Episode 73: Borderline Personality Disorder

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.

The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. On their Substack newsletter, you can find different styles of articles that aren’t part of the main magazine, like this excellent walkthrough of nuclear power technology called “Nuclear Reactors for Dummies”. You can find that and much more at worksinprogress.news.

Show notes

* Mayo Clinic page on personality disorders

* NHS page on Borderline Personality Disorder

* Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2021 essay “It is Obscene”

* Tom’s Unherd article on this controversy

* 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.