bottombinch:

“As a significant “feminised” category of mental illness, however, HPD was superseded in the DSM-III by the introduction of the controversial BPD, a label which has been increasingly applied to women, with around 75 per cent of all cases estimated to be female (Becker 1997 : xxii–xxiii). Seen as a milder form of schizophrenia and lying on the “borderline” between neuroses and psychoses, the concept has been used in psychiatry since 1938 (Decker 2013 : 196). Like other personality disorders, BPD has a notoriously low reliability level even by the generally poor standards of the DSM, and even within the profession is considered by many as yet another “wastebasket” category (though as Bourne ( 2011 : 76) ruefully remarks, the ambiguity of such personality disorders makes them particularly useful in policing deviance in the new century). One member of the DSM-III task force stated at the time of constructing BPD that “in my opinion, the borderline syndrome stands for everything that is wrong with psychiatry [and] the category should be eliminated” (cited in Decker 2013 :199). The chair of the task force, Robert Spitzer, admitted with the publication of DSM-III that BPD was only included in the manual due to pressures from psychoanalytically oriented clinicians who found it useful in their practices (Spitzer 1980 : 31–32). Such practices have been documented by Luhrmann ( 2000 : 113) who describes psychiatrists’ typical view of the BPD patient as “an angry, difficult woman—almost always a woman—given to intense, unstable relationships and a tendency to make suicide attempts as a call for help.” Bearing significant similarities to the feelings of nineteenth century psychiatrists towards hysterics, Luhrmann’s ( 2000 : 115) study reveals psychiatrists’ revulsion of those they label with a personality disorder: they are “patients you don’t like, don’t trust, don’t want … One of the reasons you dislike them is an expungable sense that they are morally at fault because they choose to be different.” Becker ( 1997 : xv) reinforces this general view of the BPD label when she states that “[t]here is no other diagnosis currently in use that has the intense pejorative connotations that have been attached to the borderline personality disorder diagnosis.” A bitter irony for those labelled with BPD is that many are known to have experienced sexual abuse in childhood (Ussher 2011 : 81), something they share in common with many of those Freud labelled as hysterical a century earlier; a psychiatric pattern of depoliticising sexual abuse by ignoring the (usually) male perpetrator, and instead pathologising the survival mechanisms of the victim as abnormal”

— Bruce Cohen, Psychiatric Hedgemony, 2016