I was wandering around the web the other day and a picture caught my eye. It was an officer in the United States military and the message included that it was ok for men to admit they are having problems with depression. This is an amazing campaign and I believe and hope in the long run it is going to open the doors to a lot of men looking for treatment both from what they saw and dealt with during conflict and in their return back to the USA. The only problem I have is this campaign was started in 2007 and not decades earlier.
As a young boy you are taught that men are tough, strong and keep their emotions to themselves or else others will see them as weak. This message is taught by the parents, media and then society reinforces it. So when a man is hit by a turmoil of emotions instead of turning for help he tries to deal with it on his own and depending on the severity of the depression may very well decide his future. Instead of going to his doctor he begins to drink or use drugs to nullify the emotions that he is fighting to get buried which may eventually turn into an addiction but in a way that is okay as society sees men who abuse substances in a lot nicer light then those with mental issues even though the two go hand in hand in a very high percentage. Now this man be a functioning addict but what happens when his issues continue to build to the point where he loses his job, his family, his home and finds himself on the street panning for loose change. What happens when this man is tired of starving and freezing so decides to grab a gun to rob a bank or a little old lady. Now he is sitting in a jail cell with no alternate substance to cover his demons so the depression is very apparent ands looks unbeatable. The man has lost his family, friends, material possessions and suicide is a very attractive option when you have nothing left and you want the pain to end. Another jailhouse suicide. Who is at fault? The mental illness definitely holds some responsibility but what about the stigma that led to the decision to follow the wrong path? What would the story be if the man felt comfortable and did not worry whether or not society was going to look down at him so he sought treatment right away. Chances are his story would continue to be written instead of a premature end. The new military campaign is a wonderful act I just wished it started a long time ago.
Dealing with the Borderline Personality Disorder stigma is harder then the actual disorder for you find yourself constantly telling people that you can not sum up everyone with BPD with a simple sentence or assumption. Stigma with this disorder is similar to playing telephone in grade school, one person whispers a sentence in the person who is next to him/her ear then that person passes it along until you reach the end and find out the original message has been so distorted it is difficult to recognize. People takes a couple of bad examples then deems everyone else with the same disorder through one very narrow perspective and then tells all of their friends of this belief who continue to pass it along but it seems like no one stops this communication to actually take the time to understand the disorder so all of this false information is allowed to saturate through society until everyone takes it as common knowledge and then uses it to judge others. If I said I went on vacation to England and managed to have sex with three different women from the area so it must mean all women from this country are very easy and promiscuous then I started to pass out this information to everyone I knew. Would this become the new common knowledge? No because common sense prevails as most people would believe I just got very lucky in more then one way but when this same principal is applied to mental illness common sense is no where to be seen. The best gift that you can give to society is education which will combat the stigma that is created and hopefully prove that the common knowledge is full of errors. Remember when everyone thought that the world was flat or that Aids could be contracted by sitting on a dirty toilet seat or the only way to treat mental illness was lobotomies or that depression only effected women. The stigma can be changed but it is going to take a lot of hard work and education to accomplish it with people standing up and saying “I am sorry but what you believe is wrong. BPD has a wide scale on how it effects a human being so it is impossible to sum up everyone who is suffering under one simple category”.
The stigma that goes with self harm/self injury is so unbelievably full of risk that the fact it still remains scars the heck out of me. People believe that others self harm to gain attention so the best answer is to ignore it. I have had people fired over this stigma as I don’t believe that you should take the risk as the wrong answer may very well lead to a dead body. A scenario that I see constantly on different forms is a young teenager who in a flurry of emotions took a sharp object to his arm and caused damage to it. The child goes to the parent and says “Hey look what I did when I got upset”. The parent instead of realizing this child is screaming for help takes the stigma route and decides the child is just seeking attention so rips the teenager a new one about the damage that they are causing to their body believing that guilt will make the problem goes away. The next time the child hits a crisis he does the same thing except this time he does not tells anyone as he remembered the lecture from the incident before so he makes sure to hide his new marks carefully. I wonder how many suicides were actually cries of help that went unheard because people believed the person was just trying to get attention, I wonder how many self harm accidents were documented as suicides and I wonder when society is going to realize that a mentally sound human being does not purposely hurt themselves no matter of the reason behind it. Your child shows you a cut on his arm that they are responsible for you grab him/her by the ear and drag them to the closest emergency room for this situation it is better to take the approach of covering all bases instead of playing with fire with the belief the child is just seeking attention.
Negative stigma is what kept racism going for so long as well as sexism but as a society we were able to learn that instead of labeling a group as one model instead we take the approach to look at each human being individually so can some one tell me why this does not apply to mental disorders? My neighbor BPD and I share some common characteristics but we are two separate people so please look at the human being and not the disorder when deciding what you think of me as a person.
by untreatable
I really disagree with a lot of what you say about self-harm. Most self-harm just ain’t that serious. Here in the UK, the percentage of young people who have self-harmed is around 10%. The numbers are similar in the USA. It’s a fairly common behaviour.
