Creativity and Borderline Personality Disorder

by James C Johnson

Hospitalized as a teenager for extreme suicidal behavior, a woman went on to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology, developed a theory explaining the cause of her mental illness, and createed a successful treatment that is now in use throughout the world.  The woman's mental illness: borderline personality disorder.

Borderline disordered people are intelligent and creative, and this is the right time to talk about it.  May is BPD Awareness Month and Santa Fe’s annual “Creativity and Madness Conference” is scheduled for the week bridging July and August. 

“Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree-burn patients,” says University of Washington Psychology Professor Marsha Linehan.  “They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin.” Their perceptions of themselves and others are inconsistent; they worship romantic partners one day and hate them the next. They are impulsive and prone to explosive displays of anger toward themselves and others.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet near Stockholm have reported that “patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and their relatives are overrepresented in creative occupations.” According to a study of more than a million people, writers are at higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, depression, substance abuse, and suicide. 

The study did not specifically look at borderline personality, but it is reasonable to assume that BPD is also a catalyst for creativity. Creativity is often defined as the use of primary process thinking to generate new ideas. Primary process thinking is typical in the thinking of small children and  schizophrenics. We all use it when we dream.  Brief regression to primary process thinking often occurs in borderline patients.  Borderline affect storms are often compared to the tantrums of small children.

Schizophrenia and BPD are distinct disorders, but they do share some symptoms.  Identity diffusion (the absence of a coherent sense of self) is common to both.  Borderline disordered patients have brief psychotic episodes in times of stress and when under the influence of alcohol or drugs..

Bipolar disorder is unrelated to BPD.  Marsha Linehan says bipolar moods swing between mania and major depression, with each mood remaining stable for many months.  Borderline mood swings, on the other hand, occur much more rapidly, often several times a day.  “You have fear going up and down, sadness up and down, anger up and down, disgust up and down, and love up and down,” Linehan says.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have reported that people with borderline personality disorder often have above average IQs and possess a special giftedness. “Many borderline patients have a cognitive giftedness in the area of self- and other-perceptiveness.’”  These areas of giftedness are called inter- and intra-personal intelligences in Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Intra-personal intelligence is a common characteristic of novelists, researchers, and entrepreneurs. 

Children who develop borderline personality disorder grow up in an invalidating environment of constant emotional abuse.  Physical and sexual abuse may also occur.  The Johns Hopkins researchers speculate that the interaction of a child’s giftedness with early childhood abuse “creates a tragic drama that is the etiology of BPD.”

Borderline Artists in Santa Fe

While therapists describe borderline disordered people as highly intelligent and creative, few creative artists with the disorder have been willing to reveal their borderline diagnosis. This is certainly true in the Santa Fe art community.

I know three artists in Santa Fe who struggle with borderline personality disorder, whom I call Ann, Cathy, and Sally. None of these artists has publicly revealed their borderline disorder.  Ann has displayed in several Santa Fe galleries and Cathy is a part-owner of a small gallery on Canyon Road. Neither woman earns enough from her art to survive in the current economy.  Ann receives a monthly retirement check as part of her divorce settlement and works a part time job.  Cathy works as a substitute teacher and her father pays her monthly house payment.  Sally is the most skillful painter of the three (her finished paintings are gorgeous), but she cannot sustain an interest in any project for very long.  Most of her paintings remain unfinished and she has never shown in a gallery.  She survives on money from a divorce settlement.

Creative People with BPD

In recent years, a handful of creative people have self-identified after receiving a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.  Other creative people with symptoms have been identified by others, but these identifications are speculative and often disputed. The stigma of BPD remains high. 

New Mexico author Alisa Valdes (The Dirty Girls Social Club, The Feminist and the Cowboy) says she received a diagnosis of  borderline personality disorder two years ago. Much of her creative work is inspired by personal behaviors that would justify such a diagnosis. Many of her professional failures result from the kind of self-sabotage that is common in borderline disordered individuals.

