The Scarlet Label: Close Encounters with ‘Borderline Personality Disorder’ Jacqueline Simon Gunn & Brent Potter

http://www.madinamerica.com/2014/10/scarlet-label-close-encounters-borderline-personality-disorder/

Click on the link for Jacqueline’s and Brent’s article for Mad in America, which makes some interesting points, as do some of the comments (for example around the medicalization of distress/the human condition, and around gender bias in the psychiatric model).

We resonate with the final paragraph:-

‘If so-called ‘borderline personality disorder’ symptoms are really responses to an unpredictable and perhaps unsafe environment then the real shame of it is that we are stigmatizing people that disclose the pain of our human world. We are judging people who have sensitive dispositions and absorb the world around them; people who are essentially struggling with basic life issues. And as a system – the mental health system – that sort of prides itself on exploring human behavior without judgment, this is a failure — not on our client’s part, but on the part of professionals and systems that are supposed to be caring for them.’

Unlike some of the therapists Brent and Jacqueline refers to (accurately), we welcome those with this ‘diagnosis’ at our service. We have therapists with a great deal of experience in walking alongside people on this road. We know from experience any story from the ‘mental illness’ model about this being a hopeless road is just that – a story….Those who come here demonstrate the possibilities of healing, change and growth – the innate potential unfolding and flowering we each contain.

Palace Gate Counselling Service, Exeter