Seeing yourself, or Borderline Personality Disorder in the media

“I am better now. Word of honour, I am better now. 

I was really sick for a while though” 

~ Breakfast of Champions, 

Kurt Vonnegut

Section 1: The Beepadeeps

So I have BPD - Borderline Personality Disorder. Up front, this is going to be the shitty part of this essay, because I need to tell you about BPD, the Beepadeeps. The Beepadeeps is my personal cutesy nickname for devastating mood swings, frequent suicidal ideation, body image issues, crushing fear of abandonment. Fun!

The main symptom of BPD is wild mood swings, with really intense emotional bursts, sometimes swinging into a place of emotional exhaustion like a rapid onset depression. This leads pretty quickly into a really horrible situation, where you had a huge emotional outburst but now you feel nothing because you’re emotionally exhausted, and then worrying about how you’ve made the people around you feel, and feeling like your emotional outburst wasn’t real, like it was totally fake, because right now you can’t feel a thing, so you’re pretty sure you’re just a horrible person and a manipulative liar.

Honestly, just before getting my diagnosis, and a little while afterwards I felt a lot of the time like I was just, essentially, an awful person, like I was a liar, like nothing I ever did was valid or real, like I was just a toxic person. It felt pretty hopeless, like there was really no way for me to escape from being the bad guy. It really doesn’t help that people with the beepadeeps are given this reputation by so many other people, and if you didn’t know, oh boy is this stereotype put around by people who don’t have BPD. 

I’ve been in discussions between people about relationships where people will offer kind, compassionate advice, showing understanding that everyone is just a human being with their own internal struggles and the topic will turn to experiences of dating people with the beepadeeps, and suddenly the empathy and compassion evaporates out of the room by magic. Suddenly, these people’s ex partners are monstrous,crazy, psychopathic subhuman animals who don’t deserve to be loved and if you’re in a relationship with someone with BPD you just have to get out now bro before they go totally psycho on you. Cool and good, cool and good, thanks guys.

In fact, so many psychologists seem to think that people with Borderline Personality Disorder just basically suck that there was a measured resistance against diagnosing people with BPD, for fear of the stigma the patient might receive, even when the only people who would give the patients that stigma were the psychiatrists who had convinced themselves that we beepadeep sufferers were evil manipulative goblin people.

So the basic setup is, everything feels like the most extreme unbearable scary situation, the world is constantly made of knives, and you get emotionally exhausted from being permanently overwhelmed and convince yourself that nothing you ever felt was real and you’re a terrible person, and everyone else agrees. Fun! But, the fun doesn’t stop there, because people with BPD experience Other Symptoms™©®

One common symptom is known as “splitting”, and is more or less the accidental practice of sorting every person you meet into saints and devils, putting way too much trust into everyone you like because everyone you like is a saint and heaping way too much hate on people you dislike because everyone you dislike is literally Hitler. I have of course transcended this issue by being friends with Jack Saint, who is an actual saint, and by only hating actual nazis.

People with BPD also suffer with issues with object permanence. This is a term you might already know to do with child development - when children develop object permanence they essentially learn that objects still exist when they aren’t looking at them. People with BPD don’t lack this kind of object permanence - we know things exist when we aren’t looking at them - they have trouble with maintaining confidence in their relationships when they’re away from people. This stems from that crushing fear of abandonment I mentioned earlier. Yay!

Borderline Personality Disorder is very very likely to be co-morbid with other conditions like depression, eating disorders, ADHD, you name it basically. Even more Yay!

People with BPD are also more likely to be bisexual, and polyamorous apparently, so just when I thought maybe I was a naturally quirky and interesting person… it turns out I'm just a basic beepadeep binch.

I’ve had to learn to adjust over time to the symptoms of the beepadeeps, and I’m happy to say that with a lot of help from people around me, at the least I don’t feel like an actively bad person any more. In a more measurable sense, I am doing a whole load better now. I went through a period where I used to have panic attacks daily, sometimes more than daily, and nowadays I only have panic attacks when I think about the Tory leadership race!

I don’t mean to deflect away from the topic by just making jokes, but it’s obviously quite painful to reflect on this time of my life, even if it feels good to see how far I’ve come. I used to have panic attacks every day, usually on my lunch break from work. Sometimes it would be so bad I’d have to leave work early, other times I’d stay in but just be utterly useless for the afternoon.