Authors Susanna Kaysen (Girl Interrupted), Stacy Pershall (Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl), and Rachel Reiland (Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder) have all written about their struggles with BPD. Kaysen’s story was made into a movie starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie .

Singer-songwriter Kayla Kavanaugh readily admits that she has BPD.  Her website says her struggles with borderline personality disorder lie “hidden behind the music.”

The tumultuous lives of Tom Wolfe, Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin have been attributed to personal struggles with BPD. Marilyn Monroe, Demi Moore, and Angelina Jolie are also often identified as borderline disordered.  Alisa Valdes recently published an open letter to Demi Moore, in which she compares Moore’s personal problems to Valdes’ own struggles with BPD.

Six foot five inch comedian Doug Farrari (“Dougzilla“) demonstrates clearly that borderline personality disorder is not just a woman’s disease.  He says he gets his biggest laughs when he talks about the dark side of his borderline disorder—the ugly combination of uncontrollable rage and chronic impulsivity that are hallmarks of the disease.

Zelda Fitzgerald, who died in 1948, is often identified as borderline disordered. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a time when BPD was sometimes called ambulatory schizophrenia, pseudoneurotic schizophrenia, or borderline insanity. 

Perhaps the most creative person with borderline personality disorder is the therapist and researcher Marsha Linehan, Ph.D. She developed the “invalidating environment theory” to explain the cause of the disorder and created dialectical behavioral therapy, a treatment specifically designed for patients at high risk of suicide.  The suicide rate of borderline disordered people is 400 times higher than that of the general population. Author Stacy Pershall credits her recovery to the therapy Linehan created.   

Linehan’s patients could not help but notice that her arms are covered with faded scars, burns, and welts. After decades of denial, Linehan revealed in 2011 that she struggled with the BPD as a young woman and had been hospitalized in 1961 for extreme suicidal behavior. At that time, the BPD diagnosis did not exist and she was diagnosed with Schizophrenia.

What could be more creative than to identify the cause and find the cure of your own mental illness?

 

 

 

 

Alisa Valdes and Borderline Personality Disorder

Alisa Valdes spoke at Collected Works Bookstore the other night about her new book, “The Feminist and the Cowboy.”  A few days later, her blog post, “Shit Borderline Moms Say,” popped up in a Google Alert.  Her borderline mom lives in Santa Fe, naturally.

New Post: The Alisa Valdes Magic Show

At least 3,000 people struggle with borderline personality here in Santa Fe, according to epidemiological surveys of mental illness across the United States.  I would argue that the borderline population in Santa Fe is much larger, because Santa Fe has become a Mecca for people struggling with the identity issues.  Lacking a stable personal identity, some borderlines try to create an identity by linking themselves to a specific location.
Research suggests that a major cause of personality disorders is having a parent who is psychotic or borderline.  The specific disorder a child will develop is dependent on how the child was used by his or her toxic mother.  Some mothers use their children to give themselves an identity—“I am a perfect mother and this is my perfect child.”  Such children grow up self absorbed and narcissistic.

Other mothers ignore and devalue, blaming their child for everything that goes wrong.  These mother project their own bad feelings onto their child.  When a child’s own feelings and emotions are constantly invalidated, the child fails to develop a cohesive identity and remains emotionally stuck in childhood, which is why borderline women often act like two-year-olds. 

Alisa Valdes says she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder in 2011.  The blogasphere is now filled with stories about her borderline love affair with a Texas cowboy.  It turns out her Rambo was in fact a rapist.  Or was he?  She loved him.  Or she hated him.  It’s a borderline thing. 

Borderline women are sometimes drawn to men with caretaker personalities.  Virtually all the women who have been sexually abused by their psychiatrists have been borderline.  Caretakers, like therapists, are willing to tolerate the roller coaster emotions of borderline women.

