"women And Bpd"

[christina]

Hi, i just wanted to post this as i don't know how i feel about it. It is a photocopy of some literature given to me and i would like to know what you think. It is quite lengthy but would appreciate your comments.

"HIDDEN AGENDA"

'Women at the Margins' are a committed group of women service users/survivors and workers based in Leed, who meet regularly to raise awareness and campign around the diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). We hosted a national one day conference in March 2004 on this subject, and have edited a special edition of Asylum magazine on the issue. Wider than this, 'Women at the Margins' also describes all women who, because of their diagnosis of BPD, have been marginslised within the mentalhealth services. Those women often already marginalised by violence, abuse, poverty and other kinds of oppression - are then pushed further to the fringes of society by the diagnosis.

Our concern with BPD isn't only based on the personal experience of many of the women in our group. It is based too in our awareness that BPD is the most commonly used of the ten personality disorder diagnoses in the pschiatric classification system (DSM IV) - and its use is growing rapidly. It is also one of the most stigmatising. People with the diagnosis are frequently barred from services and assumed to be 'difficult', 'attention seeking' and 'manipulative'

Our concern is also motivated by the fact that the diagnosis of BPD is much more commonly given to women than to men. Sources agree that in at least three out of four cases the diagnosis is given to women. Ans according to a recent government paper on women and the mental health, the majority of these women also have experienced childhood sexual abuse.

Prompted by figures like these, and by our own experiences of the diagnosis - one of us as a clinical psychologist, the other as a BPD - diagnosed survivor of abuse and mental health services - we have been working on a series of papers that examine the relationship between BPD and the sexual abuse of women and girls. All of our work suggests to us the existence of a 'hidden agenda' : psychiatry's attempt to hide and deny the extent and impact of the abuse of women and girls.

Pathologising women - presenting us as 'mad', 'ill' or 'disordered' - is nothing new in our society nor in psychiatry. A centuary ago, the diagnosis of hysteria was widely used by psychiatrists. Hysteria occupies a central position in the history of women's madness. Frequently used as a male term of abuse for 'difficult' female behaviour, it has more recently been explained as women's attempts to respond to their powerlessness. Woment used 'symptoms' of hysteria as a way of showing resistance to crushingly oppresive situations in which other forms of resistence weren't open to them, They were then labelled as 'hysterics', and in many cases subjected to appaulling treatments.

Freud took particular interest in women with the diagnosis, and tried to understand their experiences through psychoanalysis. During their analyisis, many women disclosed experiences of childhood sexual abuse. However, Freud chose to conceal these memories by presenting them as fantasies. This approach fitted the prevaling moral and politial climate so well that it dominated service responses to women in distress for much of the 20th centuary. As a result, the extent and impact of childhood sexual abuse was obscured.

What happenend when the prevalance of childhood sexual abuse began (tentatively) to re-enter the public consciousness in the the 1980's? Yet again, denial arose in the form of 'false memory syndrome' : a term construced by the founders of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation in the USA to suggest that survivors could be influenced by others to believe falsely that they have been abused when they have not. In our view, false memory syndrome is a strategy that denies the extent and impact of sexual abuse. It is a more palatable story for society.

The diagnosis of BPD is a powerful new manifestation of this strategy. By focusing on the 'illness' of the' disordered' individual, like all psychiatric diagnoses BPD distracts from the true cause of distress. The explanation of an individual's feelings and behaviours shrinks to the size of the diagnosis. A women is distressed because she is mentally disordered; she is diagnosed with mental disorder because she is distressed. In the case of BPD that is given to women with experiences of childhood abuse, the diagnosis effectively hides the abuse as the primary cause of distress and/or psychological problems.

In practice, this means being given a diagnosis that often means little or nothing to the woman in distress. It means being 'treated' within medicalised settings with treatments that make no reference to the cause of the distress. It means being offered no way to understand what you are going through and no way of seeing a path through it. It means expericencing the same level of powerlessness, hopelessness and isolation that caused the distress in the first place. It means being told that there is something inherently wrong with you. It means that the extent and impact of sexual abuse is hidden yet again.

If we sound angry, that's because we are. Angry with good cause. The impact of this is society wide. It obstructs an understanding of abuse as central to the inequalities of power that still exists between men and women. Statistics that show that half of girls have been subjected to some form of unwanted sexual experience before they are 18 suggests that male sexual violence against women does not represent a deviation form the norm. All women live with sexual violence. If they don't live with its actuality, then they live with the fear it it. Just think about it.

Yet through the use of psychiatric diagnoses such as BPD mental health systems have rewritten women's responses to this unacceptable reality as symptoms of pathological personalities that need treating. This obscures the experiences that produced the distress in the first place and leaves individual women blamed for the sexual violence experienced by women in this society. Consequently, the status-quo - one of endemic sexual violence against women and girls - is protected and reinforced, and the psychiatic abuse of women continues.

We believe that for as long as psychiatry has existed, it has worked to deny the impact and extent of the sexual abuse of women and girls. BPD represents the latest, powerful psychiatric strategy for silencing women. And like all the strategies that came before, it has awful consequences for women. Not just those of us who are subjected to the diagnosis and multiple stigmas, humilations and abuse this involves, but all women who live with the threat and actuality of sexual violence. By silencing and pathologising women who express distress as a result of abuse, BPD denies our strength and agency in living with and surviving abuse. It denies the extent of sexual violence, the impact that it can have on the lives of survivors and the central position that it occupies in the gender inequalities that continue to blight our society.

Fort these reasons and more, we reject this diagnosis.

[//Nat\\]

Wow that is so true

[alphaOmega]

I agree, this is so true. I think women are being "disordered" for our differences and our different reactions to stressors common to only (or mainly) women. I have a hard time with judgement regarding women's emotions, i.e. women being looked at as too emotional- its a society thing.

For me, I believe that BPD is a very NORMAL reaction to abnormal events~ angry? emotionally LARGE? Some self-hatred and "other" hatred, etc..... wellll..... YES!!! Had anyone I know lived what I and others have lived, they'd be a little *peppered*, too, and a little quick triggered. Not justifying bad behavior, but c'mon. Normal/disordered also depends on the cards one's given... although I'm a Jesus freak, too, that question WWJD? should be reworded to say WWJD if He'd had the life I've had? LOL. Only then, would it be fair.

Not male bashing, either, but considering those poor folks have such a hard time with emotionality, they're viewed as wimps or weenies if they cry~ Just a thought that its a fine example that the things you can't accept within yourself won't be tolerated well in others. Women's emotions might feel like a threat to them.

Thanks, Linda

[CathE]

thanks christina,

i've made a copy,

very interesting

Cath. x

[Barebones]

good stuff there cristina.