eli5: What are the differences between Bipolar and Borderline Personality Disorders?
In: Biology
I’ll try it as ELi5
Bipolar affects people’s mood and causes people to either be very happy or very sad. This happiness or sadness goes on for a long time, at least days but more likely weeks/months. The person has a hard time just being in a regular mood.
The happiness or sadness is so extreme that it hurts people’s enjoyment of life and their ability to do everyday things. It’s caused by changes in the brain that the person has no control over although they can do things to stop the happiness or sadness getting really bad.
Medication from the doctor can be really helpful in making it better it but it never fully goes away.
Borderline PD affects people’s emotions and can also make people feel very happy or very sad. This happiness or sadness often changes very fast and multiple times during the day and is often caused by interactions with other people .
Borderline also really hurts people’s enjoyment of life and their ability to do everyday things. It’s (usually) caused by things that happen to the person in their life and how the person views these events. This is often called trauma. This also affects the way these people interact with other people. They are often very very sensitive and terrified of being hurt by others or abandoned by them. This can cause them to behave in what might look like strange ways to others.
Medication doesn’t help to fix borderline but talking to a doctor or other mental health expert lots and lots of times can help the person to fix it and it can completely go away.
Both illnesses are really serious and need treatment. If people get the right treatment, they can often lead very nice lives.
Non ELi5 addition
BPD is often deliberately labelled by private psychiatrists as Bipolar so that they can prescribe medication for it (no meds are indicated for BPD but they are for bipolar). Or people are given both diagnoses. That’s more profitable. I know people don’t want to hear that but I’ve worked in the industry for a long time and it’s a very horrible truth.
BPD gets completely neglected, misdiagnosed, untreated. It’s such a serious and debilitating illness too. It’s just cheaper to throw a pill at it than to provide therapies like DBT, which are expensive and time consuming.
On the flip side, some people don’t want the BPD diagnosis due to stigma and keep looking until they find someone that diagnoses them with bipolar instead.
The treatment outcomes for BPD, when done correctly, are very good.
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