On The borderline? Borderline personality disorder and deliberate self harm in literature
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Abstract
This paper examines Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in two texts - Kristen Waterfield Duisberg's The Good Patient and Susana Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted. It argues that fiction that examines the types of behaviours associated with BPD depathologises BPD through its focus on experience, meaning and reasons rather than symptom. The label of BPD can be pejorative and as such individuals who have this diagnosis or meet the criteria for it run the risk of having many assumptions made about their acts of DSH. From the perspective of the functions, meanings and significations of acts of DSH, this paper suggests that learning to listen to these highly individual networks of meanings through the non-damaging medium of literature can be a valuable tool for clinicians.