What Can We Do About Borderline Personality Disorder?

What we got wrong, what we know but aren’t saying and what we can do from now.

Photo by J W on Unsplash

To be diagnosed with BPD, you need to have 5 out of 9 traits. At least, that’s what you’re told. The folks who decided on the 5/9 criteria left out crucial information on their decision-making process — that the number is completely arbitrary.

And so begins this deep dive of what we’ve got wrong about BPD, what we know but don’t seem to be telling anyone and what we can do to remedy this. Buckle up.

What We Got Terribly Wrong

1. We called it Borderline Personality Disorder

Back in the primitive days of Psychology, Emil Kraepelin — a famous German Psychiatrist — produced a definitive map of mental illness. It was decided that there was simply Neurosis or Psychosis, and everything lay between these polarities. To put it even more explicitly: you had the remarkable choice of Paranoia or Schizophrenia.

Borderline Personality was smack-bang in the middle, hence “Borderline”, people who…