“Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)” and its Inept Name...Yet Helpful Profile

Let’s face it: “borderline personality” is ableist, inaccurate and insulting vocab. Just one of the many legacies of the cishetero white psychiatric dude brigade in the 1930’s.

Some people aren’t that bothered by this language, others understandably loathe it, and almost none of us like it! But putting the name for BPD aside for a moment, many of us have found life-saving community and resources surrounding our identification with the description of “borderline personality disorder/traits (BPD/traits).”

One of the main resources for BPD/traits is dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), which Marsha Linehan first designed for people with BPD when other approaches weren’t helping (even though many others without BPD benefit from DBT now, too).

And hey, Marsha doesn’t like the term for BPD, either!

So I think of the profile associated with BPD as something worth linking to common experiences, community, resources and people who get it. And only if that’s helpful. Otherwise, I leave the “BPD” at the door.