Bipolar vs Borderline Personalty Disorder - How To Tell The Difference? By Dr. Tracey Marks

  

Bipolar disorder versus border line personality disorder what's the difference or how do you tell the difference? That's what I'm gonna talk about today. This is actually based on a viewer question. I'm Dr. Tracey Marks a psychiatrist and I published weekly article on mental health education and self-improvement. The viewer question is from paper parade and she says can you explain the difference between a borderline with depression and bipolar? I'm gonna focus on the difference between bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder because depression is actually a part of bipolar disorder. 

There's a big difference between the personality disorders and the psychiatric illnesses like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. Personality or your personality is your hard wiring and the illnesses are your state at the time. Another analogy would be comparing your personality to the climate of a region and a disorder like depression would be the weather that you're having at the moment. 

I grew up in Florida which is a warm climate and we basically had two seasons: hot and not hot. But then we'd have hurricanes that could rip through and completely disrupt the environment. But once hurricane season passed, we'd still be left with a warm climate. The climate affects how the weather manifests at the time like wise your personality make up affects how your illness manifests. 

So going back to the geographical example, Russia has a very cold climate and this affects the type of storms that you see there. So you get blizzards in cold climates and sand storms and desert climates and tropical storms in tropical climates. 

So if a person with say narcissistic personality disorder gets depressed, it's going to look different from the person with dependent personality disorder who becomes depressed. The narcissistic person because of their self-centeredness may look more angry and self-loathing whereas the dependent person because of their neediness can become more pitiful and helpless when they get too depressed.

 Now these are just broad stroke examples. So back to border line personality disorder, this is actually a really big topic but I'm only going to briefly define the disorder for you and I'm going to use our Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders the fifth edition and I'm going to read the definition. So borderline personality is defined by the following: a pattern of unstable relationships self-image and emotional expression marked by impulsivity,beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts as indicated by five or more of the following.

 It's important that you realize that it's five or more of these characteristics so what you don't want to do is take out one and say oh I have that does that mean I have borderline personality disorder? No unless you have several of these things. 

Number one is frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. An example of this is the person who may seem to read into things too easily. Things that you say are interpreted to mean that you're done with them or that you're abandoning them in some way.

 Number two: a pattern of unstable in intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. In this kind of relationship, the person with borderline personality disorder may at one point think that you're the best thing ever and you can do nothing wrong and in the next moment or the next day you're the worst thing ever, the exact opposite. 

Number three is an identity disturbance You have a markedly persistent or unstable self-image or sense of self. This kind of identity disturbance occurs at a deep level and not to be confused with whether you're not sure if you're meant to be a teacheror an astronaut. This is a confusion about core identity issues like your gender or your sexual.