A Real Affliction: BPD, Culture, and Stigma

What can a psychoanalyst learn from patients with BPD? In this interview, Dr. Alexander Kriss, author of the recently published Borderline: Biography of a Personality Disorder, shares insights gained from treating patients with the disorder. We discuss his book, which tells the story of one patient’s recovery while also deconstructing the BPD diagnosis and the broader conceptions of madness and femininity that have created an ever-shifting but ever-present space for people harrying the line between neurosis and psychosis from antiquity to the present day.

Alexander Kriss, Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder

Alexander Kriss, The Gaming Mind: A New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Play

Link to Alexander Kriss’s New York-based psychotherapy practice

Alicia Elliott, “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground”

Sigmund Freud, A Case of Hysteria (Dora) and Three Case Histories

Edvard Munch, The Scream

Why should we draw on the field of disability studies to envision, treat, and talk about BPD? In this second and final part of my interview with Professor Lisa Johnson, author of Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality, we explore this question and others, including the connection between BPD and sexuality, why we might diagnose fictional characters with BPD, and the form of her memoir, which “sutured together many types of discourse (medical texts, self-help books, fairy-tale, personal email, autobiographical memory).”

Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet

Merri Lisa Johnson (editor), Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire

Merri Lisa Jonson and Robert McRuer. "Cripistemologies: Introduction."  

Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer, “Cripistemologies Now (More Than Ever!)”

Alyson E. Blanchard et al., “Testing the Hot-Crazy Matrix: Borderline Personality Traits in Attractive Women and Wealthy Low Attractive Men Are Relatively Favoured by the Opposite Sex”

Baby Reindeer TV series

Beyoncé, “Hold Up”

Anne Boyer, The Undying

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Daphne Gottlieb, Final Girl

Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”

Jonathan Metzel, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease

Sarah Redikopp, “Interrogating Nonsuicidal Self-Injury Disorder Through a Feminist Psychiatric Disability Theory Framework”

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

Would you choose to hold on to a bad memory for eternity? In this bonus episode, I explain how EMDR therapy and a rewatch of the glorious Japanese film, After Life, made me reflect on memory.

Hirokazu Kore-eda, director, After Life (1998 film)

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.)

Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost

Marsha Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living

Viet Thanh Nguyen, “In Memoriam”

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

What does writing from the frontline of BPD look like? If the author is borderline up-ender Dr. Lisa Johnson, it looks and sounds like a witty, raw, and dazzling conflagration. In this interview, she and I discuss her memoir, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality, and share our experiences of navigating academia while being open about our BPD diagnoses.

Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet

Merri Lisa Johnson, “Neuroqueer Feminism: Turning with Tenderness toward Borderline Personality Disorder”

Courtney Cook, The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces

bell hooks, All About Love and other books

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Marsha Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living

Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"

Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House

José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics

Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

Kiera van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

Can movement therapy support people with BPD? In this interview, psychotherapist, licensed martial artist, and acclaimed writer Ellis Amdur describes his success with teaching baduanjin qigong, a Chinese breathing and movement system, to a patient suffering from acute BPD.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources:

Links to Ellis Amdur’ books

Cynthia Gralla, “Double Bind: How Borderline Personality Disorder Tied Me in Knots” published by SLICE in their May 2022 Levity online issue

Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

How do therapists come to think of BPD after a long career? In this conversation with Ellis Amdur—a retired psychotherapist, award-winning writer, and licensed martial artist—he offers his perspective on BPD, including what a background in Jungian psychology taught him about our singular and ever-evolving journeys. Trigger warning: This episode mentions suicide.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources:

Links to Ellis Amdur’ books

Patricia Barry, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology

Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld

Reiner Stach, Is That Kafka? 99 Finds

Weird Studies podcast, On James Hillman’s “The Dream and the Underworld”

How have power dynamics between doctors and patients changed over the past century and a half? In my second and final interview with Nina Shope, author of the award-winning historical novel Asylum, we talk about the complicated relationship between neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his most famous patient as he treated her for hysteria and documented her in photographs during the 1870s. Nina reflects on the photograph of Augustine that she chose to include in her novel, how she avoided flattening historical figures or reducing Augustine to past trauma, and the mythological roots in both the history of female madness and Charcot’s photography.

Nina Shope, Asylum

Nina Shope, “Changeling.” Conjunctions, Vol. 81 (“Numina: The Enchantment Issue), Fall 2023

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Maud Casey, The City of Incurable Women

Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière

Euripides, The Bacchae

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Susan Sontag, On Photography

Selby Wynn Schwartz, After Sappho

Emily Wells, A Matter of Appearance

What did BPD look like in the 19th century? It looked like hysteria, a phenomenon that puzzled doctors and fascinated the public. In this episode, I interview Nina Shope, author of the award-winning historical novel Asylum, which explores the power dynamics between Jean-Martin Charcot, the father of neurology as we know it today, and his most famous patient. In the shadows of this dynamic, we find symptoms and conceptualizations of female illness familiar to those of us who experience or study BPD today.

Nina Shope, Asylum

Christopher Bollas, Hysteria

Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière

Sarah Shun-lien, Madeleine Is Sleeping

Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady

How can we access expensive care? In the US, being diagnosed with BPD is often the first step in an odyssey through a complex and unjust health care system. In the second part of my interview with Paula Tusiani-Eng, co-founder of Emotions Matter, she discusses how to get life-saving coverage from your insurer, the wonderful success of her organization's peer support groups, the wild creativity that many of us with BPD have, and why we need an intersectional approach to treating and supporting BPD.

Resources for this episode:

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources:

Emotions Matter website

Bea Tusiani, Pamela Tusiani, and Paula Tusiani-Eng, Remnants of a Life on Paper: A Mother and Daughter’s Struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder

Frank Yeomans, Paula Tusiani-Eng, and Kellyanne Navarre, “California Approves Law Granting Pretrial Diversion for BPD”

In this solo bonus episode, I talk about what I learned while getting my MA and PhD at Berkeley and offer tips for anyone who wants to pursue a higher education degree while managing their BPD. It can be done!