If you know a young person living with BPD, it’s important to find effective and specialist treatment. While this can take some time, it can make a huge difference in the life of a young person and their family. Living with BPD is really hard, but with the right support, young people can recover.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious mental health disorder that affects the way a young person sees themselves and interacts with the world around them. Young people with BPD often have an unstable or incoherent sense of self, patterns of unstable relationships, and intense emotional reactions. They may experience chronic feelings of emptiness and a fear of abandonment by others.
Dissociative experiences often happen when someone is exposed to a traumatic event. When someone experiences trauma, they may be overwhelmed by stress and detach, in some way, from their experience, emotions, and/or body. People who have experienced acute trauma often describe dissociating from their bodies and watching something happen to themselves.
For adolescents with BPD, early intervention and timely treatment are crucial to prevent long-term harm such as other mental health conditions or problems in school and social life. But research on adolescent treatment for BPD is still relatively limited and many established treatments for adults haven’t been studied among young people with the disorder.
Perfectionism – and particularly socially-prescribed perfectionism – is a common characteristic of young people with BPD and associated with a range of borderline personality traits.
Young people with borderline personality disorder often experience episodes of paranoia and feelings of suspicion towards other people. These experiences can cause distress and affect
Many clinicians are still reluctant to diagnose BPD in adolescents before they are 18. Stigma and misconceptions surrounding personality disorders cause clinicians to avoid the diagnosis, despite strong evidence that many young people show stable and persistent BPD symptoms. Instead, young people may be diagnosed with anxiety disorders, mood disorders, or psychotic disorders.
Childhood trauma is one of the most important risk factors for the development of BPD. Many instances of childhood trauma happen within the family environment, through relationships and interactions between a child and their caregivers. These experiences can have a big impact on a young person’s emotional and social development, affecting the way they manage emotions and form relationships with others. Experts think these changes may underpin key traits and features of BPD.
Research suggests that personality disorders are, to a large extent, caused by distressing or adverse experiences during childhood that affect the way young people develop emotionally and socially. Consequently, some young people with personality disorders see their behaviours as a normal response to the trauma they have experienced.
As much as family systems can be fundamental in the development of BPD, they may also be crucial it’s treatment and recovery, especially among adolescents and young adults. Family interventions can help to establish family structures, parenting skills, and interpersonal family dynamics that lead to more stable interpersonal relationships, better emotional regulation, and fewer self-harming behaviours.
Families usually constitute young people’s closest relationships and support systems. That’s why family therapy is so important in the treatment of anorexia nervosa. Working with young people and their families, family therapy sessions support families in overcoming unhelpful behaviours that may reinforce eating disorder symptoms, replacing them with positive systems of relationships that nurture lasting change.
Families are not to blame for the development of eating disorders. However, eating disorders are serious mental health conditions that can strain the relationships within any family. It’s common for families affected by eating disorders to face challenges relating to one another and caring for a young person with an eating disorder.
Some people think that anorexia nervosa is just about food, body shape, or weight. But the reality is much more complicated. Anorexia is caused and
