Would you rather be autistic or have BPD?

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Would you rather be autistic or have borderline personality disorder?

I like myself as I am, so I prefer being autistic. I don't think that either is necessarily better or worse - both can be severely limitiing disorders that create a lot of challenges for the people who have them. I actually have a lot of sympathy for people who have BPD because BPD causes social difficulties, although for different reasons. I also believe that the disorder is badly mischaracterized in a lot of the literature and by professionals. Also by a lot of people who are not professionals who can't or won't understand the idea that BPD's emotional dysregulation creates problematic behavior and that it can be difficult for people who have BPD to understand the impact of their behavior on others.

Last edited by Verdandi on 22 Dec 2011, 2:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'd rather be myself and I am autistic so I'd rather be autistic.

I don't think you'll get a meaningful conversation here with so many of us preferring to remain autistic if we were given the chance of changing.

No contest: I'd rather be on the spectrum.

I have a bipolar aunt and I'm glad I'm not like her. When my daughter has mood swings, I worry about the possibility of her being bipolar and that's my worst dread. She doesn't have a diagnosis yet, but I hope it's AS.

borderline personality disorder + asperger

i have AS and my sister has BPD. i have succeeded in a job, which she has not. she is never happy, she says, and i frequently am. if my autism were more pronounced, the story might be different.

I'd much rather have neither...

I had a good friend with BPD and I remember that she was impaired in ways I was not but that I was impaired in ways that she was not.

I'm content keeping my autism even if it were possible to trade it in for BPD. And I'm pretty sure she didn't want to trade with me either.

Obviously, I am heavily biased:

I'm used to being autistic and I have tremendous difficulties with change.

I was briefly misdiagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder a few years ago and it was the worst experience with mental health that I've ever had. Doctors stopped listening to me, and sent me home from the ER once when I was in mortal danger. All because of a few letters on my chart. A few months after the initial diagnosis, another doctor was like "wait, you don't have this" and removed it, and also dropped me and left me without a doctor because she only treated people with BPD.

My experience in the mental health field with how they treat people they think have BPD has been horrible. It is so misunderstood, and so mistreated. I would never in a million years want to be diagnosed with BPD ever again.

And of all the people I talked to about my misdiagnosis last year, only one understood this (and said the diagnosis can be a therapeutic death sentence). I found a paper on how clients diagnosed with BPD are extremely mistreated by many medical professionals and typical behaviors that are acceptable from the majority of clients are mischaracterized as manipulation and attention-seeking behaviors.

The funny thing is that people keep assuming that I was trying to escape the diagnosis. I didn't care if it was true, I cared about possible sabotage to getting therapy before I even got into the system. If I really had it, I was okay with that because I was trying to find out what was wrong with me, not hide from it. I just didn't want to be treated like toxic waste because of a diagnosis.

Autistic

Leme see, emotionally unstable or weird. I'm going to go with autistic.

I am happy with being autistic. So I will select autism.

Agreed. None of the personality disorders are very scientifically defined. I have been in the worst emotional pain and was told that my cutting myself and talking about suicide was a ploy for attention. There's such a fundamental misunderstanding of EVERYTHING in that idea... the instinct to hurt oneself may have evolved for its benefit of calling attention to a person's illness, yes... that's about the extent of it. No one hurts themselves if they can help it.

I found the post (from another ASD forum) at the link interesting. Apparently there is more than one kind of BPD. And, as with ASDs the descriptions of BPD are an outside-in view, which deliberately leaves out internal states. So, what might look like manipulative behavior may actually be due to an empathy failure in the viewer/assessor, since the person may be in an extremely dysphoric state (beyond normal experience).

http://asdgestalt.com/viewtopic.php?p=43169#p43169

The whole thread is actually pretty good.