Borderline
The borderline personality disorder is characterized significantly by instability in terms of the mood of the person. By instability, we mean that the person undergoes severe depression, anger or anxiety. These emotions happen usually and most probably without any reasonable cause at all.
The website http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/borderline-personality-disorder.shtml defines borderline as a disorder that is “characterized by pervasive instability in moods, interpersonal relationships, self-image, and behaviour.” Persons who have been diagnosed with this illness are pictured to have times of intense self-doubt and even times of utmost self-importance. They are often having difficulties in their relationships with other people. These people may also describe certain emptiness in themselves, and they may resort to meeting new people who, they feel, might fill the emptiness they experience.
Statistics shows that borderline personality disorder is a more common condition compared to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. It affects 2 percent of adults and more common to young women.
The previously mentioned website lists down the symptoms of borderline personality disorder. These include transient dissociative states, where diagnosed people have the feeling of losing track of time and forgetting their identity. Extreme depression and anger are frequently felt by these people as a result of misinterpreting other people’s actions and consider these as rejection or abandonment.
In another website, http://www.stanford.edu/~corelli/borderline.html, it states that the symptoms of borderline personality disorder also consist of “unpredictable and impulsive behaviour which might include excessive spending, promiscuity, gambling, drug or alcohol abuse, shoplifting, overeating or physically self-damaging actions such as suicide gestures.”
The people also experience disturbances in their identity and an unstable performance in their work. Because the relationships they have with other people are also unstable and are not healthy, they tend to have extreme depression and express this by cutting or burning themselves. This can further result to serious suicide attempts.