To be sick of personality disorder being used as an excuse for bad behaviour?

[fluffydressinggown]

I see it all the time on here, people say their partner/friend/family member has behaved badly and someone comes along and says maybe it is a personality disorder.

Personality disorder does not necessarily make you a bad person or give you bad behaviour. Some people are just dicks. Not dicks with a mental health problem.

SparkyLark - I am neither mad or bad, what an offensive comment.

I am not 'grateful' for my diagnosis, not am I a 'borderline'

or just accepting that the other person may simply be an idiot.

I don't think anyone has a problem accepting that the person concerned may just be an unpleasant/selfish person. They are just suggesting that there may also be another possible explanation.

I think they are doing away with the 'borderline' diagnosis? My dd is nearly 18 and will be officially diagnosed with emotionally unstable (I think)personality disorder once she hits 18-she moves to an adult forensic hospital the day after her birthday

Oh dear, I think I meant it the way it is discussed philosophically - and I have read a lot on these subjects and know people affected too.

I didn't suggest you were grateful for your diagnosis, and of course I don't know what your personality disorder is.

I do, however, know two people who did find a diagnosis helpful, and they were borderlines. Many PD people would of course not be interested in any kind of diagnosis.

Lemon you clearly haven't read or understood what I have written

or you Chipped are just trotting out shite and using the trusted old fall back off “you simply don’t understand my point” when called on it.

Neither of these peoples' PD suddenly appear when their not getting their own way or as an excuse as to why they have been violent to their partners after a night down the pub.

I never once mentioned violence, I never once mentioned PD traits only arising when someone wasn’t getting their own way, I never once mentioned alcohol and pd’s. I merely challenged you stating that it was impossible to have a personality disorder and hide it from all around you except to those you are intimately involved with, i.e husband or wife. It is possible to function normally enough that no one except a husband or wife would know about the pd. It’s you who refuses to accept that. It’s you who states repeatedly that unless the wider family and community notice the PD, then it’s proof the person is just an abusive cunt.

Where exactly have I made any reference to children?

what you’re doing on this thread by categorically stating that no one can have a pd and hide it effectively from everyone except those they are intimately involved with (husband or wife) is no different than saying a child can’t be on the autism spectrum if the teacher regularly reports they behave well in school. Never mind what the parents experience at home.

I find it insulting to those people with pd’s who can “hide it for the most part”, except with those they are intimately involved with. Because I know how damned fucking hard they work to manage that level of coping with their illness. They are not defrauding the world. They are practicing what therapy has taught them. It’s a good sign that no one (except their most nearest and dearest) notice their pd. It’s a sign their therapy and continued daily efforts are working. And your constant insinuations of “fraud -- unless it’s noticeable to all” are highly offensive.

What part of “what applies for the outside world doesn’t necessarily apply in intimate relationships” do you have trouble understanding and accepting? It’s not an “out there” concept. Most of us practice it to one degree or another.

Garlic, my apologies, I must have been getting you mixed up with Chipped.

I do have BPD diagnosis (yes to emotionally unstable PD being used now) but I resent the phrase 'borderlines' - I am more than a diagnosis.

Oh dear I am not going to continue in this thread where I cannot join in genuinely and freely (not perfectly I admit) without being condemned as offensive etc, its just going to go nowhere. Other peeps seem to be getting angry too, who needs it.

Oh stop it Sparky, spare us the indignation and try to educate yourself a bit.

Of course people don't want to be described as 'Borderlines', it is offensive.

Would 'relieved' be a better word than 'grateful', fluffy? I have some depressing diagnoses (one of them is depression, lol) which, while I'm not exactly chuffed to be malfunctioning on a couple of possibly permanent & life-limiting bases, I find really helpful in two specific ways: they 'explain' me to other people who might otherwise think I'm just being an arse, and they guide me towards appropriate self-help.

The above is about 'me' and 'us' though. Your original OP was whining about responses offered to people trying to manage life with one of 'us'. The longer this thread gets, the clearer it becomes that those who deny rigid behaviour patterns are the ones displaying those patterns. Flexibility of thought & feeling is a human given ... but for ~10% of adults, (more if we include those with ASD impediments,) such flexibility is restricted. It's not the subject's fault; neither is it incumbent on their friends/partners/family to indulge their boundaried perspective.

