Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night. –Bette Davis

After countless hours of research regarding BPD I stumbled across a book by Paul T. Mason, MS and Randi Kreger called Stop Walking on Eggshells (2nd Ed.). The book is long, informative, and quite honestly tear-jerking. The way that everything gets broken down makes one feel like they are not alone. Right off the bat the book brakes down the fact that “people with BPD feel the same emotions other people do [and] do many of the same things that other people do; the difference is that they:

• feel things more intensely

• act in ways that seem more extreme

• have difficulty regulating their emotions and behavior (Mason and Kreger 13).

This is a simple yet undoubtedly complex explanation for the inner workings of a BPDs emotional mind. The issue is, however, that many people can and will feel the same symptoms a borderline individual experiences at some point or another. Subsequently the ability to diagnose this disorder makes for a daunting task despite its prevalence. “[T]he [recent] rise in borderline diagnoses[, however,] may illustrate something about our particular historical moment” (Cloud 46).

John Cloud wrote in his compelling article Minds on the Edge that “Culturally speaking, many ages have their signature crack-up illness. In the 1950s, an era of postwar trauma, nuclear fear and the self-medicating three-martini lunch, it was anxiety. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, an age of suspicion and Watergate, schizophrenics of the One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest sort captured the imagination—mental patients as paranoid heroes.”

“So, is borderline the illness of our age? When so many of us are clawing to keep homes and paychecks, might we have become more sensitized to other kinds of desperation?

In a world so uncertain, maybe it’s natural to lose one’s emotional skin” (Cloud 46).

http://www.democraticunderground.com/

Mason, Paul T. and Randi Kreger. Stop Walking on Eggshells. Oakland: New Harbringer Publications, Inc., 2010. Print.

Cloud, John. "Minds on the Edge." TIME Your Brain: A User's Guide October 2010: 44-47. Print.

"Lucy." We offered some affordable health care services outside today's Palin/Bachmann rally in Minneapolis. Web. 16 Aug 2010.

Mankiewicz, Joseph, Script. All About Eve. Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz." Perf. Davis, Bette. Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation: Film.