So unavoidably I need to mention that when I was working full time I was completely miserable, and not just in a I-don’t-like-this-job way or a I-wish-I-had-better-pay way or even a capitalism-sucks way… well in kind of a capitalism-sucks way. I believe that working full time, 9 to 5 or in many cases longer hours, is inherently pretty terrible for you, and in my case especially, grappling with all these symptoms plus just an underlying fear of abandonment, getting up, commuting in, working all day, getting back having dinner and sleeping and having no energy to really do anything else with my day, made me about a thousand times worse. I couldn’t handle it at all - and that’s not to say I could never handle it, but there was never going to be room for me to become healthy in that system. In the year of being self-employed since my last full time job, despite worries about rent, despite having to deal with the terrible UK benefits system, despite any personal struggles or politically oppressive climate looming over me, I’ve never been happier.

Of course there are things that provide different stresses about self-employment, and in particular YouTube, but I think they’re stresses I can manage a lot better.

People obviously talk about “YouTuber burnout” a lot, that’s been a recent hot-topic, but I mean the ways that people act in videos on YouTube to make popular content. There’s a pull to perform extreme emotions in video content, in order to be entertaining, especially to be performatively angry, and honestly… that shit’s just bad for you.

My emotions are extreme enough already, and maybe for other people pretending to get really really really mad about a game or a movie because that makes their video about it funnier is just a fun thing to do, a way to perform, but for me it’s exhausting, and it encourages this idea of myself that I can fall into way too easily, and get kind of stuck in. When you’re getting mad about everything, and making this energetic, cool, sarcastic version of yourself, and people are watching you and validating that that’s the right way to be, you can just get trapped in that mode, and that’s why I’ve always made a conscious effort to talk about things I like on this channel.

As I’ve said, I know, based on my diagnosis, that other people don’t have such big feelings as me, so it’s not going to be the same issue for everyone.

I see people posting stuff that’s like “my favourite character died in this show. Man that was so sad I nearly cried” or like “two years since my parents died today, cried for ten seconds and felt a lot better” and that stuff seems wild to me. I cry all the time. At movies, at books, at games, at average everyday occurrences.

Here are some reasons I might be crying on an average day: I watched a children’s cartoon and I forgot to eat lunch so I wasn’t stable enough to handle it; I remembered the line “you’re still beautiful to me, cos you’re my mom” from Headlights by Eminem; I was listening to an audiobook in the supermarket and I heard the line “everything was impossible and his stomach hurt"; I saw a bunny in a pet shop and I thought too hard about how much I could love it if I had enough space for it to live with me. Those are all real examples.

I think I’ve learned to be pretty good at dealing with my symptoms now, although there isn’t really a good solution to just suddenly crying because you saw an encouraging tweet, you just have to learn to be okay with crying really. One of the main things I’ve found is that communicating well is a good blanket solution to dealing with a lot of beepadeep-related problems, and as a result I have noticed that my fellow beepadeep sufferers who have been working on themselves a little while since their diagnoses tend to be some of the best, most open and direct communicators around. I just thought it was worth saying that, so that I could be the one person saying nice things about people with BPD online.

Okay, that was the rough part, going over the experience of actually having this condition. Surely the rest of the essay will be lighter and easier. Right, let’s look at how BPD is represented in the media!

Section 2: Beepadeeps on TV

In the show It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia, five friends and co-owners of a bar get into various shenanigans. It's a sitcom, what can I say? The thing about Always Sunny is that it derives its humour from a sort of sense of relief. At least I'm not as bad as them. Usually, this means that when the characters are sexist or racist or otherwise bigoted the show doesn't make the marginalised identities the butt of the joke, but rather takes aim at the bigoted characters.

The jokes rarely boil down to ha ha, they're different, and when the jokes are at the expense of someone different the show usually eventually reaches a point and decides it's time to move past it. Take for example Mac, one of the main characters, coming to terms with his sexuality: for many seasons the show derived humour not from the fact that he was gay, but from the fact that everyone knew he was gay and he was bizarely ignorant of it, eventually leading to a point where Mac just happily comes out of the closet when the joke seems played out, and the show even ended a later season with a deeply moving piece of interpretative dance mirroring the conflict between Mac's strict belief in catholicism and his sexuality.

