A Real Affliction: BPD, Culture, and Stigma

“I thought that mental health problems were something that you caught while young”: Lucy Yanow

Can recreational drugs be used to treat BPD in controlled environments? In this interview, I talk with Lucy Yanow, who holds a master’s degree in Bioethics and Society and formerly worked as a midwife, doula, and protector of reproductive rights. I ask her about her experience taking ketamine pills for depression and suicidality, but our conversation detours in rich and surprising ways. Lucy opens up about how her family’s history of suicide has affected her. She thoughtfully reflects on intergenerational trauma, the limitations she sees in talk therapy, and weighing the risks of drug therapy against suicidality.
Trigger warning: This episode discusses 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:
Chittaranjan Andrade, “Ketamine for Depression—Knowns, Unknowns, Possibilities, Barriers, and Opportunities”
Sarah K. Fineberg et al., “A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial of Ketamine in Borderline Personality Disorder”
Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? 
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Herland
Thomas Vanicek et al., “Intravenous Esketamine Leads to an Increase in Impulsive and Suicidal Behaviour in a Patient with Recurrent Major Depression and Borderline Personality Disorder”

The book that saves lives: Mishell Baker’s Borderline

How can an urban fantasy novel save lives? By depicting a protagonist with BPD who is resourceful, loyal, and heroic. In Borderline, the first book in the Arcadia Project trilogy, author and BPD survivor Mishell Baker does just that. In this interview, her perspectives on her books and her life reveal a woman who has found strength and inner peace after agony. As she says to me, “If you die by your own hand, you don't know if your work was done.”
Trigger warning: This episode discusses 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:
Mishell Baker, Borderline
Mishell Baker, Phantom Pains
Mishell Baker, Imposter Syndrome
Charlaine Harris, The Southern Vampire Mysteries
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Seo-Young J. Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation

“People with BPD are not a different kind of person”: Dr. Alexander Kriss, author of Borderline

 
What can a psychoanalyst learn from patients with BPD? In this interview, Dr. Alexander Kriss, author of the recently published Borderline: Biography of a Personality Disorder, shares insights gained from treating patients with the disorder. We discuss his book, which tells the story of one patient’s recovery while also deconstructing the BPD diagnosis and the broader conceptions of madness and femininity that have created an ever-shifting but ever-present space for people harrying the line between neurosis and psychosis from antiquity to the present day.
 
Alexander Kriss, Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder
Alexander Kriss, The Gaming Mind: A New Psychology of Videogames and the Power of Play
Link to Alexander Kriss’s New York-based psychotherapy practice
Alicia Elliott, “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground”
Sigmund Freud, A Case of Hysteria (Dora) and Three Case Histories
Edvard Munch, The Scream

“It's Upon Us to Widen That Lens”: Dr. Merri Lisa Johnson, author of Girl in Need of a Tourniquet

Why should we draw on the field of disability studies to envision, treat, and talk about BPD? In this second and final part of my interview with Professor Lisa Johnson, author of Girl in Need of a Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality, we explore this question and others, including the connection between BPD and sexuality, why we might diagnose fictional characters with BPD, and the form of her memoir, which “sutured together many types of discourse (medical texts, self-help books, fairy-tale, personal email, autobiographical memory).”
 
Merri Lisa Johnson, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet
Merri Lisa Johnson (editor), Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire
Merri Lisa Jonson and Robert McRuer. "Cripistemologies: Introduction."  
Merri Lisa Johnson and Robert McRuer, “Cripistemologies Now (More Than Ever!)”
Alyson E. Blanchard et al., “Testing the Hot-Crazy Matrix: Borderline Personality Traits in Attractive Women and Wealthy Low Attractive Men Are Relatively Favoured by the Opposite Sex”
Baby Reindeer TV series
Beyoncé, “Hold Up”
Anne Boyer, The Undying
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Daphne Gottlieb, Final Girl
Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener”
Jonathan Metzel, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease
Sarah Redikopp, “Interrogating Nonsuicidal Self-Injury Disorder Through a Feminist Psychiatric Disability Theory Framework”
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation

After Life and building a life worth remembering with BPD and EMDR

Would you choose to hold on to a bad memory for eternity? In this bonus episode, I explain how EMDR therapy and a rewatch of the glorious Japanese film, After Life, made me reflect on memory.
 
Hirokazu Kore-eda, director, After Life (1998 film)
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.)
Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost
Marsha Linehan, Building a Life Worth Living
Viet Thanh Nguyen, “In Memoriam”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“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