“I feel like the system failed me.”

I was diagnosed with Panic Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and an eating disorder when I was a teenager. Later when I was 22, a psychiatrist told me they thought I had BPD. Six years later I was diagnosed with BPD again when I was seeking accommodations to help me finish college.

BPD impacts me in so many ways, I really could go on forever. I don’t think there’s a part of my life that hasn’t been affected by BPD. I used to jump from job to job before therapy, spent more money than I could afford and did things that scared me or confused me. Life has always felt dangerous because I’m so easy to hurt that people do it by accident all the time.

I have really intense emotional reactions and that means most people can’t understand me. It also meant I struggled to understand other people before I realized I was different.

Not being understood is incredibly lonely, so I tend to fixate on people who I think might want to know me. Because my emotions are so intense, I’ve had to compartmentalize and dissociate to cope with them. This impacts my memory to the point where I have difficulty recalling anything connected to emotions I’m not experiencing in the moment.

Having rapidly shifting emotions and a weak memory all my life has made forming a sense of self impossible. I can’t figure out what I like/dislike or what I value and who I want to be, because these things keep changing. This further complicates my relationships with other people because I use those people I’m fixated on to stabilize my identity. I basically try to make myself into someone who they’d be able to love. I don’t do it on purpose; it just happens instinctively.

That makes it even harder to understand who I am because I can’t separate my likes/dislikes/values/goals/etc from theirs. If they leave me or if things change in any significant way, I end up feeling like my entire sense of self and my safety is being taken away. This makes me act (or want to act) in very extreme ways to make them stay with me and like me and help me feel safe again.

Since my emotions are so intense, it can feel like even tiny changes have this huge impact on me. I’ve learned to suppress my emotions and hide everything that’s happening internally so people won’t be freaked out.

This causes the emotions to become more intense to the point where I start to get delusional. Then I do things that hurt me like self-injury, starving myself, sabotaging projects I care about – all to punish myself for the crime of having emotions that don’t make sense to other people, that make me harder to love. I think that’s the core of it: BPD makes me feel like I’m very hard to love.

I was admitted to hospital when I was about 16 (I say about, because my memory isn’t great at placing things in time). I had been cutting a lot, starving myself, not sleeping, I had no friends. I was usually a straight-A student, it was part of how I’d always tried to present myself, and I was failing chemistry. I burst into tears in class one day and a teacher made me go to the counsellor’s office.

I decided to tell them everything I was doing. They immediately took me to the hospital and the hospital recommended I be admitted to the psych ward in the nearest city (a couple hours away). My mom was furious. She told me I was making her look bad, but she drove me there anyway.

The daily routine was a couple of groups per day. I remember one was a meditation thing that was boring. Another was about alcohol/drugs, which I wasn’t into, but the other patients were. We had one where we talked about feelings, but there were a lot of us, so we didn’t get through everyone every time. There were a few old movies, puzzles and board games, and a shelf of books, so not a lot to do. I felt better as soon as I got there, though, because I thought they’d want to help me and that meant I’d be able to feel better.

I think since I was so cheerful and helpful, they didn’t really believe anything was wrong with me. I had a couple of meetings with a therapist, but I didn’t have anything to talk about because I felt better not being at home where no one paid attention to me, or at school where the pressure was intense and the loneliness was crushing. As for treatment, they put me on an SSRI (Fluvoxamine). It made me drowsy and gave me really weird dreams.

The patients were all between 12 and 16. There was a girl with autism who said she was there because she had meltdowns (really messed up, to look back on that), a few with drug/alcohol problems, a couple others who self-harmed… there was one girl I really admired there because she seemed to talk so openly about herself and her feelings.

I met a boy there and we started dating after we both left, my first boyfriend ever. He later sexually assaulted me and then stalked and threatened me for several weeks. He was in the hospital for threatening his previous girlfriend and acting violently. I didn’t have any experience with dating to recognize this as a red flag. I just wanted someone to like me.

