I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder with symptoms of anxiety and complex ptsd in July 2019. Those of you who know me this won’t come as a surprise but to most of you this is likely new. Which makes this even more scary for me. I have never been fully open and about my mental health before. Honestly because I was embarrassed. I wanted taboos to be smashed but other people to do the work. But not anymore. What finally prompted me to hit publish today though was seeing ‘Bullet Train’ at the cinema last week. In that film Borderline Personality Disorder was used as a joke to describe the baddy of the film. It played into every negative stereotype of the diagnosis and if I can do something to combat that then I will.

This is my moment to come out of the woodwork and hold my head up and say I am not ashamed of being ill and of struggling. I want to stop saving this post until I am ‘better’ because what does that even mean? This is not a tell all, there are bits of my story I am still not sharing because I am not ready. But my BPD diagnosis is a huge part of me and was genuinely life changing for me. I was to help reduce stigma, support others to feel less alone and help people to understand personality disorders a wee bit better.

Since my diagnosis I have become aware of how stigmatised and misunderstood BDP is. When I was diagnosed back in July 2019 I had never heard of Borderline Personality Disorders or any Personality Disorder for that matter. My diagnosis was actually quite a relief. Because before that point I just had a ‘depressive disorder’ loose diagnosis that had never really been discussed or assessed. What was my experience of being diagnosed with depression or ‘depressive disorder’ as the official diagnosis was? Well I was never told my diagnosis in person. No-one discussed it with me. It was just written on my prescription and my hospital discharge form as if it was as simple a fact as the date or my own name. No-one considered how I might be effected by that news. Honestly I was devastated and refused to accept it. I thought oh they just need something to write on the page.

But I didn’t think the symptoms were right and that scared me even more. I would spiral into thinking somehow I was creating a fake mental illness for attention because the ways I was behaving and feeling didn’t align with depression. So on the one hand I was panicking but on the other sliding even further into denial. I wasn’t ill, my symptoms didn’t fit and if I just could work harder and ‘man up’ then all would be well. Let me be clear this is never a successful strategy to beat mental health problems. It ended completely catastrophically for me and I hope more than anything if you only take one thing from this post it’s that your mental illness or mental health issues are not a result of a personal failing and can not be fixed purely by you beating yourself up about it and attempting to just try harder.

But to go back to my diagnosis story. As much as depression is a hugely debilitating illness to me it didn’t seem to explain what was going on in my head. My BPD diagnosis was a huge game changer for me. I had never heard of the condition before but it made sense of what I was experiencing and made me feel less odd. I also got much more helpful care. My diagnosis of BPD suddenly explained everything I was going through, it made sense of my symptoms and I could finally start healing. An advantage if not knowing about the diagnosis before hand was that I had no idea it was stigmatised. The team caring for me at the time of my diagnosis was very supportive. One of the first places I turned to for information about BPD was of course the NHS website which explains the four main symptoms of BPD are: The 4 areas are:

• emotional instability – the psychological term for this is “affective dysregulation”

• disturbed patterns of thinking or perception – “cognitive distortions” or “perceptual distortions”

• impulsive behaviour which is often harmful.

• intense but often unstable relationships with others. Feelings of rejection.

There were a few key factors in determining BPD was the diagnosis for me, as it wasn’t a decision made overnight (which is important as there is little benefit in rushing diagnosis). The first one was how rapidly by mood changed. In the space of a few seconds I could go from feeling pretty fine and stable to rock bottom depressed. It could feel like this huge wave of emotion I hadn’t seen coming would hit me and knock me off my feet. I was drowning in my own mind. I couldn’t think of anything other than the overwhelming emotion. The feeling would consume me. If it was a bad feeling I would do absolutely anything to free myself from it. If it was a good emotion I would ride such a high that when the feeling was over I fell off a cliff because I couldn’t regulate how I was feeling. That meant I would be scared of feeling good because of the crash that could come afterwards.

