In the past week, there have been two articles about borderline personality disorder in the media. One focuses on BPD and sexuality; the other on the science of BPD.
Excerpt:
[Mike is] a 27-year-old grad student in San Francisco, happily ensconced in a stable long-distance relationship when he met the ethereal Elizabeth at a party. Their chemistry was immediate. They talked until dawn. Soon, Mike was breaking up with his girlfriend to fall headlong into a passionate affair with Elizabeth. Their sexual trysts were unlike anything he'd experienced-breathless and overwhelming.
"We were turned in on each other and to hell with the rest of the world," he recalled. "It really felt like she was losing herself to me and I felt the same way. And that's what made it so hot. ...She didn't seem to inhabit the same world I did. There was just something enchanted about it, something like going back to childhood about it."
And, borderline experts say, is what makes partners with this particularly disorder so engaging at first. "Successful men who may be obsessional, who tend to suppress emotion, can go for the passion," presented by a relationship with a borderline, says Frank Yeomans, a BPD expert and clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. "They say to themselves, 'She fills an intensity that's missing from my life.'"
By Gina Piccalo. Click here to read more.
Excerpt 1:
The more audacious symptoms of BPD-such as angry outbursts or experiments with self-harm--as willful efforts to manipulate others or attract attention. But in recent years biologists have been looking deeper at the psychological and neurological causes of BPD and have sketched a radically different picture of the ailment.
BPD patients do not choose to act the way they do; they are buffeted by a combination of unconscious processes--an unusual tendency to pick up on the subtle facial expressions of others, coupled with hyperactive emotional responses.
In addition, a brain region that helps to guide people amicably through social scenarios seems to malfunction in BPD sufferers, an impairment that
may add to their insecurity in relationships. These findings establish BPD's credentials as a brain disease.
The work also has inspired more effective therapies, based on perceptual and emotional underpinnings of the disorder. Psychotherapy for BPD is now enabling patients to overcome an illness that has long been viewed as a life sentence. "This is a disorder that everyone, for a long time, said was untreatable," says psychiatrist John Gunderson of Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital. "Today our research shows that when treated properly, BPD is actually a good-prognosis diagnosis."
Excerpt 2:
A 2008 study led by neuroscientist Brooks R. King-Casas of Baylor showed that people with BPD lack the brain activity that, in most people, interprets social gestures, such as those that signal trust. The researchers tested the ability of BPD patients to interpret the actions of a partner (in this case, the amount of money he or she invested) in a betting game as signs of trust or its absence-something those with the illness had trouble doing.
The scientists found that a brain area called the anterior insula, which responded to the investment level in the healthy participants, was unresponsive to this amount in the BPD patients. The insula ordinarily monitors uncomfortable interactions with others, such as those stemming from the violation of trust and other social norms.
But the BPD patients seem to lack this gauge in their brain, leading to their difficulty perceiving a breakdown of trust from others actions. As a result, patients may not feel they can trust others. Thus, although people with BPD may be hypersensitive to subtle facial expressions, they are impaired when it comes to perceiving true signs of social collaboration--or the lack of it. That is, people with BPD may be sensitive to less reliable social cues.
By Molly Knight Raskin.To read more, click here. There is a small charge. If you don't get right to the article, click on Scientific American Mind and look for the article "When Passion Is the Enemy."
Randi Kreger
Author, "The Essential Family Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder: New Tools and Techniques to Stop Walking on Eggshells"
Available at www.BPDCentral.com
