Can you say, "Witch hunt"? Pshrynkologikal bullshit.

nice. Way to slap someone with some bullshit diagnosis for the crime of – oh, I see – failing to conform to whatever narrow straitjacket of behavioral norms women are currently being restricted to. Angels on the head of a pin, anyone?

From http://www.practiceofmadness.com/2010/02/borderline-personality-disorder-and-the-control-of-subversive-women/

Copy + pasting the whole thing. In-text biblio references removed for ease of reading (see original for same); bolds mine.

Modern-day witch hunts.

“Borderline Personality Disorder” and the control of subversive women…

Feminist examinations of psychiatry are rooted in the anti-psychiatry movement’s criticism of the validity of psychiatric diagnoses, arguing that the knowledge and experience of madness arises not from medical abnormality, but from the cultural, economic, and power structures of the society in which it occurs. The official labels describing “mental illness” are used as tools in social control, pathologizing conduct that strays from social norms, but positioning individual pathology as its source, when it is really a reaction to a social environment, only meaningful within it.

Szasz, observing the treatment of women, argues that the DSM is the contemporary Malleus Malificarum, equally “scientific” and identical in its definition of acceptable female conduct and punishments for deviance. Feminist thinkers have since examined the conditions and processes that allow women to be controlled in the name of “mental health”. Several DSM diagnoses occur at much higher rates among females, suggesting particularly good place to look for these. “Borderline Personality Disorder” (BPD) is not only one of the most dramatic instances of the overrepresentation of women, but belongs to the DSM category that bears the very least resemblance to physical ills – “Personality Disorders” (PDs).

As many as 80 percent of diagnosed “Borderlines” are female. Their primary symptoms are impulsive behaviour, a high level of dependency on others, self-harming actions, inappropriate emotional outbursts – most notoriously anger, and dysfunction in interpersonal relationships. Feminist theorists highlight the use of gender stereotypes in BPD criteria that reveal the diagnosis not only pathologizes both underconforming and overconforming to expectations of female passivity, indicating a “double-bind”. Studies have focused on the double-bind within the criteria for other PDs while those examining BPD come from the limited standpoint that feminists must work within the medical model, thus fail to consider that this category of “illness” may lack fundamental validity.
[...]
Feminist theory concentrates on relations of power. Men occupy the majority of positions of power, authorized to define objectified forms of knowledge, such as the criteria that determine illness.

When women act “difficult” because they are dissatisfied with their circumstances, the use of a medical diagnosis falsely indicative of individual pathology detracts attention from the “true” cause – the social construction of gendered power relations – thereby helping to ensure they are maintained.

[...]It became an official disorder added to the DSM in 1980. Second-generation studies uncovered the strong correlation between BPD and childhood sexual abuse. BPD would now be ambiguously attributed to “multiple factors”, which is still the position of clinicians today. Some researchers believe BPD refers to the same condition that was called “hysteria” in the nineteenth century, but no comprehensive work on that correlation has been published.

All seem to agree about the stigma attached to the Borderline label. Surveyed mental health workers have used the words “manipulative”, “difficult”, “angry”, and “hateful” to describe the patient with BPD. One study indicated nurses to show much more empathy towards schizophrenic inpatients than those with BPD.

Literature for practitioners warns that patients with BPD are manipulative and deserve constant suspicion. “Treatment regressions”, and a knack for “evoking inappropriate responses in one’s therapist” are identified as “markers”. BPD has been linked to legal woes including the denial of child custody, and Kupers’ research for Prison Madness included reports from several female prison inmates that being assertive, upset, or expressing dissatisfaction with services was dismissed by staff with the use of the label “manipulative borderline” against women who speak up. Male inmates were unfamiliar with this term.

Existing feminist research on BPD has employed a few different research methods. Wirth-Cauchon’s work, the most widely recognized research on this topic, analyzes the commentaries of therapists and their clients from feminist and postmodern perspectives. Cermele et. al. subjected the DSM Casebook to content analysis that revealed consistent differences in the language used to describe female or male patients, often reflecting oppressive conceptions of femininity. A few quantitative academic projects using questionnaires have been carried out. Sprock and Morey et. al. each surveyed males and females, asking them to rate criteria, secretly taken from DSM PD criteria, on a few bases related to gender. Neither study revealed significant differences between the responses of men and women, and both researchers concluded that DSM PD criteria were not at all biased towards men or women. However, both studies overlooked some important factors: the effect of demand characteristics in the questions, the inherent gendered nature of the criteria themselves, the larger patriarchal system in which both males and females exist and in which women pathologize their own behaviour, and the possibility of differential pathologizing of characteristics on part of the diagnostician when displayed by different sexes. Another study by Collins contradicted those of Sprock and Morey, as it showed both males and females consistently assigned “dominant” behaviour to men and “submissive” behaviour to women. Collins argues that women’s behaviour is not just submissive, but constitutes a classic human response to oppression, comparing it to the response given by Zimbardo’s male “prisoners”. My own research will look not at all PDs, but specifically at BPD, taking the more radical approach of challenging the reliability and validity of this category of “illness”. In addition, I will examine further contradictions in the existing literature, criteria in the DSM, and the portrayal of “Borderlines” in popular culture.