This is only part of the story though. Do not feel that all the symptoms are all that you are. You are more than your diagnosis. I am more than my diagnosis. You can have a full, happy, productive and loved life with BPD. When you first get diagnosed it can be scary the amount of difficult information there is out there. Don’t let that overwhelm you. You are still the same person you were. There are so many people out there with BPD who are living lives full of meaning. There is joy out there I promise.

Getting the diagnosis was life changing and helped a lot. But talk in the mental health community and amongst certain professional that should be supportive and welcoming has meant I have held back from completely publicly sharing my diagnosis for three whole years. On mental health Twitter recently I have been seeing a lot of really negative statements like ‘Everyone with BPD actually has cPTSD’…’BPD should be abolished as a diagnosis’…’BPD is just a label to give to patients people don’t want to treat’…’Personality disorders aren’t real’…Etc. I could go on. The BPD is just ptsd comment is very common. I know there is a big problem with autism being misdiagnosed. If that’s happened to you I am truly sorry. But both our experiences can be valid.

Please remember that there is a huge difference between challenging your own diagnosis and calling our problems with the diagnostic criteria and saying the condition shouldn’t exist. Because by doing that you are contributing to the negative stigma as well invalidating me and my whole experience. You are taking away my right to manage my own mental illness. This diagnosis fits my experience and I don’t want to loose it. It has been suggested that a compromise could be renaming the personality disorder group. I find this hard to decide about because I find change super unsettling but I think not having the world ‘personality’ in it would definitely better. Maybe Borderline Mood Disorder or something or Emotional regulation Disorder.

For me I have a diagnosis of cPTSD as well and to me they are related but quite separate. PTSD is flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks and trigger avoiding. BPD is emotions, rapid mood swings, fear of abandonment, self sabotaging, self harm, suicidal thoughts, and feeling totally out of control of my own mind.

My mental illness lost me two years of my life in many ways. It broke me and it had a hugely damaging impact on my friends and family. It let to two three months inpatient admissions in a secure psychiatric ward. The second one under a Mental Health Act Section (which is something I want to talk more about in the future because my experience of being sectioned under the act was highly traumatic). BPD nearly took my life from me on more than one occasion. I feel like I am living not just surviving. I have an excitement for the future that I thought I would never have again. I am back at work, I am volunteering, studying, horse riding and travelling. It’s taken a mixture of medication, psychology, coping skills, opening up to my family and friends, and a lot of backwards steps. But mostly it has taken time. I am not ‘well’. I think mental illness may always be a part of me but that’s okay. I am stronger now than I ever been before. And I am so grateful to everyone who has stuck by me and supported me through the rough patches. Life can get better.

I am going to finish off this blog post with a little poem that I wrote just over a year ago when I was in a bad patch with my BPD. Hopefully it should help you understand what it can feel like within a BPD brain.

Borderline personality disorder,

That’s what they call me.

I am hidden too deep to see

But yet can express myself so easily

Inside the head, the heart, the soul,

Thoughts take their toll.

Emotion is not a strong enough word

Because these feelings can be heard

In every fibre of her being

They have such meaning

She is consumed and yet empty

Desperately alone even amongst many.

The clawing sadness rips away

At every little joy that’s stayed.

Memories disconnected, discounted,

As I gather the negatives all compounded.

She tries to fight

To turn to the light

She wants to emerge from the dark

To allow positives to make a mark.

Not so easy I say

You can’t keep me at bay

Time for anxiety, panic and fear.

Everything that you hold dear,

I will take and reshape,

Force her to think there will be no abate.

Her heart pounds faster,

Faster,

Faster

Thoughts hurtling towards disaster.

She obsessively tries to count, tidy, order

To control and to give me the cold shoulder.

Maybe for a minute I’ll let her be

But I am only playing you see.

Let her guard drop for a while

And I’ll come back with a bigger trial

Leaving her drowning in depression and fear

Screaming for no one to come near.

This is all going as I planned

She is damned.

Her brain is burning

She is pacing and turning

Pacing and turning.

There are techniques that will slow me down

But she must learn so now I wear the crown.

A distant voice rings through

It’s quiet but true,

Deep inside I am remembering

I am Morag.

I have BPD

But I am Morag.

Keep fighting. Keep going. Keep living. One step at a time.