The show, however, isn't always so kind, because it is also one of a very few representations of Borderline Personality Disorder in the media. Another main character, Dennis, is explicitly diagnosed with BPD at one point in the show, and a pretty unceasing source of comedy is the strong implication that Dennis may be a serial killer. He explodes in screaming rampages at people, he threatens people around him when he feels angry, he has a terrifying method for seducing women that involves making them emotionally dependent on him and then disappearing, and it is all but spelled out for the audience that Dennis is a sexual abuser.

To a group of people who already feel like they are the bad guy because of their mental illness, Dennis is really not something they need to see.

As an aside, I wish people would stop representing villains, and antagonists as mentally unwell, because even besides the obvious harm of it, it’s just… wrong? Like, people with nothing wrong in their lives are generally the ones who do the most harm - and with a certain hypocrisy, as well. Victims in situations are so often accused of the exact things being done to them.

People with mental health issues are way more likely to be attacked than to attack someone. People of colour are called fragile and “too sensitive about race” and like…. Have you tried pointing out that a white person is white? They hate that shit. Trans people are accused of being creeps who will assault people in bathrooms and changing rooms, but actually trans people are astronomically more likely to be assaulted in bathrooms than assault anyone. There is a recogniseable trend of trans people getting UTIs from not feeling able to go into bathrooms, because they aren’t safe there.

And yes, people with BPD are accused of being manipulative and abusive, and are much more likely to be abused or manipulated than to abuse or manipulate people - I mean, as a group they have really strong emotions that they can’t trust are proportional or reasonable reactions to their situations. That alone makes people with the beepadeeps unusually vulnerable to gaslighting - to people telling them they are unable to correctly understand the world around them.

To be clearer about this, I don’t mean that no abusers, bullies or harassers have mental health issues. I’m talking about the villains and antagonists, and when it comes to horror, even monsters in our stories.

Trying to give a villain in a story a mental illness works just about the same way as trying to diagnose a terrible person in real life with one. The efforts to diagnose Adolf Hitler, historically, with various mental illnesses have been continuous and intense, and for a more modern example tonnes of people try to diagnose Donald Trump with mental illnesses. I don’t want to talk about what illnesses Trump has, there’s one thing wrong with him and it’s that he’s fascist trash.

But anyway, that's not about the beepadeeps, so let's talk about the beepadeeps.

Crazy Ex Girlfriend is a musical comedy series about a lawyer, Rebecca Bunch, who moves to a small town because she finds out a boy she dated for one summer as a teenager over a decade ago lives there. If you hadn't guessed, she isn't in the best mental state, and although it takes several seasons to get to this point, she is eventually diagnosed with *drumroll* Borderline Personality Disorder.

She also continually experiences life as a set of musical theatre songs, and people with BPD don’t hallucinate life as musical theatre though, so Rebecca Bunch must have BPD comorbid with… um… uh…

Across the whole show Rebecca does some pretty atrocious and bad stuff, including but not limited to: stalking; manipulation; more stalking; gaslighting; an homage to the musical Cats; conspiracy to murder; lots of stalking.

But you know what, she's still a lot better than Dennis. 

Even if Rebecca Bunch is meant to be pretty extreme, the songs about mental health - although they aren’t my favourite song from the whole show - are really meaningful. There’s one about how freeing it is to get a diagnosis and not just feel like you’re a random collection of garbage brokenness, there’s one about how you shouldn’t feel bad if you need to take medication, there’s one called “You ruined everything you stupid bitch” and hell if that isn’t a mood. That is pretty exactly how I feel whenever I mess anything up, spot on. Thank you Crazy Ex Girlfriend.

Actually, Crazy Ex Girlfriend is a sympathetic look at not just mental illness but all sorts of issues that we tend to overlook about normal adult relationships. Rebecca's journey across the series is framed as a romantic drama, but ultimately it turns out to be about learning to appreciate not just the great people she has around her, but see that she has value beyond any romantic partner.

Overall Crazy Ex Girlfriend is absolutely incredible. As opposed to in Always Sunny where the characters are such bad people the audience is reassured that they aren’t as bad as them, and one of the things that’s bad about one of the characters is BPD, in Crazy Ex Girlfriend the character has BPD, and she does awful things that suck and it’s reassuring to other people with BPD who aren’t as bad as her. It’s a subtle but also enormous difference.

