despair

I have a major psychiatric disability:  borderline personality disorder.  I also experience major depression.  I have been 'officially' diagnosed manic depressive by a couple psychiatrists --  I've seen several of them over the years. When I used to take psychotropic meds, I had to had a psychiatrist. Some states allow nurse practitioners or certain levels of licensed MSW (masters of social work) to write meds. There are no meds for a personality disorder, which is just what the phrase suggests, a disordered personality, hardwired into a person in childhood.

I believe my disorder began as soon as I was born.  I believe both my parents were borderlines.


I don't believe anyone really knows what it means to have a mental health disability.  I know there are people who devote their lives to the issues, and many who do lots of putatively scientific research under the title of professional mental health studies. I know some mental health care practitioners  are genuinely called to help folks with mental health disabilities heal. I believe there are natural healers. And I believe people who invest many years to train, to get MSW, PhD', and all kinds of expertise help simply because they invest their life force in good intention.  You know what Napoleon Hill said in Think and Grow Rich:  what the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. Hill was focussed on showing people how to will themselves rich.  I think he got the power of the human mind right but he got the idea of using the power of the human mind to make money wrong.  I think the human mind should only be used to achieve good, and, I think, the common good.  More and more, I think community, the human community, matters more than any individual. But I am unwell and unable to make much contribution to the human community, other than to care for myself and be less of a burden on the whole.

Lots of people have personality disorders. Who doesn't know a narcissist, one who is narcissistic to the personality disorder level?  I just ready a story, at The Atlantic, about the writer's encounter with Joan Didion a few decades ago. Apparently many who have run into Didion believe she is a narcissistic and believed that her also renown-writer husband was as well.

As my marriage counselor turned individual therapist told me bck in the eighties when I was getting divorced from a severely disordered husband, he said that many peole with serious disorders function in their jobs and this causes most people to believe the disordered people aren't crazy. Look, they say, he has a big-shot job, he makes 200K a year, he can't be crazy. But if you talk to the people who have to interact with such a theoretical person, such as their immediate subordinates or their family, you find another story.

My PhD psychologist told me, around 1984, that I had direct personal experience with someone who was severely disordered but had a very responsible, prestigious position but in his personal life, he was a nutter. Dr. No-Name told me that my ex-husband would have to have residential psychiatric care for at least five to seven years if he was ever going to heal from his multiple personality disorders.  He had been subponaed as an 'expert witness' in my chils custody litigation -- by my ex, not by me. 

One thing my ex never figured on