Stigma: People with BPD are crazy, abusive and manipulative.

Reality: individuals with BPD are really struggling with a serious mental health condition that affects their emotions, relationships and behavior. Their brains are actually smaller and have less activity than a typical brain. These anatomical differences are the evidence that are behavior is not because we are crazy or manipulative but rather those anatomical differences are evidence, explaining the abnormalities in our behavior.

Stigma: BPD is rare and not many people are diagnosed.

Reality: 1.6%- 5.9% of the general population suffer from BPD. That number is higher meaning that BPD is even more common than we previously believed.

Stigma: Only females get BPD.

Reality: While it is true that women are more likely to be diagnosed with BPD, it's not because they suffer from it more than men, it's because they seek treatment for it more than men. The true numbers may even be half and half. Men with BPD are underdiagnosed and often discovered in prisons and substance abuse centers.

Stigma: People with BPD are just attention Seekers.

Reality: Although people with BPD will engage in behaviors that might appear to be attention seeking, but those behaviors are really just coping mechanisms, for their intense emotional pain and distress. I'd like to give an example here: if you are in a relationship with a borderline, one of their core symptoms is a fear of abandonment. If you were to threaten your partner with borderline that you were going to leave them, they may respond by telling you that they're going to kill themselves. How is this not manipulation? Simple, it is the motivation behind it. They are not saying that they are going to kill themselves, in order to trick you into staying. When they say this, they mean it. The reason they say it is because being abandoned is more frightening than being dead. They don't want to feel that grief, because we feel things 100 times stronger than typical people.

Stigma: BPD is a personal weakness or a flaw in their character.

Reality: BPD is a very serious and deadly mental health condition that requires lifelong professional treatment and support. Not because they are weak or flawed, it is those anatomical differences in our brains that would lead you to believe that.

Stigma: People who suffer from BPD are not able to have healthy relationships.

Reality: It is true that people with BPD struggle in maintaining relationships however, many people with BPD are capable of forming and maintaining healthy, fulfilling relationships with the right support combined with treatment. I just want to insert here, that I have been happily married for almost 12 years, we can have long healthy relationships.

Stigma: BPD is an untreatable life sentence of mental illness.

Reality: While BPD is challenging to treat, therapies like DBT have been proven to be the most effective in reducing borderline symptoms and drastically improving our quality of life. In fact statistics show that borderlines who spend two years in DBT therapy have a 98% chance of becoming symptom free the rest of their life and no longer testing positive for borderline.

Stigma: People with BPD are aggressive and even violent.

Reality: While some people with BPD may exhibit aggressive behavior, it doesn't reflect the entire BPD population. Many people with this diagnosis are not violent or aggressive at all, in fact there are a group of borderlines who are less likely to be violent to others but more likely to be violent to themselves.

Stigma: BPD is caused by poor parenting or a bad upbringing.

Reality: While childhood trauma and an invalidating environment may contribute to the development of BPD- exact causes are complex.

Stigma: People with BPD are faking their symptoms. It's all in their heads.

Reality: People diagnosed with borderline are not faking. BPD is a legitimate mental health condition that requires compassion understanding and professional treatment. It can be identified through the physical differences between a healthy brain and a BPD brain. They are not the same and the differences explain the differences in our Behavior. And about it being in our heads, of course it is, where else would it be?