The rise in mental health awareness has paradoxically brought about a wave of casualty and desensitisation — disorders are now slang words, used as casually as we would use adjectives. How often do we hear
and make casual remarks such as “You’re acting so bipolar”, “That’s Schizo Behaviour” or “His OCD was acting up lol”? Personality disorders in particular have strangely acquired an association of being “cool” or “unique” while the severity and day to day challenges are kept in the shadows, eating away at those who are clinically diagnosed.
Among personality disorders, Borderline Personality Disorder or (BPD) remains largely misunderstood and stigmatised, which creates conditions of compounded suffering for diagnosed individuals. BPD is a personality disorder characterised by emotional stability, stormy relationships, impulsive behaviour and an unstable sense of self. It is often confused with Bipolar Disorder; Bipolar Disorder is a Mood Disorder with long episodes of mania and depression (lasting weeks or months) with periods of stability in between, whereas Borderline Personality Disorder is marked by sudden and intense shifts in mood that can change on a daily or even hourly basis, making it far more volatile to deal with. BPD also includes a deep fear of abandonment, identity diffusion and interpersonal turbulence, causing persistent and profound distress.
During the prime years of personality development during adolescence and young adulthood, the emotional volatility in BPD can make socialisation and learning in educational settings, feel threatening. Students with BPD may not be able to concentrate due to intense emotional distress, misinterpret feedback as personal rejection or avoid group work for fear of criticism or conflict. While disorders like ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorders are easily diagnosed and recognised from a very early age, BPD is unfortunately overlooked, until crisis strikes or is diagnosed by the time relationships, grades and mental health have already crumbled.
Similarly, at the workplace, emotional sensitivity can lead to misunderstandings due to miscommunication with superiors and colleagues. This may trigger impulse spending as a means to self soothe, or frequent job changes when the stress is overwhelming to handle. Such patterns over time carry a high risk of entrapping such individuals in a loop of low educational attainment, unemployment and financial precarity and self-criticism.
Interpersonal relationships are where BPD symptoms are most salient — individuals may seem to be overdramatic and hyper-sensitive, due to their fear of abandonment, making closeness feel necessary, yet terrifying. They may rapidly alternate between idealisation and devaluation of others — where a loved one is seen as perfect one moment and cruel the next. They may cling to relationships but push others away when overwhelmed, which has adverse implications for intimacy, understanding and cooperation with others. Moreover, codependency patterns where their self-worth becomes contingent on others’ approval of them, strains dynamics between friends, family and partners.
Despite its prevalence, BPD carries heavy stigma, originating from psychiatric professionals themselves, who view individuals with BPD as difficult, manipulative and less worthy of treatment. Popular media has also contributed to this discourse, by portraying BPD as dangerous, attention seeking and personally responsible for their condition, rather than something which is disruptive and reduces their quality of life.
Unsurprisingly, BDP is overdiagnosed in women due to clinical gender bias, owing to the fact that mere emotional expression in women has always been inflated and labelled as “hysteria”, instead of a reaction to systemic oppression. Gendered expectations regarding emotional expression are pathologised and misinterpreted as dysfunction in women, while they are attributed to situational factors when it comes to men. On the other end of the spectrum, men with BPD symptoms are likely to get misdiagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
People with BPD benefit significantly from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), helping individuals manage the symptoms through skill building. It includes individual therapy and group sessions aimed at distress tolerance, emotion regulation and interpersonal effective skills. While diagnosis is a tool which can demystify symptoms and guide a path to recovery, they can quickly become sticky social labels that rob affected individuals of their identity and personhood. Thus, it is imperative that we first start by changing the way in which we relate to distressed individuals — they require care, support and understanding just as we would, in times of despair and pain.
Intersectional tangents pose unequal hurdles for us to overcome, be it unequal access to healthcare, or being comorbid with another disorder. Understanding BPD also means recognising how inequality shapes its course — class determines who receives long-term, evidence-based therapy and who is left with crisis care alone. When emotional suffering is detached from social context, BPD is reduced to a personality flaw rather than understood as a response to relational trauma, systemic stress and unmet needs. This reduction does not just misrepresent the disorder, but deepens isolation and reinforces shame.
To care about BPD, is not only to care about a diagnosis, but to care about the kind of society we are building. One that responds to emotional distress with punishment and labels, or one that meets it with understanding, patience, and structural support.
Moving towards a more equitable society means challenging casual diagnostic language, expanding access to compassionate mental health care and recognising emotional vulnerability as a shared human condition, rather than a personal failure. When we shift from asking “what is wrong with this person?” to “What has this person lived through and how can we support them?”, we create a space not just for those with BPD to survive, but to live with dignity, stability and hope.
Yashee Jha, a multi-faceted student, is an avid commentator on various topical issues. Views expressed are personal and solely those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