In terms of danger, cuts to the arm are very unlikely to lead to death. Unless someone has a blood clotting disorder, it’s nearly impossible to bleed to death by cutting the arteries in the wrist. That’s not to say that people can’t injure themselves severely by self-harming – it sucks to accidentally cut through a nerve or a tendon. But even so, the vast majority of people who cut, only ever do so superficially and never require medical attention for their wounds. Self-harm by way of poisoning is much more dangerous and can lead to death much more easily than cutting.
There has been research on self-harm as a precursor to suicide. Fox and Hawton’s estimate is between 40 and 100 times as many young people have engaged in self-harm than those who have actually ended their own lives. So the best guess at the number of suicides that are actually self-harm incidences gone wrong is “not many”.
Which isn’t to say that self-harm shouldn’t be treated, but an over-reaction is probably as bad as an under-reaction. Unless that child with a cut needs stitches, there’s no point going to the emergency room – an appointment with their family doctor would usually make more sense. The Young People and Self Harm is about the situation in the UK, but is probably useful reading for anyone with an interest in the subject.
Information aimed at males is an important step forward;
with Self-Injury Awareness Day coming, we’ve got a good, solid Factsheet for guys who self-injure – check out http://www.lifesigns.org.uk/publications/
Self-harm IS a serious issue. The mental state of someone who cuts or burns themselves even superficially should be seriously addressed because both of these behaviors can only result in pain. The physical pain may be preferable to the extent that it dulls emotional pain, but I would question anyone who claims to engage in these actions for pure enjoyment. It’s true that cutting doesn’t often lead directly to successful suicide, but it often starts there. The cutting gets deeper and more frequent and now the plan to swallow a bottle of pills seems feasible.
Thank you for this post
This is a great article. The disease is not the person. High time we learn to separate the two.
The stigma of BPD is not just from cutting though. (Other people do it too and not all BPD people do by any means.) It is because “borderline” has become a quick to apply adjective for someone who is angry at you or just for difficult people that one finds unlikable. It’s quite possible that it is over-diagnosed for females that come to consult a therapist if they are in a stormy mood and under-diagnosed in men because anger in men gets interpreted under other labels. But people who really suffer from BPD have trouble controlling all of their negative emotions in ways hard for “normal” people to imagine.
Self-harm (cutting, slapping, drug use, adrenalin rushes etc.) releases opioids in the brain and can pull a person who suffers from “BPD” out of his unbelievably painful dysphoria (explosive cocktail of rapidly cycling feelings of inadequacy, guilt, overwhelming shame, total despair, irrational fear, intense self-hate, and yes, anger). By directing his acting out inwards, someone with BPD can actually save those around him a lot of grief (as long as these behaviors are hidden or socially acceptable as in dangerous sports, of course). BPD people have the same feelings as others, only their negative feelings, once started, often spiral down at the speed of light, and once they’re in the black hole it can take them days to crawl out. The fact that they do, over and over, get back to the surface where they go on with their lives (i.e. their marriages, their friendships, their jobs, etc.) and in spite of terrible stigma from an uncomprehending and often very quick to judge world, is all to their credit.
The bottom line is that this is a painful emotional dysregulation disorder that affects all kinds of people, which can wreck havoc on the sufferer and his family, until everyone learns to separate the disease from the person. Then suddenly it all doesn’t seem so bad.
Self-harm is very serious, in fact it landed me in the hospital 2 times in the past. When someone does this to themselves it is often like a comfort zone to them. It was and still is for me. I won’t say what I do, but again after all these years I have started to do it again. And it can often lead to something more serious ……….death. People who cut may make deeper cuts, they could bleed to death. people who use pills, could take more if they are having a hard time of it. Any kind of self-harm is a serious matter and needs to be addressed. Mary
i don’t believe that self harm is neccesarily an indicator of Borderline Personality Disorder. I actually don’t believe that the symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder constitute an actual disorder in themselves, but are often markers of a deeper problem i.e depression, bipolar disorder, problems with self esteem/body image and sexual abuse. (or is a co-incidence that most young women who are given the BPD label are sexual abuse survivors or have some form of trauma in their past) I was given borderline personality disorder as a label untill i had a severe manic episode. I also have sexual abuse and self harm problems in my past. In Australia, many young people are given that label because they have issues too complex for an overworked system to deal with. It doesn’t go anywhere near deep enough in adressing the problems they have, but it’s the best they can do, we can’t medicate you, get the fuck out of our hospital. Why aren’t we putting resources into properly diagnosing mental health concerns amongst the young, including self harm. Untill we do that I don’t think anything is going to change.
Mel
I think it is a huge step forward for men to admit their feelings. We live in a World still where most men feel they have to bottlwe up their emotions.