Alisa hates caretaker personalities.  She loved them once, but not anymore.  Now she says they are weak and emasculated and calls them “icky liberal men.” 

In her book talk at Collected Works, she said she now rejects liberal Marxist feminism and embraces female submission to a perfect macho man.  Her book describes her brief borderline love affair with her middle-aged Republican cowboy.  He was her perfect macho soul mate.

Alisa’s father is an outstanding scholar and emeritus professor at UNM.  Years ago, I took his graduate level course on the history and sociology of Cuba, the country of his birth.  He was certainly idiosyncratic, and his clothes were obviously not his priority.  He once came to class for an entire week with trouser legs of different lengths. 

He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Cuba and expects his students to master the assigned readings and do independent research.  His lectures included everything from a discussion of mob influence in pre-revolutionary Cuba to stories of how mothers living near the Bay of Pigs began naming their newborns “Usnavy” after witnessing the failed invasion. 

I loved his class, but many students did not.  Fifty percent of the student evaluations on “Rate the Professor” label him a poor teacher.  These students complain that he did not lecture from the textbook and that he did not teach to the test.  These complaints are childish, in my view.  Adult students should not expect spoon-feeding in a graduate level course. 

The Professor had a reputation for being a ladies' man.  One fellow student said he “is just another macho Cuban, like Desi Arnaz.”  Indeed, the Professor himself alluded to Cuban machismo when he told us how the CIA found it impossible to maintain security at the mercenary training camp they set up in Mexico for Cuban exiles preparing for the invasion.  Despite a camp lockdown, Cuban trainees would sneak into town every night to hook up with women of easy virtue.  Cuban machismo was all about courage and sex.

Another classmate did not know much about economics, so I loaned her “Elementary Price Theory” by Peter Dooley.  One day she told me she had a crush on our professor, and was delighted when he began inviting her out for coffee and more.  

I wonder if Alisa’s search for the perfect macho man is a search for somebody just like dear old dad.

Alisa describes her relationship with her cowboy in typical “I hate you, don’t leave me” borderline style.  She loved him.  He was her master.  Then she hated him.  He was her monster. 

Finally, she imagined that her cowboy was planning to murder her.  She literally runs away, fleeing into the arms of the next perfect lover.  She sounds just like Sally, my borderline fiancée in Santa Fe.  Every borderline’s story is completely different, but their pathological behavior is exactly the same. 

The borderline relationship Alisa describes in her book was just another failed relationship.  Every partner was perfect until he was not.  Each man was her hero.  Then he was zero.  It is of course not her fault.  Nothing is ever her fault.  It’s a borderline thing.

Alisa complains that her publisher is not supportive now that she has told her truth about her cowboy.  Like all borderlines, she feels empty and unloved.  Any failure to give unconditional support is experienced by her as total betrayal and rejection.  She feels just like she did when her mother failed to support her when she was a little girl.  Whenever she feels traumatized, she must act out.  She has no other coping skills. 

It has happened before.  In 2000, Valdes accused her employer, The St. Petersburg Times, of racism and discrimination.  Her accusations were contained in the snotty tirade that was her letter of resignation.  She claimed that the paper’s use of the word “Latino” is a form of genocide.  The word “Latino” was bad. 

Alisa now runs a Latina Book Club and is Latina Magazine’s Woman of the Year.  Latina is empowering.  Latina is good.  Black is white and white is black.  It’s a borderline thing.

The trauma that a borderline mother inflicts on her daughter is devastating to the child’s emotional development.  Unless someone comes to the child’s aid, the victimized little girl remains emotionally stuck in the earliest years of childhood, reacting for the rest of her life as if she was a defenseless little girl.  Borderline women never overcome the damage their mothers have inflicted on them.  With proper therapy, however, they can learn how to cope.

My heart goes out to Alisa and I wish her well, even if that makes me another emasculated icky liberal man.

Alisa's "borderline thing" continues in the comments section below...