Crazy Ex Girlfriend is constructed around creating a helpful and relatable experience for people with similar mental health struggles, and that kicks ass.

After talking about the beepadeeps for a bit, what I want to tell anyone else watching with BPD is you are lovable, and you deserve to be loved, no matter how much you feel the opposite way about yourself.

But when I think about Crazy Ex Girlfriend I think there's something more than that I'd like to say, about how much more than just lovable you are, but honesty it seems very hard to put into words, so maybe all I can say is I really think if you haven't already, you should watch this show.

BPD isn't a particularly well represented condition, but a funny thing is, you could realistically read a lot of people in films and TV shows as having BPD, to be perfectly honest, especially the sort of “troubled protagonist” archetype.

Don Draper? Beepadeeps.

Saul Goodman? Yeaahhhh beepadeeps.

All your favourite soap opera characters? BPD.

Rick Sanchez? Oh boy yeah probably.

All female love interests in essentially everything.

Bojack Horseman? Beepadeeps for sure.

These aren’t actual instances of representation of BPD, I’m just saying that the way people write characters to be melodramatic, quick to temper, secretive, promiscuous… yeah they read like they have BPD pretty well… and they’re still better representation than Dennis.

Section 3: it me

I put out some questions on twitter to investigate this stuff, and while people’s responses didn’t hugely surprise me given my own experience, it was utterly fascinating to hear other people’s experiences. On the one hand, this is far from a scientific investigation and couldn't be considered “data” by any definition, and on the other hand I asked three questions LET'S GOOOOOO

My first question was if you've seen your diagnosis represented in media, how do you feel about what you saw?

There are some conditions, like Schizophrenia or Dissociative Identity Disorder (colloquially called Split personalities) for which it shouldn't be a particularly controversial take to say: they don't have good representation. In fact, it shouldn't even rock the boat to say their representation is appalling dogshit and the people who make those pieces of media should be ashamed.

On the other hand, some people are pretty happy with how their diagnosis is represented in media. Generally speaking, people are happiest with it when the representation is accurate, even if the reality of their condition is an upsetting one. It’s similar to how, counterintuitively, it can feel freeing to be given a diagnosis because it means that your problems are a known quantity, something that people in general have dealt with before.

My second question was how do you feel about characters who exhibit your symptoms but don't explicitly have a diagnosis?

This was a really interesting one, because a lot of autistic people responded saying there was a lot of this done for autism that they felt really uncomfortable about, especially because it relied on stereotypes of what autistic people are like - cold, emotionless, humorless, asexual, stubborn, idiosyncratic - that aren't necessarily true, but audiences tend to understand as communicating autistic traits. To understand this better, let’s examine two terms:

Crypto-autism

Autistic minstrelsy

Crypto-autism is for autistic people what I was pretty much asking about here: characters exhibiting the symptoms of your condition without an explicit diagnosis.

Autistic minstrelsy is when a character portrays an absurd version of autism based on stereotypes about autistic people.

People really have a horrible understanding of how many neurodivergent people behave, and autism is a prime example of that. There is a field within economics referred to as “Post-autistic economics”, based on the stereotype that autistic people love numbers and maths and don’t know how to relate to people. Thanks economists!

At the intersection of these terms, is what people were bothered about - representing characters as having something people assume is autism, but not explicitly saying that the character is autistic either. Not explicitly stating that the character is autistic of course means that the writer can abandon all responsibility for good representation.

This is why on this question, a lot of people told me that they really hate Spock, which I can definitely understand given these factors, but I HAVE SOME FEELINGS ABOUT SPOCK which we'll get back to…

There's something I think people tend to overlook, which at the same time, when you state explicitly seems obvious, which is that when you see yourself represented it can make you realise who you are. A place this is overlooked a lot is among Glinner and the very-online-TERF brigade. Transphobes like to claim that young people with trans friends come out as trans because it's “trendy" in exactly the same way homophobes claim young people come out as queer because it's “trendy", but they're putting the causality back to front. Put simply: there's a reason these kids are making trans friends, or queer friends.

And that's why I wanted to ask my third question: Did you discover your diagnosis after seeing it represented in the media, and if so, how do you feel about it now?

