Borderline Personality Disorder is one of the most common and painful mental illnesses to deal with.

BPD is a biosocial illness in which a highly sensetive person is raised in a non validating environment where their feelings and needs are ridiculed, ignored or punished. The sufferer begins to believe that what he or she perceives is not real because those around him or her imply that it is not. Often this occurs in a situation of physical, sexual or emotional abuse and leads to distorted thinking and disorted self image.

The symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder include fear of real or imagined abadonment, unstable self image, impulsivity in behavior, self harming urges and behavior and in some cases repeated attempts at suicide.

Patients are difficult to work with because their distored thinking often leads them to not trust care givers and to give up on treatment before there is a chance for the treatment to work. Since highly deprseeive episodes go with the symptoms listed above sometimes sufferers become to depressed to even seek or work on treatment. This can lead to suicide attempts. Approximately 10 percent of all BPD sufferers manage to successfully commit suicide before they can adequate treated.

In addition BPD also often presents itself with a concommiting eating disorder, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and serious Dissassociative Disorders. This illness is so difficult to live with and treat, but there has been success with some new treatments.

Especially effective has been Dialectical Behavioral Therapy which teaches sufferers skills in mindfulness, interpersonal relationships and self soothing techniques that can help the BPD sufferer to spend more time in the moment, being conscious of the value of relationships while soothing their own sense of panic and in adequacy. DBT involves using a set a skills to help the patient put life in perspective and begin to take control of the chaos that is characteristic of the illness. These skills take time to learn and integrate and should thus be taught along with a regime of therapy and sometimes medications.

For many years doctors believed that BPD could not be cured but most now agree that it can be controlled with the use of behavioral therapy and ongoing talk therapy.