Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a condition in which people have significant difficulty with emotion regulation, instability of sense of self, and difficulty with interpersonal relations. The advocacy group National Alliance for Mental Illness reports that BPD affects 1.4 percent of the population, 75 percent women.
According to the DSM-5, BPD is associated with the following signs and symptoms:
- An intense fear of abandonment, even going to extreme measures to avoid real or imagined separation or rejection.
- A pattern of unstable intense relationships, such as idealizing someone one moment and then suddenly believing the person doesn’t care enough or is cruel.
- Rapid changes in self-identity and self-image that include shifting goals and values, and seeing yourself as bad or as if you don’t exist at all.
- Periods of stress-related paranoia and loss of contact with reality, lasting from a few minutes to a few hours.