A Real Affliction: BPD, Culture, and Stigma

“A Vulnerability Artist Who Fights Ableism”: Dr. Merri Lisa Johnson on BPD

What does writing from the frontline of BPD look like? If the author is borderline up-ender Dr. Lisa Johnson, it looks and sounds like a witty, raw, and dazzling conflagration. In this interview, she and I discuss her memoir, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality, and share our experiences of navigating academia while being open about our BPD diagnoses.
Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet
Merri Lisa Johnson, “Neuroqueer Feminism: Turning with Tenderness toward Borderline Personality Disorder”
Courtney Cook, The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces
bell hooks, All About Love and other books
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Marsha Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living
Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"
Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
Stacy Pershall, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl
Kiera van Gelder, The Buddha and the Borderline
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

Movement therapy for BPD with psychotherapist Ellis Amdur

Can movement therapy support people with BPD? In this interview, psychotherapist, licensed martial artist, and acclaimed writer Ellis Amdur describes his success with teaching baduanjin qigong, a Chinese breathing and movement system, to a patient suffering from acute BPD.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources:
Links to Ellis Amdur’ books
Cynthia Gralla, “Double Bind: How Borderline Personality Disorder Tied Me in Knots” published by SLICE in their May 2022 Levity online issue
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score

“There is no final destination for a human being”: Psychotherapist Ellis Amdur

How do therapists come to think of BPD after a long career? In this conversation with Ellis Amdur—a retired psychotherapist, award-winning writer, and licensed martial artist—he offers his perspective on BPD, including what a background in Jungian psychology taught him about our singular and ever-evolving journeys. Trigger warning: This episode mentions suicide.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources:
Links to Ellis Amdur’ books
Patricia Barry, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology
Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
Reiner Stach, Is That Kafka? 99 Finds
Weird Studies podcast, On James Hillman’s “The Dream and the Underworld”

“He was provoking all these symptoms he had wanted to cure”: Nina Shope, author of Asylum

How have power dynamics between doctors and patients changed over the past century and a half? In my second and final interview with Nina Shope, author of the award-winning historical novel Asylum, we talk about the complicated relationship between neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his most famous patient as he treated her for hysteria and documented her in photographs during the 1870s. Nina reflects on the photograph of Augustine that she chose to include in her novel, how she avoided flattening historical figures or reducing Augustine to past trauma, and the mythological roots in both the history of female madness and Charcot’s photography.
Nina Shope, Asylum
Nina Shope, “Changeling.” Conjunctions, Vol. 81 (“Numina: The Enchantment Issue), Fall 2023
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Maud Casey, The City of Incurable Women
Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière
Euripides, The Bacchae
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Selby Wynn Schwartz, After Sappho
Emily Wells, A Matter of Appearance

“I was fascinated with showing the things behind hysteria that were being erased”: Nina Shope on Asylum

What did BPD look like in the 19th century? It looked like hysteria, a phenomenon that puzzled doctors and fascinated the public. In this episode, I interview Nina Shope, author of the award-winning historical novel Asylum, which explores the power dynamics between Jean-Martin Charcot, the father of neurology as we know it today, and his most famous patient. In the shadows of this dynamic, we find symptoms and conceptualizations of female illness familiar to those of us who experience or study BPD today.
Nina Shope, Asylum
Christopher Bollas, Hysteria
Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière
Sarah Shun-lien, Madeleine Is Sleeping
Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady

"Insurance companies are breaking the law": Paula Tusiani-Eng of Emotions Matter

How can we access expensive care? In the US, being diagnosed with BPD is often the first step in an odyssey through a complex and unjust health care system. In the second part of my interview with Paula Tusiani-Eng, co-founder of Emotions Matter, she discusses how to get life-saving coverage from your insurer, the wonderful success of her organization's peer support groups, the wild creativity that many of us with BPD have, and why we need an intersectional approach to treating and supporting BPD.
Resources for this episode:
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources:
Emotions Matter website
Bea Tusiani, Pamela Tusiani, and Paula Tusiani-Eng, Remnants of a Life on Paper: A Mother and Daughter’s Struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder
Frank Yeomans, Paula Tusiani-Eng, and Kellyanne Navarre, “California Approves Law Granting Pretrial Diversion for BPD”

What I wish I’d known about getting a PhD with BPD

In this solo bonus episode, I talk about what I learned while getting my MA and PhD at Berkeley and offer tips for anyone who wants to pursue a higher education degree while managing their BPD. It can be done!

“How do I meet other people with BPD?”: Paula Tusiani-Eng of Emotions Matter

What do people with BPD need? When Paula Tusiani-Eng co-founded a BPD non-profit after the tragic loss of her sister Pamela, she realized that we often need more community support. In this interview, Paula tells me about Pamela’s struggle with BPD in the 1990s and how Emotions Matter has built a community for others like her.
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources:
Emotions Matter website
Bea Tusiani, Pamela Tusiani, and Paula Tusiani-Eng, Remnants of a Life on Paper: A Mother and Daughter’s Struggle with Borderline Personality Disorder
Evan A. Iliakis et al., “Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder: Is Supply Adequate to Meet Public Health Needs?”

“I Love Us”: Melanie Goldman on living with and treating BPD

How can people with BPD find their voice? In this candid interview, the radiant and loving Melanie Goldman (@mindovermelanie) tells me her story of lived experience with BPD, from the shock of the diagnosis to the joys of advocacy and reclaiming her voice. She also shares wisdom from her training as a registered psychotherapist and her ultimate goal of treating others with BPD. 

Is No Longer Human about BPD—and should we even ask that question?

Can we diagnose the narrator of Osamu Dazai’s novel, No Longer Human, with BPD or some other diagnosis? And does it make sense to try? In this bonus summer solo episode, I give my perspective as a Japanese literature scholar and a person with BPD.
Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human
Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author”
Shirley Dent, “Don’t ‘Diagnose’ Fictional Characters”
Jared D. Fife, “Stuff Psychologists Like—#1. Diagnosing Fictional Characters”
Edward Fowler, The Rhetoric of Confession
Cynthia Gralla, “Suicide Contagion and the Risks of Literature”
Cynthia Gralla, “Dream Girls Gotta Have Agency”
Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality
Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs, Heaven, and All the Lovers in the Night
Craig M. Klugman and Carol Levine, “Diagnosing Shosha: Literature As a Lens to View Disease and History”
Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Yukio Mishima, The Sea of Fertility tetralogy
Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan
Narrative medicine at Columbia University