Do you know anyone who has extremely intense relationships—one minute totally in love with someone; the next, flying into a rage and calling them the worst person ever? It’s possible that they have borderline personality disorder.
Whatever that is. What is a “personality disorder”, anyway? How is one diagnosed? In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart discuss a disorder that gets a lot of attention online, but which seems pretty tricky to define. And it’s somehow both surprising and entirely predictable that Tom relates this disorder back to his favourite topic: the Reverend Thomas Bayes.
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Show notes
Mayo Clinic page on personality disorders
NHS page on Borderline Personality Disorder
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2021 essay “It is Obscene”
2009 paper on Dissociative Identity Disorder and its overlap with Borderline Personality Disorder
Comparison of patients with DID and BPD, with a discussion of the overlap
Pieces by people with BPD diagnoses who’ve regularly changed their dress/style
Tom’s book on Bayesianism
Sceptical article about top-down effects on perception
Paper on the “predictive processing” theory of BPD
Scott Alexander article on the same topic
Twin study on the overlap between BPD and antisocial personality disorder, and potential sex differences
Longitudinal studies on whether people “age out” of BPD
People higher in “dark tetrad” traits are more likely to enjoy trolling people online
Credits
The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.
