Over my past two years in Oxford, I’ve had quite a few conversations with other women that followed along the lines of ‘I was diagnosed with BPD at a young age, turns out I have ADHD instead’ or ‘I thought I had borderline personality disorder, until my autism diagnosis allowed me to understand my feelings’. Considering that studies have recently emerged examining the misdiagnosis of neurodivergency as BPD, it’s clear we’re not the only ones talking about it.
Combined with the stigma that usually comes part and parcel with any mental health diagnosis, Big Bad BPD has a gnarly reputation to boot. Seemingly characterised and fetishised in TikTok annals as the ‘young woman’s disorder’ for the post-modern era, the BPD Girl is presented as crazy, dangerous and yet somewhat sexually appealing. The overapplication of the term seems to extend to any woman who acts a bit off-kilter, drawing eye-roll inducing comparisons to 19th and early 20th century female hysteria diagnoses levelled at any woman “who had a tendency to cause trouble for others”. In light of this, it’s easy to conjure up mental parallels between some Burk discussing his ‘Crazy BPD ex’ to his mates at the pub and some old-timey breadwinner sending his chronically under-shagged and bored housewife off to get a lobotomy because ‘she’s hysterical’.
The aforementioned over-application of BPD in general social scenarios is reflected even more troublingly in terms of mental health professionals. Being lamented over on the internet or by ex-friends and lovers is one thing, but getting a big fat “A-Not-OK” from a professional can feel like more of a sentence than a diagnosis. Mental health services seemingly get it wrong when slapping the diagnosis of BPD or the term ‘Troubled Teen’ on any youth who breathes slightly out of order. Who would’ve thought?
This endemic misdiagnosis of young women’s neurodivergency as BPD seems to serve many young women with the harsh news presented by a quick Google search and check of r/BPDlovedones. The die is cast, and you might as well resign yourself to a fate of spinsterism and an early grave owing to your ‘addictive personality’. This stigma surrounding such a misdiagnosis not only contributes to personal self-persecution, but a barrier to getting the underlying root cause diagnosed. Characteristic symptoms such as emotional dysregulation, black and white thinking, and impulsive behaviour seem to signify a neurodivergency that hasn’t been properly accommodated. Combined with a pressure on women to ‘mask’, labelling and chastising young girls as emotionally unstable further contributes to the shame of feeling misplaced and judged for something pre-determined.
This laissez-faire attitude to diagnosing young women as BPD leads ultimately to a genuine misguidedness surrounding how to approach the narrative around women’s relationships.
Any behaviour deemed too over-emotional or uncouth seemingly warrants tarring women with the BPD brush, painting them as burdensome, jealous, and most importantly, bonkers. Oh, and upon further consultation of the TikTok zeitgeist also seems to be an indicator of an almost idolatrous relationship with Hello Kitty. (Look, man, I’m not too sure why this happens, but it does.) Overall, the at-length dismissal of women’s issues as something wrong with them emotionally speaks to a wider issue of medical sexism and infantilisation. Boiling down Women’s interpersonal struggles to a perceived mental defect shows that we’re somewhere in the conceptual ballpark of a new-age female hysteria diagnosis.
The BPD diagnosis is seemingly accommodating of nothing but an inability to accommodate female responses to interpersonal adversity. If you’re anything like me, the suggestion alone will send you to the counsellor’s office, lamenting over your broken nature. Self-flagellatingly rehashing every slight misstep into the emotional realm, making sure never-ever to make a screeching drunk banshee of myself again. The policing of women’s behaviour through holding the term ‘BPD’ over our heads leads to a hypervigilance that plagues anyone with a modicum of mindfulness on how they hold themselves. Whether it’s a result of existing within a bad environment or a genuine misdiagnosis of a pre-existing condition, it’s clear that BPD is a shorthand way of labelling women ‘bonkers’. Maybe somebody should have told sixth-form me that it’s actually quite reasonable to get miffed over your current squeeze’s infidelity….
On the topic of being ‘bonkers’, the difficulty of writing an identity article like this is, you have to be vulnerable, which is an incredibly daunting task when you know your vulnerability is being published on The Oxford Student’s website. As someone who prides themselves in being image-conscious and annoyingly contrarian at times, I would have previously baulked at writing a piece of pop-journalism on personal issues. Yet, here I am standing on the soapbox writing said article on Borderline Personality Disorder as the new female hysteria diagnosis. To me, writing this piece inspires a similar sort of feeling as the Threads (1984) “Jesus Christ, they’ve done it” scene. Where in this instance, ‘it’ is pasting my article into InDesign to be printed for student consumption, as opposed to the beginning of a nuclear war that plunges the world into another dark age.
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