Representations of personality disorder Kirsten Stalker Aileen Barclay

Representations of ‘personality disorder’ Kirsten Stalker, Aileen Barclay and Iain Ferguson, Stirling University

Approaches to ‘personality disorder’ • Psychiatric discourse • Behavioural • Childhood trauma • Social model of madness + distress

Glasgow Study – aims + methods • to explore users’ views re meaning of ‘personality disorder’ + the usefulness of this term • to seek users’ accounts of the difficulties they experience • to identify users’ views of what helps • interviewed 10 users (+ 12 providers)

Understandings of PD • most users had little or no idea • some thought something fundamentally ‘wrong’ with them • a few thought just another label • one or two questioned aspects • lack of information + explanation • discovered diagnosis by chance

Usefulness of diagnosis • half saw PD as a derogatory term • label excluded people from support • a few thought some diagnosis better than none

Type of difficulties • Forming + maintaining relationships • Poverty, domestic violence, homelessness, substance misuse • Stigma and discrimination • Coping with day to day activities

Causes of difficulties • Almost all saw childhood abuse as major factor • Experiences of loss

What helps? • Wide range of coping strategies - going to mental health resource centre - talking to someone; keeping busy - martial arts; going to bed - medication; ‘keeping yourself to yourself’ - ‘fighting the illness’; drugs + alcohol - overdosing; cutting • Almost all were positive re mental health services, but building trust was hard

• • Implications for a social model? ‘PD’ involved distress not illness significance of life events impact of social/ economic factors interaction of private/emotional and social/ structural dimensions • social relational model – impairment effects, material barriers, + psychoemotional disablism