Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline personality disorder and the substance abuse | addiction connection explained. The importance of understanding is, in part, due to the role mental illness plays as one of the five key risk factors for developing an addiction.
Often people who suffer from a mental illness, such as borderline personality disorder, also suffer from substance abuse and/or drug addiction or alcoholism. This is because abusing the substance helps numb their pain, frustration, angst, despair, and the list goes on. For as with a drug or alcohol addiction, a mental illness causes brain changes — brain changes that make it impossible to think “straight.” And as with having a mental illness, it is the stigma, misinformation, fear, and confusion that keeps people with a drug or alcohol addiction stuck in the thought/behavioral loops of brain changes caused by the brain disease of addiction; it is what prevents them from getting the diagnosis and thereby the treatment they need for their specific brain illnesses; treatment that will again, make their lives worth living; their lives something filled with joy — the same situation that occurs for individuals with undiagnosed, untreated borderline personality disorder or another mental illness.
I’d like to share this clip of a talk by Amanda Wang, who is the lead organizer of RethinkBPD, a peer-led advocacy and support group for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Ms. Wang participated in a lecture series on BPD at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She shared her personal experience in coping with BPD as well as the objectives of RethinkBPD.
What Ms. Wang has to say deals with her horrific experiences trying to live/cope with undiagnosed, untreated BPD and the changes in her life for the good once her mental illness was finally diagnosed and specific treatment initiated. What she has to say about this is often true for those who suffer from the undiagnosed, untreated disease of alcoholism and/or drug addiction. For what especially resonated for me was Ms. Wang’s plea, “Teach me how to live. ” That is what addiction recovery is all about, as well. Teaching the brain new neural networks; new ways of “thinking;” rewiring the brain.
Lisa Frederiksen
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If you can watch this without tears welling up in your eyes, you’re not human.
I so agree with you, Joyce. Thank you for adding your comment!
I’m typing through my tears despite the fact that I’ve been the target of a BPD for years. I’ve been broken by him emotionally, physically and financially. He kept from my kids for months because of his false allegations of abuse, arrested after false allegation of domestic battery, alienated me from my kids, family and friends, damaged my kids badly, and so much more. But here I am, crying for him. Seeing this because I’m doing days of research to gather in an attempt to make the court get him help before he becomes another victim of bpd. Furious now not only at the broken family court system but now also at the medical community that has failed him by having the facts needed to diagnose but failed to do so. Not because they missed it, but because it’s potential trouble for them? Shame on them. Can I ask what she meant in the clip when she said Heather’s diagnosis was withheld? That’s heartbreaking
I’m so sorry to hear all that you’ve been and are going through, Denise. I don’t know what she meant by that comment in the film – perhaps there’s a way you can contact her directly?? I wish you all the best, Lisa