Jim Jones and Borderline Personality Disorder
This post is only speculative as you can’t diagnose someone post-mortem.
From nimh.nih.gov : Borderline personality disorder is a mental illness marked by an ongoing pattern of varying moods, self-image, and behavior. These symptoms often result in impulsive actions and problems in relationships. People with borderline personality disorder may experience intense episodes of anger, depression, and anxiety that can last from a few hours to days.
Symptoms fitting Jim’s behavior:
An intense fear of abandonment, even going to extreme measures to avoid real or imagined separation or rejection: That’s basically the core of his relationship with Marceline, looking up to her and seeing her as a mother figure, then threatening her and the children when she wanted to leave him. Same for Peoples Temple members, threatening them or begging them when they wanted to leave the Temple. From Raven : “He not only kept seeing Carolyn as a mistress; he chipped away at Marceline’s standing, alternately praising her and running her down in front of the children and church members. In his frustration and guilt over his affair, he would throw angry fits and become so hostile that she threatened again to leave; then he would beg her to stay, telling her she was the only one he loved. Sometimes he threatened to harm her and the children if they deserted him.”
Impulsive and often dangerous behaviors, such as spending sprees, unsafe sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, and binge eating : We can check everything but spending sprees and maybe reckless driving (even though his drugs and alcohol abuse + his love of driving can’t be a good combination). If you listen to some of his sermons, he talked about the eating part a few times. “He begins taking amphetamines (in 1971) so that he can stay awake longer. He’s working 20-hour days, even more sometimes. And then because the paranoia is set off by that drug because they make you so edgy, he has to start taking pills so he can go to sleep. And he’s a man of excess. He’ll take double the dosage to get up and he’ll take triple the dosage to sleep to the point where sometimes he starts nodding out. And any drug addict - and Jones was a drug addict - will develop even more acute paranoia.” - Jeff Guinn
Recurring thoughts of suicidal behaviors or threats : Thoughts of suicides started quite early in his childhood to continue later in life.
Intense and highly changeable moods, with each episode lasting from a few hours to a few days : Happened quite often, hard to pinpoint to a specific example though.
Chronic feelings of emptiness : “He was into power, sex, food, drugs. Whatever he needed to fill that hole, he was using it.” - Stephan Jones
Inappropriate, intense anger, such as frequently losing your temper, being sarcastic or bitter, or having physical fights : There’s a few examples out there about episodes of intense anger close to going physical toward some members, only stopped by his guards restraining him.
Periods of stress-related paranoia and loss of contact with reality, lasting from a few minutes to a few hours + Difficulty trusting, which is sometimes accompanied by irrational fear of other people’s intentions : Again, hard to pinpoint to a specific example, but something recurring would be him being persuaded that people, more often than not his own, wanted to see him dead. From Snake Dance by Laurie Efrein Kahalas, example of an extreme reaction over a non-threatening note slipped under his door :
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