EUPD

Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD), or Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) as it is also known, is a mental health condition that means that you are less able to flexibly respond to, and manage your emotions. People with EUPD feel everything in the extreme, either very happy – ecstatic even – or more often deeply sad or angry. The middle ground is not so available to them, so they don’t feel the ‘humdrum calm’, the ‘plodding along’ that most people live with. They lack stable emotions. It is not known what causes EUPD but it seems to be linked to trauma in childhood or adolescence.

Mental illness isn’t visible. All we see is the behaviour that mental illness causes which is often not socially ‘the norm’. Their behaviour is often extreme and to us incomprehensible.

Problems that seem easily solved to most people can be almost impossible challenges to those with EUPD. We don’t realise that they are doing their best to survive with a bewildering and irrational condition.

Or they ‘present well’, behaving as we would like them to behave, conforming and appearing OK but really, they are just trying to please – trying to make the ones they care about happy when really they are struggling.

We need to recognise that people with EUPD would much rather be living the humdrum, plodding along life that most people live, being more in control of their extreme emotions.

Emotions such as: the feeling of self-loathing that makes them binge then starve or take laxatives in a self-destructive cycle; the feeling that makes them unable to shower or change clothes for days because they will have to look at themselves; the feeling that makes them hurt and push away the ones they love through fear of being abandoned; the feeling that makes them cut their skin with increasing severity to get temporary relief from the uncontrollable turmoil inside; the feeling they have of wanting to die.