Borderline
The Biography of a Personality Disorder
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
An intimate, compassionate, and expansive portrait of Borderline Personality Disorder that rejects the conventional wisdom that this condition is untreatable, told by a psychologist who specializes in BPD
Mental illness is heavily stigmatized within our society, and within this already marginalized group, folks with BPD are deemed especially untreatable and hopeless. When, as a graduate student, Alex Kriss first began working as a therapist in the field, his supervisors warned him that borderline patients were manipulative, difficult, and had a tendancy to drop out of treatment. Yet, years later, when Kriss was establishing his private practice and a borderline patient known as Ana came to his office, he felt compelled to try to help her, despite all of the warnings he’d heard.
Borderline is the story of his work with Ana—how his successes with her led him to open his doors to other BPD patients and advocate for them. Borderline is also the story of the disorder itself: Kriss traces accounts of the condition going back to antiquity, showing how this disease has been known by many names over the millennia, most of them gendered: possession, hysteria, witchcraft, moral insanity. All referred to a person—usually a woman—whose behavior and personality were seen as fractured, unstable, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. Kriss guides us through this history up through the emergence of psychotherapy, the development of the modern diagnosis, and attitudes toward treatment today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Borderline personality disorder, defined today as a "pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity," was misunderstood long before its 1980 addition to the DSM, contends Fordham University assistant psychology professor Kriss (The Gaming Mind) in this stimulating study. According to the author, the disorder has remained elusive partly because of the medical establishment's reluctance to acknowledge links between societal power imbalances, trauma, and mental illness. Meanwhile, BPD's prevalence in women—who represent roughly 75% of diagnoses—further drove its stigmatization. Kriss details how the condition is unfairly typified in popular culture by "wild, promiscuous people... who abuse substances, threaten suicide and fly into rages," when for many, the borderline experience is a subtler, "chameleon-like" one, and often leads sufferers to slip through the cracks of established diagnostic and treatment practices. While the history of the disorder's "status as an outlier" from fifth century BCE to 1885 (before the birth of psychoanalysis) is dispatched in a single, breakneck chapter, on the whole this is an enterprising and in-depth exploration of who decides what it means to be ill, how mental illness is framed in cultural narratives, and who gets shut out of those narratives. It's an ambitious reassessment of an understudied condition.