Raltheraffe, my dad was (I believe - there are no supporting documents, unsurprisingly) diagnosed psychopathic, which is what they called it in those days. When I said I'm sorry that happened to you, I meant it. This being true, I still think it's daft to insist 'we' are just like everybody else. Not everyone else grew up amongst traumatic experiences. Each person who had our misfortune had it in a different way, thanks to individual circumstances. People whose childhoods passed securely find us weird, in varying degrees (depending on the surrounding circumstances & individual outcomes.) It is helpful to them - and, imo, to us - to understand their confusion and to try & help. This does not mean helping them to live comfortably in a situation that is uncomfortable for them. It means helping them to understand what's going on, and giving them personal respect.

Sparky & Lemon

I do not think my dad is evil. I think he has a genuine disorder.
When he was younger his disorder did not affect him too much, apart from when he got sacked for knocking his boss unconscious.
Now he is old it has a bad effect on him. There was a recent event when he took on a biker gang (all young men) at age 70 and got the shit kicked out of him.
He is the only person I know who would pick a fight with Mike Tyson. Most people would back the hell off, but not my dad, he would take him on and lose.

Mine had the good grace to die early, pursuing a dangerous sport in a dangerous way :)

(He did try to get my mother to kill herself first, though! And offered to help )

Personlity disorder is neither something that can be changed or something that can be cured they way I have been taught anyway way it can be controlled with behavioural techniques and in some cases medication as I guess can some cases of autistic spectrum disorders i have worked with many people with personlity disorder s and they have been very complex .

Borderline can be changed, in fact 86% of people who get treatment will get a full remission from the disorder in 10 years.
Other pds are far more difficult to treat and get remission.

Raltheraffe that's good to know I ha e only just come back to acute psychiatry after ten years in dementia care diagnoss change as do definitions over time so forgive my ignorance people diagnosed with personality disorder need more under standing not ignorance.

Sparky lord - please realise that your style of writing is awful, stop referring to people like that. Would you refer to people with bowel cancer as bowels? I hope to god the answer is no.
X2boys - that perception is incredibly outdated. If you work with people with PD please try and access KUF training

Borderline can be changed - YY, not least because BPD sufferers are the most open to change :) I'll propose a very small, correction, though - People with BPD or emotional dysregulation can change their ways of interacting with themselves & the world around them. There is nothing passive about changing, unless you're talking about violent & surgical "therapies". Which I'm sure we aren't!

GarlicNovember
I sincerely doubt that you've ever seen Mumsnetters put drunken wife-beating down to a personality disorder.

Not quite the same, but on a thread about DV and EA, the MNer said her husband told her he'd said a particular (incredibly hurtful) thing just to see how she'd react.

Another MNer asked her if she'd considered the possibility he had an ASD.

I wouldn't be surprised if I saw drunken violence put down to a PD, tbh.

but am I being entirely unreasonable to suspect that many of the people claiming the condition are just being a little bit.... soft?

Yes you are.

Unless you can give figures showing the number of MNers who see each thread title, the proportion of the population that have anxiety disorders, dxd and undxd, and can calculate from those figures the probability that dozens of MNers are lying/exaggerating/making excuses for their children, you need to pull your head in and stop making ridiculous sweeping judgements.

You are easily amazed.

It's hardly surprising that a high number of poster have child who have some sort of SN.

What's the first thing parents do when their child is diagnosed with something now days? We go home and google like mad which a lot of the time leads to here because there are so many specific threads.

Given that typed communication is much easier for people with assorted MH conditions to handle, it's likely there is disproportionate representation on all Web forums tbh.

In recent years there has been a massive trend towards bipolar self-diagnosis. It is a phenomenon studied by medical researchers. Since Stephen Fry has "come out" as having bipolar, some individuals see bipolar as a trendy label and start claiming they have it. Some of them probably are a bit cyclothymic (the mildest form of the illness) but most are just using it to get attention or excuse bad behaviour.
There was a recent thread on here started by a woman who was being treated like shit by her partner and every time she challenged him he pulled out the "bipolar card". The OP wanted to know whether his behaviour, which she described in depth was bipolar or not. Although there is a massive individual variation in bipolar symptoms the behaviour she described was just manipulative. I advised that her DP went to see his GP as the GP could refer him to a psychiatrist to investigate the diagnosis further and the DP refused, probably because a pdoc would have said there was nothing wrong with him.
I had the reverse as a child. One of the many aspect's of my mum's emotional abuse of me was to refer to me as an autistic s* (I will not even type the word as I find it so offensive). I asked her if we could see the GP as even I believed it as I was very good at maths, but she refused every time. In the end when I had to start seeing a pdoc for bp, I asked for a referral to investigate my ASD as I had internalised the comment. Got referred to an educational psychologist who said I was not asd. It was said in a nasty disparaging way, not genuine concern that I may be sn.

I am virtually certain that if someone says their child has SN on here it is because they have been officially diagnosed. In 99.99% of cases