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"5150" One Who Flew Into The Cuckoos Nest Pages 324-326 Borderline Personality Disorder Over the next couple of years the hospitalizations continued. I recalled years ago the first time a doctor diagnosed me before I met Mason. His name was Dr. Safai and he looked at me while I was inpatient and said, “I think I know what you have.” I felt as though I might have a new identity and asked, “What? What is it that you think I have?” He said, “I’m not sure yet. I think I might need more time to be sure.” I wasn’t one to be put off for something this important. I asked again, “Tell me, please tell me what you think I have.” He answered, “I think you have Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Well, that sure made a lot of sense to me! I was on the border! On one border lived Lil Kathi and on the other boarder I existed. And since that day I had been diagnosed with that disorder many times. Sometimes the doctors put “severe BPD.” It made perfect sense, that is, until one day I decided to look it up. I wasn’t at all happy about what I read. According to the DSM-IV, the psychiatric handbook, and to paraphrase, to meet borderline personality disorder, I had to meet 5 of the 9 following symptoms: To paraphrase:
I could see how on an inpatient ward that a doctor might think I could have BPD. I mean take away a person’s freedom, put them in a very small area, take everything away from them, and give them nothing to do, invalidate them, enter into power struggles, mix it up and you get a very unstable individual. In a normal conflict a person can select “fight or flight,” but not on an inpatient ward. You can’t fight because there are too many staffers. You can’t run because the door is locked, so the only aggressive thing a person can do is plot to get even. Staff charted this type of behavior as passive-aggressive, meaning a patient is passively acting out their aggression. For example, if I were to stand on the wrong side of the Red Line that restricted patients from being too close to the exit door, and I refused to move; I’d be characterized as passive-aggressive. In other words, I was being aggressive in a passive way. However, because a patient cannot choose “fight or flight,” everything is fair game to become “aggressive” because it is the only available option and there is nothing passive about it because it is “in your face” behavior. Yet, when I really considered the BPD symptoms, I could relate to (1) emptiness, (2) abandonment issues, (3) identity conflicts, (4) dissociative symptoms (5) cutting or hurting myself, (6) intense mood swings (7) inability to control anger at times. And, all of these symptoms were magnified on the inpatient unit. The bad thing about BPD is that it is often a trashcan diagnosis. Often times a doctor will brand a patient with BPD as a way of indicating the patient is a pain in the butt, rigid and unworkable. Because of this, other doctors have a problem with this diagnosis stating it is a demeaning failure-based approach to treat trauma survivors. In addition to the BPD diagnosis, staff charted it was manifested with extreme impulsiveness in which I had difficulty controlling myself. When I read that in the chart one day, I looked at a staffer and said, “It says right here that I’m impulsive.” The staffer said, “That’s right, you are impulsive.” I challenged, “Okay, to prove to you that I’m not impulsive, this is what I’m going to do. The time is now 2 pm. At 4 pm I am going up into the ceiling. This will give you two hours notice so that when I do go up into the ceiling, you will know that I was not impulsive.” The staffer just looked at me and said, “Yeah, right.” Two hours later I looked around the unit. All of the staff was inside the nursing station. My heart started to beat faster because I knew I was going to go though it. I grabbed a plastic chair and put it on top of the T.V. cabinet. I jumped onto the T.V. cabinet and then up on top of the chair. Right then I heard, “Kathi! Get down from there!” At that moment, I knew it was on. I had to get up into the ceiling or it was seclusion. Staff rushed from behind the nursing station. I pushed up a section of the drop-down ceiling, jumped high and grabbed two vertical 2x4’s and pulled myself up into the ceiling. Nurse Baldwin caught the tip of my foot on my way up. I kicked her hand lose so I wouldn’t fall. I hurt her finger by accident. She calls it her “Kathi finger.” I put my feet on a narrow ledge and stood up. I held the 2x4s and scooted in the ceiling looking for a place to escape. Except for one thing, there was no escape in the ceiling and I had to come down. On my way back I slipped and took 7 ceiling tiles out with me when I fell to the floor. I wasn’t hurt. I smiled and looked at the staffer and said, “Please don’t chart that I was impulsive, because I gave you a two hour notice!” It didn’t help with staff charting because they still kept charting that I was impulsive. ?ť Copyright Year:
2007 |
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