I’ll go ahead and close this, and providing I actually remember, provide a link to the new thread once I get it posted. I’m hoping that will be before the end of tomorrow – I just had my eyes dialated and can hardly see.

Thanks.

Fair enough, but plenty of people upthread were bagging on the Manic Depressives. It all started looking like the same BS and the tired old generalizations.

I’m tired of always having mental illness (of any stripe) discussed from the outside in.

I’m tired of being told what Those People Are Like.

I think these issues are important, even if they need to be addressed in a separate thread.

(amandaw – just to be clear, I’m talking about commenters, not you)

” People with BPD inflict so much emotional harm on those around them and revel in the negative attention these actions evoke. They feel no need to get help for themselves no matter how much damage they inflict because they enjoy hurting others. ”

Please try to separate “ASSHOLE” from “Manic Depressive.” Not all Manic Depressives are bad people.

My mother is Manic Depressive and you could not find a better, more loving, more thoughtful woman to raise you.

Jane,

“It also has ZERO effect to tell someone with BPD or narcissistic personality disorder or anti-social personality disorder this, because they don’t care how someone else feels. They not only don’t care, they’re not really capable of caring how someone else feels. ”

You do realize that you’re discussing three entirely separate illnesses, correct?

“…untreated BPD’s lack empathy and the ability to understand complexity in human behavior”

Plase stop. This is so offensive to Manic Depressives. We’re not capable of feeling empathy or other people unless we’re medicated? We’re not human unless we’re medicated?

Amandaw, please consider shutting down this thread. It appears to have devolved into hate speech.

I’ma try to get that post up today.

Sorry. Talking about BPD is always difficult. I don’t mean that in the way that I think you took it. It’s meant as a way to understand what the problem is — untreated BPD’s lack empathy and the ability to understand complexity in human behavior and asking them to change their behavior on the basis of how someone else might feel is not useful. It’s like asking a blind from birth person to describe colors.

Empathy can be developed through therapy, but it’s very difficult. In the meantime, the “think about other people feel and change your behavior” is not a useful means to address the problem. It just doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work because of the personality disorder fundamentally interferes with what the person is being asked to do. It’s not a fair request.

Wow. Hold on there.

This sort of thinking helps nobody.

I’ma try to get that post up today.

This is 100% true. It also has ZERO effect to tell someone with BPD or narcissistic personality disorder or anti-social personality disorder this, because they don’t care how someone else feels. They not only don’t care, they’re not really capable of caring how someone else feels. My mother is capable of empathy only in the rarest of circumstances. She just can’t “see” how someone else is feeling. She doesn’t have the capacity to grok other people’s feelings. It’s like she’s blind. BPD/NPD/ASPD are like autism with good social skills. She understands how to act and respond in a social situation, but she doesn’t understand the underlying feelings of the other people in a social interaction. She can hear the music but she doesn’t get the meaning.

I’m really not kidding when I say that I’m just a prop in my mother’s life. She cannot perceive that people have any more feelings that a chair or her purse. It’s a real disability.

Tie that inability to understand other people’s feelings and thoughts together with the splitting characterstics of BPD (Ie. people or things are either 100% good or 100% evil) and you can understand why people with BPD are in such a high state of distress so much of the time. They don’t understand why people act the way they do, and don’t understand that a single bad exchange with a person doesn’t mean that the person is 100% evil. It all seems random to a person with BPD and every incident is very high stakes for them. It makes a person with BPD a nightmare as a parent of children — every childish screw-up is incomprehensible to the parent with BPD and it is evidence that the child is bad/evil/hates the parent.