\n"}\n\n\n\u201cAs a significant \u201cfeminised\u201d category of mental illness, however, HPD\nwas superseded in the DSM-III by the introduction of the controversial BPD, a label which has been increasingly applied to women, with around 75 per cent of all cases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\u2013xxiii). Seen as a milder form of schizophrenia and lying on the \u201cborderline\u201d 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 \u201cwastebasket\u201d 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 \u201cin my opinion, the borderline syndrome stands for everything that is wrong with psychiatry [and] the category should be eliminated\u201d (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\u201332). Such practices have been documented by Luhrmann ( 2000 : 113) who describes psychiatrists\u2019 typical view of the BPD patient as \u201can angry, difficult woman\u2014almost always a woman\u2014given to intense, unstable relationships and a tendency to make suicide attempts as a call for help.\u201d Bearing significant similarities to the feelings of nineteenth century psychiatrists towards hysterics, Luhrmann\u2019s ( 2000 : 115) study reveals psychiatrists\u2019 revulsion of those they label with a personality disorder: they are \u201cpatients you don\u2019t like, don\u2019t trust, don\u2019t want \u2026 One of the reasons you dislike them is an expungable sense that they are morally at fault because they choose to be different.\u201d Becker ( 1997 : xv) reinforces this general view of the BPD label when she states that \u201c[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.\u201d 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\u201d\u2014 Bruce Cohen, Psychiatric Hedgemony, 2016
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