Zoe:
quote:
I agree with you that there is not much that can be done if the person has been judged competent by a court. But overall there is a big difference in Aunt Harriet and someone who is bi-polar. The person with BPD has a malfunction of her or his "decision-maker" -- the brain.
That's your opinion. The person that you view as having "bipolar disorder" (who may or may not view themselves in the same fashion) may not agree with you. In fact, one of us may think that your decision-maker is on the fritz.
Some of us prefer to be this way. Some of us regard our brains as being more that just our decision-makers, and consider them to be the most quintessential "us" of any subpart we've got. (You probably do too). Some of us have just never developed much appreciation for having who we are defined by someone else as a disease.
(It's different if we don't like the difference or its consequences and want help, but that's individually OUR decision).
PS -- in case it's kind of escaped your awareness, part of the reason for many of us having this attitude is that we were your Aunt Harriet (or Guinastasia, or you) until one day a psychiatrist changed that by applying a little label to us.
Many people in the movement were subject to occasional "spells" of being miserable and out of sorts and inclined to seek some therapeutic help now and then, but did not think of ourselves as being non compos mentis, just a bit moody.
Many others did not seek, were not seeing, and had never sought help of any sort remotely akin to "mental health" and yet still inspired someone to think we weren't OK in the head, often for some pretty outrageous and appallingly narrow reasons.
It could happen to you. To absolutely anybody on this board. (In fact, a tendency to spend hours per week reading this board would be sufficiently indicative of mental disorder in the eyes of some overzealous shrinks, if your worried mom or coworker or ex-husband phoned them about you). And once it has happened once, however briefly, you no longer get to be simply the independent and willful and eccentric Aunt Harriet. Instead you get to be sick Aunt Harriet whose brain dysfunction explains everything she says or does that the people who know her would not have said and done, or, even if they would have, thinks that she should not have said and done.
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same thread
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Original SDMB thread Is manic-depression a disease to be cured?