Independent Guide to Care in North Wales

Healing with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
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If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with the disorder known as a borderline personality disorder, your first response is to ask how the condition can be cured. To respond to this, it's important to say that BPD affects 1.4% of the population and is entirely treatable. In fact, with the right approach and treatment, you can be well on the road to recovery and remission.


While remission and recovery aren't considered a ‘cure’ per se, both of these represent the successful treatment of BPD.


Definitions:


Remission is the stage where you do not meet the criteria for a BPD diagnosis ie your symptoms are diminished to a normal level.


Recovery is not as well defined, it suggests you are able to function in all aspects of life for an extended period of time, including holding down a job and maintaining meaningful relationships.


Goals for your Treatment


In the past, a lot of doctors believed that BPD wasn’t treatable and grouped it together with other difficult-to-treat conditions, for example, antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). As scientists gain greater insights about the disorder itself, more and more new treatments have appeared helping many achieve lasting remission from BPD, in many cases without the use of drugs.


Results do vary, some people respond to treatment better than others, but for the most part, with well-informed and individualised treatment, BPD can be controlled in much the same way that diabetes and other chronic conditions can be. The disease might not completely disappear, but it can be managed in a way that allows a better quality of life.


People tend to achieve remission as a natural part of dealing with the disease. A study in 2012 followed a cracking 2909 patients with BPD every two years for a whole 16 years. What they found was the remission had a habit of occurring spontaneously within two to eight years of the initial diagnosis and treatment.


After 16 years, 99% had achieved a two-year remission, while 78% had experienced an eight-year remission. The same study revealed that symptom relapses tend to wane over time also. Up from a high of over 36% after two years to around 10% by eight years.


It’s important to note that these statistics are based on people who were not diagnosed and treated for BPD, the results did not include the kinds of treatment provided or even what maintenance therapies could have been used. As such, it’s not clear how much the treatments influenced remission rates or if undiagnosed people also outgrow the condition.


Treatments of BPD are varied, but the basis for this is psychotherapy, also known as ‘talk therapy’


Among the various approaches are:


CBT - the foundational structured approach to talk therapy which is incorporated into all forms fo psychotherapy.


DBT - a type of CBT that aims to find and modify negative thinking patterns, incorporating skills training to control your emotions and to tolerate distress.


Mentalization-based therapy- this aims to improve mentalisation, which is the process of by which we make sense of one another and ourselves, either implicitly and explicitly.


Schema-focused therapy(SFT) aims to identify and modify any held thought and behavioural patterns from the past (usually those that people clint to for emotional survival).


Transference -focused therapy (TFT) aims to prevent feelings of negativity towards past events and transfer it to current experiences.


All of these therapies are used for BPD treatment, approaching the disorder in a different way. There isn’t only one that is better than the others for every person, as everyone is different.




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