What are the symptoms of BPD?
Individuals with BPD display a pattern of dramatic mood swings, irritability, and intense anger. Mood swings typically occur in response to stressful life situations, and in particular to difficulties in interpersonal relationships or interpersonal conflict. Individuals with BPD are intensely sensitive to rejection or perceived abandonment, and when they feel they are being abandoned they often respond with explosive anger or with self-injurious or suicidal behavior. Because these behaviors take a toll on close interpersonal relationships, individuals with BPD often provoke the very rejection and abandonment they fear. Other BPD symptoms include feelings of emptiness or boredom; identity confusion; and impulsive behavior such as over-spending, risky sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, or binge eating. BPD individuals sometimes display brief stress-related periods of paranoid or irrational thinking. They also tend to think in “black and white” terms, alternating between extremes of
