Echo,

I am new here and just dipping my feet in to this site. Thank you for the post but it is missing some important aspects to BPD. It is not only the person with BPD that give up easily, but the professionals as well. I have doctors who wont give me a yearly pap, even the clinic refuses medical treatment although I have been going there since early childhood (now 40). I have a psychiatrist who I trusted who wont see me. I was arrested for failing to stop at stop sign because I appeared agitated and told him I was going to file a complaint against him (although completely clean record and not even so much as a traffic ticket in ten years and was not disobediant or threatening). I was ousted out of law school after the first year because I couldnt manage to connect with the younger student body for study groups (evidently essential to the study of law).
I am not trying to use this forum to whine about my life. I am simply trying to explain that it is not only about our perceptions as those with BPD, but it is about how others perceive us. Many people with BPD are odd looking or acting to society. Authorities and healthy society members automatically presume us to be some sort of irritant before we even have a chance to prove that we are intelligent, caring, honest, civic-minded, and rational. The so-called "short temper" has much to do with the saturation of inequitable treatment and (in my case as many other BPDers) being bullied for decades. I now am agoraphobic because I cant even see a police officer without having a panic attack. I was once going to be a lawyer protecting people with disabilities, now I am spending my days in my cocoon collecting disability and dreaming about what remote island I am going to live on if I cant make my mortgage payment next month. (okay, I ended up whining a bit).
The point is this.... Symptoms of BPD are not simply internal or behavioral. One can recognize BDPers by the effect their presense has in any social situation or by how society treats them. If you are consistantly being, rejected, bullied, abandoned, betrayed, ignored, and marginalized, then your feelings of persecution may not be delusional and may be attributed to BPD; and this treatment has likely been there way before you "got angry" or saturated.

Just my two cents,

Enigma