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Thursday, May 30, 2013

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?

 

 

 

 

14 comments:

  1. Thank you for your post. It is encouraging to me. -an anonymous musician who suffers from BPD.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello fellow/sister anonymous musician struggling with BPD! Just wanted to say hi and you're not alone. We anonymous musicians need to stick together :) Sometimes it really helps to have a reminder that BPD has certain gifts as well.

      Delete
  2. BPD is ruining my life but somehow my art gets better...

    ReplyDelete
  3. I was diagnosed with BPD in my 20's but believe I was born with it. I always knew I was different and labelled as a freak by my peers for my uncontrolled rage and inability to *See* the world as a normal person did. It's nice to know that my creativity was not a fluke but part of this unique mindset. I have never wanted to lose the disorder because is part of me now. I just need to talk to it and find a way for us both to work together for common goals.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I was diagnosed last year and believe borderline brings up the best I am as an artist. I am a writer, photographer and a painter. The sad part is that I tend to switch from one thing to another. I would like to photograph, paint and write every day, but days have only 24 hours. It takes too much energy to switch when it doesn't occur naturally.

    ReplyDelete
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