Crime Shows and BPD Stigma

I watch a lot of crime shows on TV. Stuff on the Crime Channel and Discovery ID. A disturbing trend I've noticed is that in many, many cases they'll mention that the culprit was diagnosed with BPD, and how this makes them dangerous, volatile human beings.

Especially in shows about stalkers. Seems every single one has BPD. The reason this upsets me so much is because the vast majority of the time it's clear that the diagnosis is incorrect; that the person in fact has a narcissistic, socio/psychopathic or antisocial personality disorder. It also makes it seem like all BPDs are these scary evil monsters who murder people.

My fiance and I have a laugh every time we see this happen, as we're both fans of crime shows, but I know on some level it must make her scared, or even weary of me.

Have you come across this sort of thing on TV before? What other ways have you seen BPD stigmatised?

Yes I've seen it, and it is the thing that has made me deny having any type of personality disorder, even though it's not my main issue and I've outgrown the more serious aspects of it it's still frustrating. The worst was the Jodi Arias case, they kept bringing up how Borderline she is. She is an extreme example and I believe she is also simply an evil person, I think there is a difference between a mentally ill person and a criminal

They also make sure to mention that most serial killers are diagnosed with schizophrenia which I think is untrue. They promote the stigmas of mental illnesses.

yeah i also find they use very stereotypical versions of the conditions they use as well particularly for things like OCD it is mostly cleaning when there many many different forms of OCD but yes i hear BPD mentioned a lot i think they sometimes just use mental illness to justify why the person killed/committed the crime but that again makes it look like mental illness is dangerous.

I agree with all of you. I did this post a while back and yes they are definitely keeping the mental illness stigma alive and well.

BP also uses extreme examples or misdiagnoses. When I was first diagnosed all I could think was this one particular Law and Order episode. I just knew I'd be killing in a matter of months. My husband is still convinced that all BP people end up in an asylum forever.

I remember watching an episode of Law and Order SVU and there was this woman on there they were interviewing. She was paranoid and had a few other tendencies like me. I thought "She reminds me of myself" and the therapist guy came out and said she had BPD and I was like... whatever.

Long story short... Just because they portray us as criminals doesn't mean we are. It's just like everything else in life -- people will always use what they can against you.

Yea, it just sucks sitting there with someone who knows your diagnosis watching a tv show where someone does something horribly violent and scary and then being diagnosed as BPD.

People with BPD can become violent. So can almost anyone. The reasons just tend to be different. If a person has it in them to attack others over something, it's gonna happen regardless. For a person with BPD, the snapping point is more likely to be centered around fear of abandonment. For people without BPD, it could be a rather wide variety of possibilities. BPD doesn't make people kill anyone. All a BPD diagnosis could do in the case of a murder is tell investigators that, if a person with BPD was found guilty proven by science, it was probably an abandonment issue that caused it. I've known someone who was murdered over an ounce of weed, as well. Some people have it in them to kill when they are simply emotionally upset, be it a jilted lover situation or, I guess, an ounce of weed.

I think the jest of this topic is how others view us. We can talk all day long about our experience but it is the real world opinions that keep us out of housing jobs and education friendships love due to other people's fears.

But we can't change other people. If a person is ignorant on a disorder, they are willfully ignorant, by choice, because there is a wealth of information and many different views to consider that they could access with nothing more than an internet connection. People who believe that BPD makes people into murderers, want to believe that. They want reality to be extremely simple and easy to understand. They don't want to do the long, hard work of contemplating the complexity of human beings and various circumstances. These people cannot and will not be persuaded from ignorance, because they cling to ignorance like a comforting blanket. And in such a case, the best we can do is hold tight to reality, ourselves.

I totally agree. I am just saying that those same ignorant people impact our lives in employment housing lawyers medical field even therapists and mental health staff. I know we can't change them nor their ignorance just wish it wasn't so. Just saying.

Yea. The stigma is bad, even in psychiatry. I've told my fiance outright that she must never google borderline personality disorder because there's so much stuff out there that paints us with a pretty bleak paintbrush.

I would never disclose my diagnosis to any my employers.

My foster brother's mother has BPD and because of this my parents think anyone with BPD is as unreasonable as she is. It really bothers me (and my sister). It shows us that our parents aren't eternally supportive, or generally understanding of people and their difficulties.

Then again, I could have seen that coming.. I remember my father telling me "Act normally or you'll be going to school by a taxi bus" (kids attending Special Education are brought to and from school in a taxi bus) and when I said, trying to lessen the blow, "That sounds like fun" he said "I don't want a child like that"
Guess what I'm attending now? SpecEd.. being brought to and from in a taxi bus. I'm autistic, I CAN'T handle double standards.

Sorry for making this post about me.

Society loves to contradict itself. On the one hand the movement is toward acceptance of all types of people, race, creed, religion etc.. but on the other, it does everything it can to stigmatize those same things it acts as though it is trying to help people to accept.

Haha it's like instead of

"People with BPD are not murderers."

We get

"People with BPD are crazy murderers, and that's okay!"

Honestly I feel that a lot of people with BPD have proven the quality of their character, if anything.

Most of the people I've encountered have never stood at that threshold.. of being so painfully, insanely enraged that every cell in one's body is on fire, of desiring violence so badly from being in such fiery agony.

But many people with BPD have stood at that threshold, they've had to face it, and they've made the willful choice to stand down, control themselves, writhe internally and fight their demons, usually in order to protect others and protect their humanity.

The average Joe and Jane watching crime shows know nothing of this experience. The most rage and agony they ever have to deal with is the frustration of having to sit in a long line at Secretary of State next to some annoying people. They have no idea what it's like to be put to the test, to have their humanity put on the line.

