Just Borderline Mad

[Published March 2017 in Asylum Magazine, by Flick Grey]

I’m not sure how to locate my own madness experiences in relation to this world, but I’m tired of feeling or being marginal (or ‘borderline’!). Within the psychiatric system, I was informally labelled as having borderline personality disorder, but today my private (trauma-informed) psychotherapist describes me as having “complex posttraumatic stress disorder” (a diagnosis not recognised by DSM 5). I don’t find either description adequate, although the latter is much less shaming! I understand my own experiences not in terms of a disorder of an individual, but in terms of relational embodiment.

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C-PTSD has primarily been theorised by trauma-specialists, not by Mad people, and so their words don’t feel like my words: it still locates mental health professionals as ‘the real experts’ on my most intimate experiences. Even the word ‘trauma’ has a place in my culture that is overly pre-determined, rather than offering space for individual meaning-making (as is offered by the Hearing Voices Network).

I ask people “How do YOU understand your experiences?” – especially when they have no obvious, culturally-recognised trauma: too many people with a BPD label describe feeling ashamed for not having “enough trauma to be this fucked up”. But I believe that when we listen carefully to relational context and meaning-making our responses always make sense.