A stigma wrapped in a history inside another stigma - that will probably never make it onto a t-shirt

Polly at Polarcoaster has designed herself a cute 'Bipolar Princess' t-shirt (click here for a photo). She writes 'I don’t know if I’ll ever wear it outside of my apartment or my friends’ apartment, since it’s like wearing something that says “LOOK AT ME! I’M AN ATTENTION WHORE!”'

I might be wrong here, but this seems to imply that the stigma of being perceived as an attention whore is greater than the stigma of being diagnosed with bipolar. Which leads me to ponder... how many people in the broad consumer/ex-user/psych survivor community (hereon referenced as c/s/x for brevity) would be prepared to publicly sport a t-shirt proclaiming 'Borderline Personality' or 'I Hate You, Don't Leave Me', especially in a context where a lot of people would understand the reference?

Now, I know that this is a diagnosis that has been severely tarnished by its use by psychiatrists as a 'trash can' for the 'treatment-resistant' and as a way of 'explaining' the behaviour of therapists who take advantage of their clients sexually. (The apparently irresistible pull of the 'seductive, needy' borderline and the fear of 'borderline rage' if the patient's overtures are denied, etc etc etc. If borderlines didn't exist, psychiatrists would have to invent them.) I know that BPD often might as well stand for 'Bitch Pissed Doc', and that it has a hot-potato effect, causing the unfortunate patient to be referred from shrink to shrink to shrink, rendering her chance of ever developing a therapeutic relationship with any of them near impossible by the prior communication of the damning diagnosis. So there's a whole stack of reasons why you would want to avoid being lumbered with it, if you have any interest in obtaining the best and most respectful treatment possible for yourself. But, sadly, nothing I've noted above makes the phenomena, each considered individually, of fear of abandonment, difficulties with close relationships, anger management issues, or short-term, highly reactive mood swings, rare or non-existent among those who've spent some time at the mercy of the mental health system. (Heck, if you do have issues like these, your time in 'the system' might even be a contributing factor.)

But few people ever want to admit to them, and so they probably shouldn't, if they're sitting anxiously in the office of a strange psychiatrist. But what about here, where we're anonymous and online, or in real time, talking to other c/s/x people? How many times have c/s/x (particularly bipolar) people declared to me, unprompted, that they've never been diagnosed as borderline? The subtext appears to be: I might be sick, but at least they've never called me that. It seems that not only are those diagnosed with BPD the niggers of the mental health system, they are the niggers of the c/s/x movement as well. And that worries me - a large group that, while rightfully resisting its stigmatisation as a whole, implicitly stigmatises a subgroup of itself, by accepting uncritically the attitudes of some rather weak and callous psychiatrists who, unable to deal with the frustrating but logical emotional and behavioural consequences of intense suffering, have somehow infected their entire discipline, and possibly now the c/s/x movement, with their bigotry.

Don't kid yourself - if you've cut yourself just once, or made a cry-for-help suicide attempt back in the days when neither you or anyone else had the faintest clue what was wrong, or even just argued with your shrink, 'borderline' will have almost certainly made a guest appearance - or even qualified for a regular slot - in your files. If you were young and female at the time, it's pretty much a done deal.

Of course, we're all free to judge individual examples of a person's behaviour, infer a pattern from them, and decide that we'd rather not deal with them if we so wish. But don't do this backwards, and indulge in the kind of wanton borderline-bashing that shrinks do both in semi-public 'places' such as professional journals, and behind closed doors, possibly under the influence of alcohol or other disinhibiting substances - not that some of them would need them, as they're clearly quite happy to let those bitches have it any time.