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The hottest take of all is that every time I get called ableist for bpd discourse it’s literally because someone is splitting lmao.

I have mentioned in longposts before that there is some correlation between developing personality disorders and a history of trauma (correlation doesn’t equal causation, there are plenty of people who were abused who don’t end up with a PD - and correlation also isn’t an excuse to go through life being a volatile mess or an asshole lmao). 

I’ve talked about how what’s currently being called C-PTSD often gets confused for (and misdiagnosed as) BPD. I’ve expressed that I think there’s a difference between C-PTSD and BPD. I’ve said that according to diagnostic criteria a personality disorder must be pervasive and inflexible, so if your symptoms improve with therapy - which most people’s do 6 years after starting therapy - you weren’t BPD to begin with. You were just someone who needed to do some maturing after living with trauma for so long that you never really learned how to manage your emotions like an adult. 

Just because what’s being called “C-PTSD” might exist, doesn’t mean that BPD doesn’t exist. This community has a really hard time accepting that sometimes women aren’t victims. Sometimes they act manipulative and volatile and shitty because they gain something from that. Sometimes they slash their wrists and threaten suicide to keep their boyfriends from going to the mall. That sort of behaviour isn’t the same as someone who might have C-PTSD who slashes their wrists privately as an unhealthy coping mechanism. That being said, C-PTSD isn’t even laid out in the DSM-V (here’s an article about that), it’s largely a construct of online self-help communities, and even acknowledging it as a separate entity is controversial. I acknowledge it as something separate because I think it best explains the fact that 6 years after starting therapy, most people diagnosed with BPD don’t meet the diagnostic criteria anymore, and yet there are plenty of other people with pervasive and inflexible symptoms that remain for life. I think that the C-PTSD vs. BPD model does well enough to explain the difference between these two groups. But to say that “C-PTSD exists” is a hard fact is ludicrous, it’s uneducated, and it’s generally done to push an agenda of self-victimization, which is ironically a common behaviour of BPD. And that’s really where the ethical dilemma surrounding C-PTSD begins. If you’re aware that a group of people commonly exhibits sympathy-seeking manipulative behaviour, and you see time and time again that these people are framing themselves exclusively as victims who bear no responsibility for their actions, and they’re avoiding taking accountability for abusive/manipulative behaviour by calling themselves “C-PTSD”, as a diagnostician you’re treading on very thin ice. 

I think we do have a problem of over-diagnosis of BPD right now (it’s a popular diagnosis right now like ADHD and Bipolar were in the 90′s and 00′s), which in part may be due to the financial incentive psychiatrists have when pill-pushing. Moreover, I think there’s an entire community (which is very visible on tunglr) of edgy young girls who WANT to be diagnosed with personality disorders, and that clinicians need to be aware of this ridiculous trend because girls are seeking diagnoses to validate their blog description (if you don’t believe me, check out my “tunglr user clarksonthesnake” tag). We may also be living in a social climate that fosters the development of more disordered personalities. 

All women who have been diagnosed with BPD are not inherently victims. Some of them abuse their children and then threaten suicide as a form of manipulation to discourage the children from seeking help. Is this a common occurrence? Maybe not. But it happens. Real cases of bpd, a cluster B disorder (which are characterized by dramatic, overly emotional or unpredictable thinking or behaviour and manipulative, exploitative interactions with others) exist. Not every female on the planet is a victim. Not every shitty female behaviour can be excused because of her status as a member of an oppressed class. Seriously, the black and white thinking around this is mind-boggling. It’s extremely concerning that there are a lot of women who are openly diagnosed with BPD who hover like starved vultures around my posts every time I mention that a woman might actually be accountable for her actions. The great irony here is that, once again, a common BPD behaviour is to frame yourself as a victim. Larps criticizes BPD behaviour? Oh, she’s oppressing me! Evil witch! Give me a fucking break lmao. You’re literally proving my point. 

I’ve explained that women are diagnosed with BPD at higher rates, perhaps because male diagnosticians are sexist, perhaps because female socialization is such that women who behave maladjustedly are more likely to behave with the traits of BPD than maladjusted men are. 

If you consider that men are socialized to be more physically aggressive and overtly aggressive and women are socialized to be more emotionally aggressive and/or passive aggressive this makes a lot of sense. Something like ASPD tends to be diagnosed far more often in males and is related to thought distortions of grandiosity and domination, and to violence, whereas BPD is more linked to disingenuous sympathy-seeking, emotional volatility, and suicidal threats. Perhaps if we can accept that males and females are socialized to behave a certain way, and that male and female socialization is different, we can also accept that this difference in socialization is represented even when people deviate from the “healthy” course of socialization into a disordered development of the personality. 

Regardless, I find it weird that a lot of radfems are fully able to attribute narcissism and psychopathy to men, but when it comes to holding women accountable for their abusive behaviour the common rhetoric is “but we’re victims!” as though there isn’t evidence that trauma influences ASPD or NPD too. There’s plenty of research that suggests that most people who develop PDs were abused. And yet most people who were abused don’t go on to become abusive. Correlation isn’t causation. Causation isn’t an excuse. A history of having been abused is even more reason not to slash your wrists to keep your boyfriend from going to the mall. If you already know how shitty it feels to be around someone who blows everything out of proportion then why are you fighting for your right to do the same?

There are many, many posts where I have hashed over this shit. And yet every time I post something critical about bpd or point out that someone is exhibiting bpd behaviours or I say that I’m regularly smeared by people who openly admit to being bpd I get told that I’m “evil” LMAO. They frame me in black-and-white despite the readily available evidence that I actually have a relativistic, nuanced, educated opinion here because that’s how they cope with being called on their shit. Splitting (framing something in black and white/ignoring the positive or neutral aspects of what I say and magnifying the aspects they perceive to be negative) is literally the most common bpd coping behaviour lmao.