Wednesday, April 20, 2011

What causes Borderline Personality Disorder?

When someone is diagnosed with BPD, one of the first questions they ask is "Why?".

What causes BPD?
Some of it's genetics. Like most mental illnesses, if someone in your family has it, that puts you at a higher risk of getting it. It's estimated that about 35% of Borderline patients have a close family member diagnosed with BPD.

The bigger cause of Borderline Personality Disorder is living through an extremely traumatic childhood. Sadly, that accounts for about 75% of all cases.  When a child is forced to endure so much abuse, their brain does what it can to cope. And since the brain is doing all this coping during the time that it's also developing and growing, the pathways end up getting all screwy. And that affects the way we think, feel and react for the rest of our lives.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder

When I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, I had no clue what it was. I'd never even heard of it before. So of course I went online and Googled it. I was pretty disappointed with the results. It seemed like the exact same information was on every single website. Like someone researched it, wrote about it, and then gave it to every website to display. Ans as if that weren't bad enough, it was all written in complicated medical terms. Even the explanations of each BPD symptom were too hard to understand. I had to look every other word up in the dictionary and even then, I was still confused.

That was 3 years ago. Today I'm well aware of all aspects of my BPD. But because I had such an awful experience trying to figure out the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder, I felt I had to do something to help others in the same situation. So I wrote Borderline Personality Disorder Symptoms Explained. This article explains every symptom of BPD right down to the last detail, in words everyone can understand. I wrote it based on my own life, how the symptoms have affected me. It's very personal because I felt that the more personal it was, the more people it would help.

This article was written for those who have just been diagnosed with BPD and are looking for information. It was written for those who have a family member or friend suffering from this disorder. And it was written for people like me. People who understand BPD because they've had it for so long, but they feel like they are the only ones suffering. I hope reading about my own experiences will show that we are not alone in this fight.