid or religious delusions in schizophrenia or…
