My BPD: Bullshit Psychiatry Decided
by Azra Khan
A few years ago, my diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder was a source of relief, of validation. It would be a couple of years until I came to question this diagnosis, its overwhelming prevalence of being diagnosed in women and the questionable criteria that this “disorder” is borne out of. Was I ever unstable? Yes. Was I ever anxious or stressed? Yes. Have I experienced traumatic events? Yes. I think it would be difficult to find an individual who has not struggled with such things at some point.
Now, as I shape my life around Mad activism and exploring the links between sanism, sexism and power in my education and work, I increasingly find this diagnosis to be an example of how psychiatry pathologises women’s trauma.
Jane Ussher states in her chapter ‘Diagnosing difficult women and pathologising femininity: Gender bias in psychiatric nosology’ that the same women who were once burned at the stake for being witches then became the women who were diagnosed as hysterical and locked away in asylums and are now the women being diagnosed with borderline personality disorders and medicated for the rest of their lives.
When I consider my intent behind this collage, I suppose it reflects a burgeoning realisation of mine. The fragments are haphazardly strewn together and show a noisy cacophony of pain, sadness, confusion, anger, vivid imagination, bleak surrender, and ballistic power. Juxtaposing pandemonium and logic, illusion, and truth. It is a manifestation of my own madness. It is my response to existing in a mad world. It is not finished and may never well be.