Empathy and understanding are key to fighting mental health stigmas.
For at least the last decade, mental health awareness has been on the rise, with anxiety and depression being at the forefront. However, some more complex disorders, such as borderline personality and bipolar disorder, still carry various stigmas caused by misinformation and ignorance.
These disorders, often confused for the other, have their own characteristics and causes.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a personality disorder that makes it difficult to regulate emotions. It affects the way we think, express emotions, act and behave, and maintain relationships.
Bipolar Disorder is an episodic or chronic mood disorder, which indicates heightened emotions and lasts for a few weeks, or even longer.
BPD stems from an innate aspect, emotional vulnerability, and an acquired invalidating environment. Emotional vulnerability causes someone to experience emotions more frequently and intensely and to be more sensitive to emotional stimuli. Invalidating environments are created by a lack of understanding of someone’s emotions and the implication that they are wrong and invalid.
The cause of bipolar disorder is still unknown. Current research leads to believe that genes, as well as the structure and function of the brain, may play a role in a diagnosis — but it may even be hereditary. Additionally, researchers say that brain functions and structure differ in people with bipolar disorders, and they are hopeful that the nature of these brain changes may lead to a further understanding of bipolar disorder.
Another distinct difference between those two disorders are the symptoms they present. To be diagnosed with BPD, one has to have seven of the ten symptoms, such as frequent mood swings, abandonment issues, and black-and-white thinking.
However, bipolar is categorized by manic and depressive episodes. The manic episodes make the person feel extremely happy, irritated, jumpy and wired. They don’t feel the need to sleep as much and excessively engage in enjoyable activities such as sex and drinking. The depressive episodes are characterized by feelings of anxiousness, sadness, worthlessness and restlessness. They either sleep too much or too little, and become forgetful. They lack interest in most activities and find it difficult to complete the simplest of tasks. The intensity of these episodes vary depending on the type of bipolar.
According to an article by Dr. Susan Krauss Whitbourne, the negative connotations of the word “borderline,” associating it with psychosis, laid the groundwork for the stigma around BPD.
Whitbourne explains that this is compounded when people use words such as “constitutional aggression” or “infantile personality” to describe BPD. Impulsivity and mood swings are also symptoms that scare people because they make the person look unstable and unreliable.
There are a lot of myths surrounding the disorder, a more popular one being that people with BPD are angry and hard to deal with.
Bipolar disorder suffers from a similar treatment because it is very exaggerated by the media, resulting in a harmful stigma. Similarly to BPD, limited information on bipolar lead to an inaccurate image of the disorder. For example, the idea that someone with bipolar is dangerous and violent is an exaggeration, as they are more likely to harm themselves than others.
Another misconception is that they are incapable of holding down a job or relationship; but with the right treatment, bipolar is manageable. These stigmas are harmful to people suffering from bipolar, and BPD, because they cause them to hide their diagnosis out of shame, instead of reaching out for help.
The takeaway is that both people who have BPD and bipolar disorder suffer at the hands of stigmatization through a lack of understanding and empathy. Neither disorder makes someone inherently bad — they suffer and require compassion and empathy.
