Borderline Personality Disorder Case Study Paper Example

Borderline Personality Disorder affects 2% of the population, 75% being female, which is an equivalent of 10 million people in America. The film BACK FROM THE EDGE features the stories of three individuals who have recovered and are living with the BPD and also some leading specialists in the field. Most of the therapists share the universal stigma that surrounds the BPD patients. Some of them avoid working with these patients claiming that they are very difficult to deal with. Another reason why most of the psychiatrists and psychologists avoid treating or dealing with the BPD patients is the fact that they are either incompetent or they have limited training. However treating protocols for treating these patients have been researched and developed. In the film, Dr. Marsha Linehan personal struggles with the BPD patent shows an exclusive commitment and attachment to the client is much appreciated. From her psychology expert point of view, we learn that BPD is treatable and even curable.

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In fact it has been wise for the clinicians ethically not to treat disorders they arent competent with or adequately trained on. Mental therapists who work with these clients should be very good at upholding the professional boundaries so as to successfully treat this personality disorder. Although maintaining this kind of therapeutic alliance as well as the fact that the whole process is time consuming, its still possible to treat this disorder once established. Moreover other conditions underlying the BPD such as the trauma, physical childhood or sexual abuse or eating disorder can effectively be dealt with. Setting a consistent and clear therapeutic boundary nonetheless, takes a lot of patience, compassion and time. Although taking these clients as part of the clinicians caseload is rather time consuming and requires the expert to push beyond the boundaries, an efficient clinician can help the patient in managing their levels of distress without altering the actual amount of work.

As an expert there are a number of issues that one has to have in mind when attending a client with Borderline Personality Disorder symptoms who comes in seeking psychotherapy services. To begin with the therapist should be ready to work with absolute commitment throughout the process with both the patient and the family. Its important to make the client understand that the short term therapy may be a short term solution but its not the best way to go when one needs to accomplish it. Identify a criterion that extricates the normal from abnormal behaviors including the criteria of distress, deviance and dysfunction. The therapist can distinguish such abnormal behaviors using the following methods or activities: social-cognitive perspective questions, positive psychology, trait perspective questions or using a quiz. Compare the clients symptoms from those of anxiety disorder, schizophrenia and mood disorder and analyze the challenges allied to the labeling of the BPD and the impact of the diagnosis to the patient. Then you may compare the psychoanalytical, cognitive behavioral and the biomedical approaches of treating the disorder.

An experienced expert ought to know that the client with such a disorder is not manipulative by choice. In most cases he or she might be experiencing extreme pains and emotional suffering and only tries to get the attention by in self-destructive and other dramatic ways as an approach of alleviating such suffering. Although not done intentionally, these patients do not commiserate with the therapist as they do not understand their constant need for attention is time consuming, cause great deal of stress and drain a lot of energy from the therapist. In a similar way the parents sets the boundaries with the children, the rapists needs set the margins with the BPD patients as they too are inordinately demanding. Therefore, a combination of the compassionate response and firm expectation, a protocol for treating BPD, is quite effective and in most cases leads to a behavioral change.

According to the DSM-IV-TR, for an expert to diagnose a client, he or she must have five of the nine major symptoms. Some of the symptoms include: chronic feeling of emptiness, frantic effort to avoid imagined or actual abandonment, identity disturbance, paranoid ideations, and recurrent suicidal behaviors among others.

In conclusion Borderline Personality Disorder affects 2% of the population, 75% being female, which is an equivalent of 10 million people in America. In the film BACK FROM THE EDGE, Dr. Marsha Linehan personal struggle with the BPD patent shows an exclusive commitment and attachment to the client is much appreciated. From her psychology expert point of view, we learn that BPD is treatable and even curable. . The therapist can distinguish such abnormal behaviors using the following methods or activities: social-cognitive perspective questions, positive psychology, trait perspective questions or using a quiz.