My daughter, who started having delusions, in March of this year seems stable. In fact she seems better than she has in years. Since high school she seemed to be struggling with depression, anxiety, paranoia and lack of motivation. Counselling and doctors appointments led to lots and lots of anti depressants. Then she started cutting and attempting suicide. I think there were 7 suicide attempt, most of them cutting. The psychiatrist seemed to be speculating that she had Borderline Personality Disorder but her main psychiatrist kept saying that she didn’t strike him as dramatic enough.
Her psychiatrist thinks in retrospect she has been struggling with the premorbid stages of schizophrenia, possibly schizoaffective disorder. I’m so hopeful that now she has the right medicines and is being treated for the correct disease that things will be better.
What are other peoples experiences with the years before diagnosis: were family members emotionally unstable? were they diagnosed with personality disorders? And what has happened after they were on the right drugs?
My son was depressed, anxious and paranoid during his premorbid stage. He also had some odd, brief euphoric stage way early on.
He was initially diagnosed with major depressive disorder and social anxiety. Stress does affect my son quite a bit. Someone has said that the mentally ill do better with no stress - which can be the hardest thing for them to achieve because everything stresses them.
Cutting & suicide attempts aren’t enough to put her in a BPD category alone.
From what I’ve read & people I’ve met with borderline, there’s usually some type of childhood trauma that starts it and they have a weird kind of separation anxiety where they want to be loved, but they’re terrified of being rejected/abandoned, so they can treat the people closest to them very badly one minute & be very loving the next.
And, they people I’ve known with borderline can be very dramatic. They can also be very charming to people they’ve just met.
That’s what stands out to me the most - reading over a symptom list might help you wrap your mind around it.
BPD is actually harder to treat than SZ from what I understand, so it’s not like they’re doing her a favor with that diagnosis.
And, I agree with Hereandhere - if the meds work, they work - it doesn’t matter what label someone wants use.