Well I do, and have come out the other side, as have many people with BPD. So I find it only pathetically audacious when others judge us as being crazy, sinister sorts. They have no idea how hard many of us have fought for our humanity, how precious it is to us and how fiercely we protect it.

Are you a writer?

No, that has just been my experience. I think my homocidal feelings towards my parents were the thick of it. They have both done some horrendous things to both myself and my younger brother, who I love dearly. But did I have the right to take their lives? Would it be for the good of others if I did? But could I justify the pain it would cause my brother, to lose a parent and his sister, just in order to avenge the two of us? Would it be better to take from him his father, to protect him from his father, or would it be better to sacrifice myself to protect him, but in doing so gamble with the possibility that I might fail? And who would be the true victor in the end, if someone lost their body, but I lost my own humanity? Was that the goal all along, to turn me into a monster, just like them? Those were the sorts of thoughts I wrangled with while I was on fire. And I just feel like Nons cannot possibly understand, especially if they have never been in a position where they had to answer such questions. I don't look down on Nons, but only the true fools among them would look down on me.

I agree with the stigma!
I jokingly said to my bff when I got my diagnosis that I had been told that I was actually a psychopath and would progress to serial killer!
Laugh or cry really!!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I have been thinking quite a bit about this lately. I watch a lot of crime shows, too, and I've also been watching a lot of stories on the news that discuss people with mental illnesses being homicidal and/or suicidal. It may be true that this sort of thing happens, but the reporters talk about it in such a slanted, completely biased fashion and they perpetrate social stigma. I keep my diagnoses a secret unless/until I truly trust someone and even then I tend to be selective about what I share to defend myself from unecessary stigma as much as possible. I even have to defend myself from family. I constantly fight the growing bitterness inside myself due to rampant negative judegment based on ignorance and fear.

What really ruffles my feathers is that this stigma is also perpetrated in antiquated psych books and, depending on who you talk to, even some therapists think that those with BPD are "manipulative" and hate to work with us. My current therapist said that when she first started, years ago, this is what all the books said on the topic. She was surprised to learn, years later, that most of us tend to be victims of abuse of some sort and we've learned to protect ourselves with defense mechanisms that no longer work for us. She says we feel deeply and strongly but that we're stunted in emotional growth through no fault of our own and that we just are ill equipped to handle chaotic emotions and life stressors and we get easily overwhelmed. She's been working with BPDs for years, now, and she says this is her favorite population, so to speak to work with now. She and I have an awesome rapport.

I know what you mean, though. The common misconceptions make us all sound like monstrous lunatics. If only they understood that most of us are self-destructive more than anything and most of us wouldn't dream of intentionally causing harm to others.There's a lot of self loathing involved in BPD, at least that's been my experience.

I think most people would have a hard time understanding why anyone would need to justify not harming someone, for any kind of reason. It's why I don't bring up a lot of the things I've had to think about, and it's why I have such a limit of trust. It isn't something anyone could understand unless they'd experienced it. It's really hard when the person in question has harmed multiple people too, and I've had to ask myself those questions. Would it have been worth destroying my life and maybe losing everyone who cared for me in order to stop someone who hurt me from hurting even more people? Would it really be stopping them? I still don't know the answer to those questions, and I don't think I'd be who I am now if those questions never existed.

But does that mean that people like me should be locked up? Does that mean we're dangerous? I don't think it does. The only person I've ever really tried to hurt was myself, and it was because I didn't feel like I deserved to try and answer those questions.

OP- first of all, glad there's another Camus fan on this forum.

I know what you mean about media and BPD. I remember watching SVU once and the murderer/stalker was said to have BPD.

What's worse though is I work in the mental health field and some of the stuff they say about people with BPD is horrendous. In fact, they often say worse stuff than about sociopaths or narcissists. My thoughts are that this system of managed care and this modality of treatment available today is simply too little to handle people with BPD. PwBPD are the epitome of human trauma, they are very traumatized, abused, and wounded people and it often takes a team to help them recover and manage themselves. Unfortunately, the system is nowhere near ready to handle them and stigmatizes them often. It's not just TV, lol. It's the people who are paid and tasked to treat them. It's very sad.

I don't watch many crime shows (I just don't like live-action), and the shows I do watch typically steer clear of any and all mentions of mental illness. The ones I'm watching right now feature very obviously mentally ill characters, but even then they don't say a word, just that they're "psycho!"

But one thing that REALLY bothered me about one of the shows I'm watching, Mirai Nikki, wasn't what they said, rather it was the treatment of the mentally ill character in the show and what the fans of the show often say about her.
Her name is Gasai Yuno. You may have heard of her, as she's very famous in the anime community, being the most notable "yandere" character in mainstream anime. She's very emotionally unstable, she stalks a boy that she's "imprinted" on, and she's even killed people. So in the show, the boy is afraid of her and other "crazy" characters call her a psycho. In my opinion, she's one of the most villainized characters in the entire show, although there are a few that are worse than her; they just don't get as much screen time.
What REALLY bothered me about Yuno's treatment by the fans was many different people diagnosing her as borderline, and following that dx up with "otherwise known as 'psycho b***h syndrome.'" I've seen different variations of that posted various places, and it really pisses me off to the point that I'm obsessing over it.

Yes, Yuno does display very obvious and severe borderline traits, as well as antisocial traits, but that's no reason to call her a psycho b***h, right? I identify with Yuno a lot and seeing her treatment just makes me so sad, although her case is far worse than mine.

But hey, it's mainstream media, right? What else are they going to do with a borderline character?