I had sent a nude to this boy (after he coerced me) and he posted it online when I broke up with him. I went to the police to have them help me get it taken down since I was a minor (this was before the revenge porn laws were created). Several of them saw the image and insinuated I was overreacting, and then later the boy told me that the cops had all laughed about it with him (I doubt that’s true, but it hurt to hear when I was a kid).

The fact that I’d met my ex in a psych ward was definitely used against me while the cops were asking questions. They never said it directly, but I got the impression they weren’t taking my fears seriously and they maybe thought I was asking for it by sending the nude in the first place.

I was also very dissociated when I spoke to them. I didn’t appear to be panicked or ashamed, just calm and logical. I remember feeling nothing until later. Now it’s a major trauma in my life what happened at that police station.

I remember the staff telling me patients weren’t allowed to date after leaving, but there was no way to enforce that. The staff knew he’d asked me out but nobody warned me.

I barely remember the staff. I remember being told to calm down or they would have to give me a medication to make me sleep. After I left, my mom told me that the psychiatrist said I was fine and that nothing was wrong with me, but I have no idea if that’s accurate or not.

I was given about month’s worth of the SSRI, but my mom never refilled it. I ended up withdrawing from it too suddenly and it made me act in really unusual ways. I attempted suicide by pills during that period of time, but I survived and didn’t tell anyone what happened.

Overall, I feel like the system failed me. There was a lot wrong with my life. I needed help. I was being neglected and abused at home. There was no follow up after I left the hospital, or if there was, it was only checking through my mom.

I didn’t need an SSRI. I needed DBT therapy and a plan put in place to check on me directly once I was back in my regular environment.

I think because I wasn’t having rage outbursts or being ‘difficult’, my symptoms were downplayed and overlooked. I was very compliant with staff; I trusted them, even idealized them as people who could help me. I think because I wasn’t making trouble, they didn’t put in the effort to find out why I was there.

I was 16 when I left the hospital and I got nothing out of it but more trauma. I got into a very long abusive relationship just a couple years later, dropped out of college twice, and went through tons of therapy trying to figure out why I was struggling so much.

Everything that’s helped me has been found because I pushed myself to find it. I feel like I’ve been left completely on my own to advocate for myself and devise my own treatment plan.

It wasn’t until I got health insurance through my college at age 28 that I finally had access to private therapy. I got into a DBT program, left the abusive relationship, and started to get better only after that. Mental health care isn’t covered by the government, so it’s been insanely difficult to find any help.

There is free counselling for problems like mild to moderate anxiety or depression or addictions (I’m not minimising these at all- I’m just pointing out that generally these are more straightforward for professionals to treat), but not for something very complex like BPD where I need a therapist with advanced skills and training. But I couldn’t hold down a job or complete school until I got help, so I couldn’t afford real therapy.

It took extreme effort and perseverance to keep trying, keep looking for help. I actually ended up going to school for behavioural psychology just so that I could help myself better. I think it’s really fucked up how I was left to fend for myself as a teenager and then there was nothing to help me all throughout my 20s. Even now I get $500 through my insurance from my job to put toward therapy. My therapy costs $185 per 50 minutes. I can’t get ahead at all. And I’m one of the lucky ones.

It makes me very angry and sad to imagine how so many people are just suffering for no good reason because the system doesn’t reach out and give them what they need. Right now the waiting lists for DBT at hospitals are one to three years long. The private programs that have wait lists of 3-12 months cost about $1000 a month. Children’s mental health basically doesn’t exist because it’s focused on keeping kids quiet (I did my field placements in schools and saw firsthand how it was handled). The organizations that exist have no funding to do what they want to do. People working in the mental health field get burnt out very quickly.

BPD is complex and requires years of therapy and help in so many aspects of life… our system is not equipped to help anyone who isn’t in active crisis and even then it’s more traumatizing than helpful.

The most important thing I think people can take from my story is that it’s exhausting to be your own case manager and therapist when you really need help. If I wasn’t lucky enough to have natural optimism and perfectionist tendencies, there’s no way I could have survived having BPD at this level of severity in this mental health system. I understand fully why 10% of us die by suicide. Society is failing us.