Sudden borderline relapse after twelve years - please help

[Relapsecrisis]

I really didn't think I would be writing this message and be in this situation. I'd be really grateful if anyone can respond. I've name changed for obvious reasons. Apologies for the length of this post.

I had a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder when I was about twenty. It's something that I loathe and hate having on my medical records. However, I can accept that the diagnosis was accurate and my behaviour and moods at the time were classic textbook symptoms (cutting, suicide attempts, overdoses, ever-shifting moods, fear of abandonment etc).

I was hospitalised twice at the time (one week each time) when I was extremely suicidal. The last stay I had, something clicked, they put me on Prozac, I stopped self-harming, stopped the overdosing and whilst I've battled on and off with depression of varying degrees for the last twelve years, things have been relatively stable (got degree, got post-grad degree, sorted profession, have good career, bought house, got married, got divorced, never self-harmed, no more suicide attempts, no more idealising people).

I'm now mid-thirties. And suddenly seem to have relapsed and I don't understand why. My long-term relationship broke down four months ago and DP moved out. It was a mutual decision and we'd been unhappy for months. I had anticipated a sense of relief and freedom when the relationship ended, but instead, wholly unexpectedly, I was absolutely devastated. Total grief and everything fell apart. I was deeply suicidal for about a month, went onto anti-depressants, moved out of the acutely suicidal phase and suddenly appear to have veered off back into classic BPD territory.

I started self-harming again in January (after twelve years of not cutting). Not as regularly as I used to, but my arm is fucked. My moods are spiralling daily, from suicidal to ok and back again. My sleep is awful (I'm taking sleeping tablets regularly so haven't slept normally in months). I can't eat and have lost two stone in four months. I've become emotionally fixated and dependent on a married male friend and seem to be pushing all boundaries with him. I can't seem to focus on any long-term life goals (I had lots - they now all seem utterly irrelevant). Everything seems meaningless. DD is suffering (she was tiny when I was last like this. She's now much older and hasn't seen me ill like this before).

I'm acutely suicidal. Yesterday and today especially. Have been researching various methods in depth. I don't want to engage with any mental health services because frankly, I don't see what they can do. I don't want to become bound up in being someone with a label and going through the cycle of being in and out of hospital and being a professional patient. I thought I would never be in this situation again. I'm mortified and utterly at sea. I don't want to take an overdose and exacerbate the situation. I don't want to manipulate things. I don't want to self-harm and make things worse. I just want to be dead.

The only thing I can think that might have contributed towards this (and I may be clutching at straws) is the medication I'm on. I'm taking lofepramine (I can't take SSRIs any more for various reasons) and it's one I've not taken before. I don't know if it can somehow trigger a BPD relapse, or if this is something that is unrelated. Or maybe it's having no natural sleep for 4 months (and a lack of REM sleep owing to the sleeping pills).

I have been googling to try and find answers and there are none. How have I suddenly relapsed and become like this when I had so many years of things going well? This is supposed to be something that you grow out of - not something that re-emerges in your mid-thirties.

I don't know who to talk to or how to get back to where I was.

If anyone has any insight or any pearls of wisdom I'd be extremely grateful.

Sorry now this is a very long reply! I am commenting on what I see your thinking patterns here in the hopes it'll help a bit.
Just because you feel like a leper, that doesn't make you a leper. You keep framing yourself in terms of being a certain 'way', and the picture your mind keeps presenting to you is something you don't want to be. And then we buy into that picture hook, line and sinker.
You are a woman experiencing some symptoms right now. It doesn’t make a ‘something’. When you are not experiencing BPD symptoms (like when you typed the last post for example), you are just a normal person. So you are a person who occasionally has a tendency towards what has been classified as BPD-like symptoms.
It doesn't mean in any way shape or form that your life is going to be reduced to being in constant contact with services. Your mind seems very certain you will be a professional patient, with a pile of bad connotations that holds for you.
These ideas come to us with a story of permanence. That is the nature of them when experiencing symptoms like this.
There is no one out there who actually sees you in the ghastly light you view yourself at the moment. There is no invisible audience looking at you and making judgements. There are just a bunch of other human beings, just like you, like me, like anyone going about their business in the world. No better than you and no worse than you. Every person has the same value. It’s unfair to label anyone.
These labels and value judgements you are making about yourself may be preventing you from accessing support. Support that has helped you in the past from what you say. I am not saying you should engage with the services, it just seemed like it helped you before. You say you don’t want to be labelled as a ‘something’ yet that’s exactly what you are doing to yourself. Again this is not something that you can help having, it is the flavour these symptoms come in, they bring the tendency to judge oneself extremely harshly. However, learned self-compassion can help to purposefully put these very symptoms into perspective when we experience them. A more compassionate stance towards yourself might help you to not be as quick to judge yourself. It might help to think about a situation you were in when a health professional helped you before, or was pleasant and kindly towards you. Recall the feeling between them and you. When you engage with real actual people does that not feel like something very different to the feeling you have when you are alone and thinking about what others might think of you? One is an actual experience the other is a mental process, but our minds can't tell the difference sometimes. I find it really helps to recall actual experiences with the real people and give myself the option that the experience of them might be different to what I think, when I am doing the ‘assessment of a scary future event and they’ll think I’m stupid’ type of thinking. It also reduces that fear I feel when I am feeling compromised and need to go into a social situation of any kind.
If this was your daughter that was feeling bad, would you be so quick to judge her and agree with her view? If she said ‘I feel like a leper. I am not going to access services because I don’t want to go back to the way I was. I don’t want to be a professional patient so any outcome no matter how bad for myself or you is better than doing that’.
Would you think that was a useful set of thoughts for her?
If you were parenting her in a way to help her towards healthier outcomes what would you do? Being a good mother is parenting yourself in the same way as you would parent your own child. Your daughter is important to you, and you are as important to her. But you knew that already. Sorry its so long, and hope nothing I have said has made things worse for you. A host of golden daffodils for you.

I have no advice, but I also suffer from BPD so just hugs. It is living hell.

Thanks so much. I know lots of people are very kind. But there were a couple of people, when I was younger, who worked in mental health/A&E and who were ghastly. My psychiatrist at the time was one such person. And a nurse in a ward left me on the floor of a ward , when I'd collapsed after coming back from the bathroom following massive OD. My friend had to pick me up off floor and put me back to bed.

It's just the stigma associated with it all.

I know what you mean re: thinking/judging myself through a particular prism. It's just hard to move away from thinking like that. It's hard to stop thinking, full stop. I wish I could just not think, or more specifically, not feel.

I have had the same bad experiences with MH 'professionals' but then I have also met some fabulous ones, and many more of those. Do try and talk to someone and if you don't get on with one person change

I have left a voicemail with private provider of DBT. Which I think is a sufficient compromise right now.

I am super-dizzy and have tinnitus as a result of upping the lofepramine. But am quite spaced out too, which is a bonus. If I could just stay in this kind of slightly out-of-it state, for the foreseeable future, that would be ideal.