Sociopaths, Borderlines, and Psychotics: 3 Mental Illnesses We Must Stop Hating On @ Everyday Feminism

"As a social worker in a child psychiatry department, I’ve seen professionals describe violently aggressive or manipulative children — some as young as five years old — as “budding psychopaths,” “lost causes,” and “baby murderers.”

The piece that almost always gets lost here is that people aren’t aggressive or manipulative for no reason. There aren’t simply “evil” people who were dropped on Earth with the purpose of harming others. Aggressive or manipulative personalities are most often developed in response to a combination of genetic vulnerability and severe environmental and childhood trauma....

We need to stop relying on psychiatric practices like involuntary commitment and on the prison system to clear society’s conscience of the violence it creates.

We have to find better ways of understanding each other and living together....

This disdain carries over into popular culture, where borderline individuals are often perceived as being “too needy,” “toxic,” and/or “emotionally manipulative.”

What’s usually not discussed about borderline personality is the fact that it’s hugely correlated with experiences of trauma, particularly sexual abuse, and childhood deprivation.

This is where my inner feminist just has to jump in — could the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder be a sexist way of dismissing women (and other people’s) valid responses to traumatic experiences as being “crazy?”

Certainly this wouldn’t be the first instance of psychiatric discourse being used to prop up the patriarchy’s domination of women’s physical and mental realities — there was a time when women who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by their husbands and fathers were commonly diagnosed as “hysterical.”...

The people whom we stigmatize, sensationalize, criminalize beyond all hope of receiving appropriate, compassionate mental health care?

Or is it society that is sick?

Is borderline personality a mental “disorder” or just, well, people reacting to the way that anyone would to terrible things? You tell me."

See entire article @ Everyday Feminism