Boilermaker
Master Don Juan
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2010
- Messages
- 1,339
- Reaction score
- 77
I want to talk about the possibility of encountering women with BPD, because our forum members seem to have a special talent of digging them out although it appears extremely unlikely to encounter even a "single" woman with a BPD, during the course of one's lifetime.
Just a quick check on Wolphram Alpha shows that on average only
1 in 33,000 (yes thirty three thousand!) women has clinical Borderline Personality Disorder in the US. That is 0.003 % of the entire female population. Moreover, the average age of these people is 35, which means we are not interacting with HALF of them (above 35) anyway. That reduces the odds even more. If you dig a little more and check the age distribution, you see there's almost nobody younger than 30 with clinical BPD , on average, which makes it really surprising because almost all of these so-called BPD cases that come to our forum, involve women of ages between 20 - 30.
Now if you check people with scizophrenia it's one in 1300 (thirteen hundred) in females! So our valiant forum members must have seen way more women with scizophrenic disorders than those with BPD.
Just for fun, I checked people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and that returned 1 in 4500 females. The age distribution is skewed to the older range, but still, you have your moms, relatives and friends, is a female with pancreatic cancer a common sight? That is one in ~5,000, mind you.
The answer is no.
As for borderline personality disorder, it is an extremely specific, well-defined psychiatric disorder, and it is not your everyday illness like flu.
We should stop diagnosing women with BPD whenever they break our hearts. Because it is really unlikely that many of us have sampled that small a fraction. I should add that it takes 10-15 visits for a professional psychiatrist to diagnose a patient with BPD, under clinical environments and professional tests. Our resident psychiatrists might disagree but that really says a lot about our half-assed diagnoses.
References:
1)BPD
2)Schizophrenia
3)Pancreatic Cancer
Just a quick check on Wolphram Alpha shows that on average only
1 in 33,000 (yes thirty three thousand!) women has clinical Borderline Personality Disorder in the US. That is 0.003 % of the entire female population. Moreover, the average age of these people is 35, which means we are not interacting with HALF of them (above 35) anyway. That reduces the odds even more. If you dig a little more and check the age distribution, you see there's almost nobody younger than 30 with clinical BPD , on average, which makes it really surprising because almost all of these so-called BPD cases that come to our forum, involve women of ages between 20 - 30.
Now if you check people with scizophrenia it's one in 1300 (thirteen hundred) in females! So our valiant forum members must have seen way more women with scizophrenic disorders than those with BPD.
Just for fun, I checked people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and that returned 1 in 4500 females. The age distribution is skewed to the older range, but still, you have your moms, relatives and friends, is a female with pancreatic cancer a common sight? That is one in ~5,000, mind you.
The answer is no.
As for borderline personality disorder, it is an extremely specific, well-defined psychiatric disorder, and it is not your everyday illness like flu.
We should stop diagnosing women with BPD whenever they break our hearts. Because it is really unlikely that many of us have sampled that small a fraction. I should add that it takes 10-15 visits for a professional psychiatrist to diagnose a patient with BPD, under clinical environments and professional tests. Our resident psychiatrists might disagree but that really says a lot about our half-assed diagnoses.
References:
1)BPD
2)Schizophrenia
3)Pancreatic Cancer