What isn BPD?
One popular misunderstanding of BPD is to mistake it for its symptoms. Idiosyncratic teenager behaviour (getting piercings and tatoos, sitting in a dark and musty room listening to Kurt Cobain and Judas Priest all day), for example, isn’t BPD — it’s fairly normal for teenagers to behave that way. Self – mutilating behaviour (slashing one’s under arms or burning skin with cigarettes) can be a symptom for BPD, but they do not constitute the illness — BPs may not exhibit this sort of behaviour, and people who do might not be BPs. BPD is a pervasive, degenerative and permanent pattern of generally destructive behaviour which takes the form of acting in (self – injuring) and acting out (hurting close friends and family). It is distinct from …
