Sly Saint
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
There's a mental health diagnosis that's applied three times more often to women than men. That should give you pause for thought alone.
But then, add to that the fact it may be diagnosed after only a brief encounter (not a full assessment) by a clinician who has never met you before; at the point when treatment for some other diagnosis is deemed to have "failed" for example when you don't recover quickly from depression or an eating disorder; when you are told you are "not engaging" (even though the therapist has responsibility to engage you too).
Or maybe you are deemed "unsuitable for this service", or "too difficult to manage" because you are harming yourself. What is this diagnosis? It's Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), sometimes known as Emotionally Unstable.
According to the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association) people with BPD have a pervasive pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image and affect (mood), in addition to marked impulsivity and "self-injurious behaviour".
You need five out of nine different symptoms to get the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder but if you are female and self-harm the sad truth is that you may be lucky to get a different one. It's a sticky diagnosis too. It can stay with you for decades and colour the way that every other health professional in your life behaves towards you.
We do know from research that for people who have these kinds of psychological difficulties there are therapies that can help them recover but these may be painfully difficult to access on the NHS.
But most don't get any treatment. Some get discharged from care completely and just told to go away. Those who cause most concern because of self-harm get sent to rehabilitation units and are sometimes locked away for years, often at great expense and of doubtful benefit.
Of young women known to mental health services in England and Wales who take their lives before the age of 25, a quarter are believed to have "personality disorder". More than 50 percent of those given this diagnosis who take their lives are women too (that's a higher proportion of women than in the general population where three times as many men take their own lives as do women).
But what has happened to these people, and why are so many women being given the diagnosis of "borderline"?
This diagnosis belongs in the bin - it's much more likely to be applied to women