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?