This question actually got a lot of replies from people with the beepadeeps, which is kind of a crazy lucky hit. In a bunch of cases, people with BPD answered this question by saying that they’d actually learned about BPD through watching Crazy Ex Girlfriend and realised that the symptoms and experiences shown were just like their own, and then they investigated and got their diagnosis. I find that really uplifting and exciting, because it means that people are learning about BPD from a piece of media that actually treats people with care, respect and empathy, and more than that the people learning about it are the most important people who need to be reached: people with BPD.

Crazy Ex Girlfriend is the show I would pick for someone to have that experience with - learning about their diagnosis. I wish I’d learned about my diagnosis from that show. I learned about it from Dennis. I heard the name of a condition I’d never heard of before and I looked it up and all the descriptions by people with it were just exactly me, and all the descriptions of people with it were just like things people had said about me, and I knew I had to ask my doctor about it, but always in the back of my mind was Dennis, and how Dennis acts, and how that must be me, and how I must be the bad guy.

I like Always Sunny, it’s one of the funniest shows around in my opinion, and the way the show approaches some issues has not only moved me to tears - although as we know this is a low bar - but I think Always Sunny has opened a lot of people’s eyes to things in a nuanced and complex way. But I can’t ignore the fact I could have spent a lot less time hating myself if Dennis wasn’t the character I learned these words from.

And I guess that’s all a bit of a bummer, so… 

Section 4: I have some feelings about Spock

So I have to agree with the people I talked to: I don’t really like Spock as an autism allegory. If you’re autistic and you do, then that’s obviously okay. We relate to characters we like and characters we think reflect our reality even if other people don’t find those characters to reflect theirs, however Spock is a fairly classic example of that intersection of crypto-autism and autistic minstrelsy where I can totally get it if autistic people feel really sick of being thought of as a robot, as a vulcan.

I didn’t really like Spock as a character very much at all for a while, and I had a hard time getting into The Original Series of Star Trek because of it. I liked it fine enough but The Next Generation is objectively better and my space communist father Picard will always be the best captain, but I didn’t really get into The Original Series until after JJ Abrams’ Star Trek came out, and honestly Spock was a big part of that. In JJ Abrams’ Star Trek an early scene exposes the lore that I didn’t properly understand before, that Vulcans don’t have no feelings. They have big feelings, and they suppress them in favour of logic. Suddenly, I found Spock to be an incredibly compelling character, and I think now I can confidently say that that’s because there’s a reading of Vulcans as being just like being with undiagnosed BPD.

Vulcans are calm and rational on the surface, but really they’re intensely emotional; they’re catty as all holy hell; they always think they know better than everyone else but they really rarely do; they’re more likely to be polyamorous and/or bisexual - wait where did I get that? I know I must have read that somewhere. Probably fanfiction.net…

To give proper credit to Always Sunny, this spockish mode is exactly what they captured in Dennis. Dennis is cold and seemingly emotionless until he has huge emotional outbursts. In an early episode Dennis claims to have not had any feelings since he was a teenager, even though based on his outbursts this is pretty clearly untrue.

And to give a little more credit to Always Sunny, they also went back to confront this issue in a much more recent episode, confronted with the rest of the gang saying that he has no feelings, Dennis says “I don't have no feelings I have feelings I have big feelings”

I have big feelings. And I really could have done with them making that episode sooner.

There is a terrible pain in being spockish. There is constant terror and anger and loneliness and an unease at yourself for feeling nothing when that numbness sets in, and on top of all that a horrible jealousy of everyone else for just being normal. It's just this self-destructive nagging jealousy of everybody else for just being able to express their normal, usual feelings and processing them straightforwardly.

I have been sick. I have been quite sick, but I really am a lot better now.

In his life, Vonnegut expressed sincere suspicion about the idea of going to therapy because he was worried that getting better might make him normal and if he was normal nobody would want to hear what he had to say.

When I was sick, but not too sick, when I had huge feelings but I never let them out I knew pretty simply something was wrong, and I didn’t really want to address it, because I thought I might seriously be less me if I tried to get better. I thought I might not achieve what I wanted to achieve in life if I were to make myself normal.

Now, I realise, nothing could possibly be as important as getting better, as being happy. I had to realise that I can’t live my life just waiting out the storms, I have to learn to dance in the rain. To borrow a metaphor, I might find myself alone in the vast unbearable emptiness of the cosmos,  but I need to know how to say “Hey I’m in space, it’s good, don’t talk to me”