"What all of us suffer most from is a dearth of persons in the Mental health, social, and other services who have any knowledge at all of BD, let alone an understanding of it, or how to handle its sufferers. This last is really not all that difficult once you understand to what, and how, they react.

"I am now almost into my fourth year of 24/7 one-on-one apprenticeship and have learned quite a lot, the hard way, but oh how I wish I had had somebody teaching me the basics right at the start! A short handout for service workers explaining BD's enormous difficulties with e.g. 'compliance', whether with forms or interviews, their gross oversensitivity to the slightest hint of condemnation (which to them only means personal rejection), the time needed to respond to even a simple question, their inability to hear the 'whole story' and to focus in instead on some detail, the need to break things down to one single item at a time, and to be very literal in all explanations etc?"

"My suggested practical leaflet/handbook for carers could be developed online as an open dialogue on the website, by just asking for things that have been found to work? Actually this would also be useful for people who have BD work colleagues or other contacts? It's all a matter of getting the general population to KNOW about BD, as they now do with e.g. dyslexia, and, to some extent, clinical depression.

"I think that between us, we hands-on carers could come up with a pretty comprehensive list of do's and don'ts!"

What I have done is sent the following to all carers on our database (who are caring for people with mental health problems across the spectrum).

"'Are you caring for someone with a Personality Disorder?
If so we would like to know what information you would find helpful when caring for the person, so that we can decide whether we should have an information session around Personality Disorder.
You may want to know some of the following things:

• How you should respond to different behaviours
• Effects of medication
• What you can do to help the person
• What you can do to help yourself'

"We had then asked them to get back in touch with us with their thoughts. Given that we only work with carers in Edinburgh it may not be appropriate to ask carers on the forum to feedback responses to us directly? However it would be really useful to hear what carers in general feel would be helpful."