How is bpd a misogynistic slur? -not being a dick, I'd like to understand why
So, Iâd start by saying, any clear meaning of the phrase âborderline personality disorderâ was jettisoned a long time ago - if it ever existed - and the phrase originally meant âthe border between neurosis and psychosis.â If someone came out and said to you âyouâre at the border between neurosis and psychosis,â you could at least ask them which of your thoughts/actions they considered neurotic and why, which of your thoughts/actions reminded them of psychosis and why, and get a clear idea of what they meant and how you might disagree with them. Likewise, âbipolar disorderâ was a phrase coined to replace the phrase âmanic depression,â mania and depression being the alleged âtwo poles,â and if someone came out and said to you, âTHIS is what I identify as your mania, THIS is what I identify as your depression,â you could at least get some clarity on what they meant and whether or not you agreed with them. Replacing at-least-somewhat clear descriptors with newspeak babble also happens when institutions start referring to consumers or survivors of psychiatry as âpeersâ - absurdly meaningless and cut out of context.
This is part of how psychiatry presents its labels as explanations, when really theyâre only superficial descriptions of observed behaviors - AND they are (most often) descriptions coming from well-off men employed to enforce ruling-class ideas of how people should behave. âDrapetomaniaâ was a diagnosis given to Africans who liberated themselves from slavery, followed up by the schizophrenia diagnosis being 4 times more often put upon black men, often specifically for their civil rights activism or rejection of white supremacy. âBorderline personality disorderâ follows from the old âhysteriaâ diagnosis in a similar way, and at a basic level I see it as misogynist because itâs a label overwhelmingly put on women and not on men.
Specific details make it worse - there is a large population of women who self-report that they were labeled âborderlineâ for showing signs of child abuse and/or rape trauma, that this diagnosis was used both to deny them services or resources they were seeking because they were âlost causes,â AND to commit medical violence against them under the banner of âaddressing their severe symptoms.â This lead Judith Herman to describe the diagnosis as âlittle more than a sophisticated insult.â
What makes psychiatric labeling even more perverse as a tool of domination is its double-edged catch-22s. While the âborderlineâ label is put on many women for Stockholm-like signs of complex trauma - identifying with their abusers, having little sense of their own goals or desires and identifying with the goals and desires of other people instead, conversely, many other women are labeled âborderlineâ precisely for refusing to exhibit Stockholm syndrome, refusing to identify with the wishes of psychiatrists or other authority figures, and having too strong an emotional investment in their own thoughts and their own needs, and so doctors call them âborderlineâ for being unreasonable and unruly.
The âcheckboxâ nature of psychiatric diagnoses just make this extra maddening (which makes sense as theyâre a means to produce madness!) âBorderline personality disorder,â for instance, will be âdiagnosedâ by going down a list of nine traits, and labeling the woman if she exhibits five. First, this is crazy because thereâs no way to implicate a common cause - just disparate people showing vaguely similar behaviors for disparate reasons. Second, this is crazy because it invokes a âsyndrome,â a âcollection of symptoms,â where there is none - a person (1) having unstable relationships or (2) fearing abandonment canât therefore be assumed to be more likely to (3) be self-injuring or (4) have little sense of their own self-interest, or vice versa.
Third, this is crazy because none of these things are a sickness of the psyche - cutting oneâs self may be the best means available to someone to process their trauma, fearing abandonment is wholly reasonable (and issue is better taken instead with specific attitudes towards or ways of treating oneâs relations), and unstable relationships exist between people, not within people. We should ask anyone in the business of diagnosing other peopleâs relationship patterns, âWhat, then, defines a respectful and healthy way of relating to each other?â But the answers we get from professionals whoâve essentially beaten marginalized peopleâs minds out of their bodies are unlikely to give us much guidance.
Edit:Metzlâs âThe Protest Psychosisâ has more on racial discrimination in the schizophrenia diagnosis.Hermanâs âTrauma and Recoveryâ has more on c-ptsd and the gender politics around it.Chamberlinâs âOn Our Ownâ is a great roadmap of non-medical psych survivor autonomy building - and right now Iâm also feeling ways about Kaslâs âMany Roads, One Journeyâ as a holistic anti-oppression recovery text, and also bell hooksâ text âcommunion.âBest luck to you!
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