I have experienced this, dear. For 17 years I thought I had BPD. I finally got off of all of the meds which never helped me, only made me sick as hell all the time. I then realized that I never had BPD. I had Complex PTSD from childhood emotional neglect and emotional abuse and parents who were severe OCD workaholics. I do not pay attention to psychiatrists anymore and I don't care much what anyone else here says, I just know my own experience and it was horrid. They ruined 17 years of my life. But maybe that had to be, for me to get to the point where I know what is wrong with me so that I can fix it. I am doing EMDR. It works to free me of these horrible childhood experiences and it helps me to change and believe totally different things about myself. I discovered I had an awful stutter whenever I thought about part of the neglect and abuse. I am working to get rid of this stutter. I was amazed when it reared its' ugly head. It is horrible. I do not know what happened to me. it could have been something very bad or it could simply be the cumulative affect of how my mother treated me.

My development was slowed way down by the childhood experiences and also by the 17 years of taking the horrible BPD meds. So I am 75 years old, going on 19 in some areas of my life, maybe. I also lost both of my upper grinding teeth from bruxing because of the psychiatric drugs. I understand this is very common. I now have a dental partial to make up for those two important teeth being gone. They were gnashed to pieces by me, unknowingly. I am amazed that I am still alive. It took me a long time to get off of the psychiatric drugs. I did it under the watchful eyes of a psychiatrist who didn't mind my going off of them because I was old. The worst ones were lithium, depakote, doxepin and xanax. I believe that my doctor then was absolutely batshit crazy with dispensing all of the drugs so freely, especially the xanax. She treated me as if I was retarded. I have a very high I.Q., probably higher than the doctor's. She is Russian and I am in the state of New Mexico. Maybe that will help someone, just that one sentence. Beware!

I cannot bear my three siblings. They trigger me all the time. They are so very limited and they have no emotional intelligence whatsoever because of the way we were all brought up. They are unable to even contact me and say I am sorry you have a broken ankle." How is that for limited?! They are ashamed to ever show any feelings; they do not know how healthy it is to show feelings! I feel that EMDR has to be one of the best treatments to heal yourself from childhood trauma. I may sound opinionated here but I am allowed to be because I know what I am talking about. I have been through hell and I am coming back. I just hope that I live long enough to finish the EMDR and that I can live free of the horrible limiting feelings that were bestowed upon me by my parents - for a while! That is all I want. I wish the very best of luck to anyone who is reading this. You can put this together with the other information here and form your own opinions.

If you are on psychiatric drugs, get a good dental night guard for your teeth! Believe me when I tell you that Bipolar Disorder is a common diagnosis made whenever the docs don't understand everything or have all the answers. But they will try to make you think they do. It is a criminal diagnosis to give to anyone, in my view. No effort was ever made to ever verify that is what I had. They didn't even bother. But they made me take tests to verify that I was not on illegal drugs! They were ALL illegal because I didn't have BPD. I was sedated heavily immediately. I was too heavily sedated to ever question any of this. For 17 years.