"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."

I am working on developing a conference programme on Children's Mental Health, University of Glasgow for May 2008 and one of the areas we were wanting to look at was personality disorders in children, do you perhaps know of anyone working in this area that I could approach to speak at the event.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,
Carolyn Fraser
CPD Manager
Division Of Developmental Medicine
Queen Mother's Hospital
Glasgow G3 8SJ
Tel: 0141 201 9264
Fax: 0141 201 0674
Forthcoming Events Log on to www.gla.ac.uk/developmental/cpd/NewCourses.html

One of the things that has been greatly helping my Borderline daughter’s Recovery is learning to meditate. It has given her a ‘still point’ from which to monitor, and wait out the storms of chaotic emotion and thought, and move purposefully on again. We first read of meditation for Borderlines from Marsha Linehan’s books on Dialectical Behavioural Therapy, which builds in ‘mindfulness’.

My daughter has been learning the techniques through a small local group of Buddhists, all of whom are gentle and compassionate people, and were among the first she was able to socialise with after a particularly bad breakdown episode.

There are a lot of teachers of meditation about, mostly religious of some kind, which can create extra problems for a Borderline. Buddhism, with no “God” as such, much less a very strict “rule book” is less problematical than others, but I would encourage anybody who already has a strong belief system to follow up instruction within that system. Then there are a variety of secular teachers, and the rule of thumb with them is that if they are charging a lot of money for it, or exhibiting any sort of ‘guruism’, they are definitely the wrong kind!

The Mind and Life Institute (www.mindandlife.org) has been publishing a lot of very interesting stuff about the process and effects of meditation on the brain. The Institute was founded in the 1990s as a result of a series of conferences between the Dalai Lama and some of the top American neurophysicists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists, is now international, and beginning to get a good deal of attention with its findings. Even the hard-nosed business types are beginning to pay attention because of the effects of meditation on relieving stress.

It’s just as good for carers too!

(Irene Miller)

I am a service user who due to the nature of the disorder, finds it difficult to respond to the psychological help provided because it is given in short term, discrete blocks. Whilst I realise that we are in a target driven society and understand that I do not 'deserve' more than other service users, I think that another model needs to be developed for such users. Despite being informed that great progress has been made by me due to psychological interventions, it continues to be severely hampered by interuptions in the service.

All parties involved agree that this is the case and yet these are the limitations of the service. Surely this problem is widespread and if so, are there any plans for dealing with this issue?