I’ve been thinking alot about this tweet tonight. It highlighted something that’s been with me for a long time - the fear of being pathologized, and what that fear does - it silences me. This is one consequence of getting a BPD diagnosis. I’m gonna rattle on about it in a thread: https://twitter.com/mynewmummylife/status/1263827395393523712

When I was diagnosed with BPD 8 years ago, it was drummed in to me by nurses and psychiatrists that my personality was disordered. Just weeks previously I was “treated” for PTSD, and was treated with a fair amount of compassion. But I then got first hand experience of what it’s

like to be given the BPD diagnosis and see staff attitudes towards you change. My CPN during those early days would walk out of our appointments whenever I started to cry, and said she’d come back when I’d finished. I remember feeling shocked at what was happening, but as I look

back on it now, she probably thought she would be “making it worse” if she gave me “attention”. Later on down the line, with a different CPN, she was great with me, until I had to see the crisis team, then she hung up on me on the phone because it was “making me worse”.

Again, looking back on it now, I can justifiably conclude that she had “advice” from the psychiatrist that she was “showing me too much attention” and therefore making “me” worse. Because the problem was located within me. Regardless of the trauma. PTSD Dx was a thing of the past

because I was a “BPD woman” now. Instead of “I’m sorry this happened to you and I’m sorry you’re struggling with the aftermath” it was now “This happened to you, and you are not dealing with it. This is your responsibility. Change your mindset. It’s behavioural. This is on YOU”

Anyway, I digress (Disclaimer: this is easily done when you’ve been mistreated by services for years. That kind of thing stays with you & it tends to lead to RANTS)

Back to the original point of this thread: the fear of being pathologized. That fear was and still is REAL. But