Hey. Personality disorders are coded as Axis Two rather than Axis One conditions. Axis One is for mental disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar, depression etc and Axis One disorders are thought to be more episodic in form and more organic. Axis Two disorders are thought to be more pervasive (only other thing on Axis Two is mental retardation) and non-episodic.

It isn't meant to imply anything about ones character or even ones personality (in the ordinary everyday understanding of personality). Just meant to capture the pervasive non-episodic nature of the disturbance.

The history of borderline personality disorder is interesting. It was found that the relatives of people with schizophrenia who themselves didn't have schizophrenia seemed to have a cluster of personality symptoms that were regarded as schizotypal. Subsequent developments... Hysteria, hysteriod, narcissistic, borderline... These things came to be carved up in different ways.

The origins of borderline personality disorder (the name anyway) was that individuals were thought to have a condition that was 'borderline' or intermediate between psychosis and neurosis where psychosis was thought to be a severe disturbance (characterized by loss of reality testing and delusions and / or hallucinations) and neurosis was thought to be the more ordinary anxieties depressions and phobias that are more common where people have less functional impairment in their occupation in particular.

The distinction between psychosis and neurosis and the conceptualization of borderline personality disorder as being a mid-way condition has fallen out of favor. The main current conceptualization of borderline personality is that labile (unstable) affect / emotion is basically the characterizing feature. Inability to regulate affect, basically.

The schizotypal personality constellation is thought to be more 'odd' and socially aloof than the 'dramatic' borderline constellation...

That being said the current dx system isn't terribly good... And we don't have anything approximating actual divisions in nature captured at present...