Dakota Van Rooy's Reviews > I Hate You—Don't Leave Me: Understanding the Borderline Personality

** spoiler alert ** This may be an unpopular opinion, but I'm going to say it:

I HATED this book!

The overall feel and tone is demeaning and dehumanizing and for a book recommended by my Doctor and Psychiatrist I found it lack the supportive feel I was expecting. Often while reading I found that there were many blanket statements made: "borderlines... (which is what people afflicted with this mental health condition were called)... can/can't/will/won't/are". Anyone familiar with how BPD is diagnosed knows that there are several combinations of factors leading to the development of BPD as well as varying symptoms (9 of them to be exact). ONLY 5 of the 9 symptoms must be present for diagnosis, thus giving blanket statements when there are dozens of possible combinations of symptoms and thus dozens of presentations/manifestations of the disorder seems to me a very bigoted and narrow-minded view.

This book goes on to then make out all BPD cases to be ones of an attention-seeking, narcissistic, irrational, etc. nature. Even saying that "the borderlines" cannot feel empathy and remain friends and are impossible to satisfy. To say this while writing a book that lacks empathy eluded me and just made me even more frustrated. He even states that BPD is most commonly caused by trauma from an early age, but alas I looked through the book for more information on this topic and found it insensitively tucked in with a dehumanizing hand amongst his case studies and that.

There is an entire series of text that speaks to the authour's belief that women in the work-force and not at home raising babies is a heightened cause of BPD and refers to families that are not male breadwinner and female housewife as "faux-families". Better still, this book was written IN THIS CENTURY!

The author mentions sexual deviance and perversions on several occasions as one of the leading impulsive behaviors of people with BPD, which while perhaps true still doesn't sit right when followed by a case study/example where he refers to this perverse behavior in the woman he speaks of as whorish and explains her encounter as “a sleezy encounter with a man at a bar”. I do not feel that these narrow-minded and demeaning comments should be included in a book that claims to be supportive and informative to the BPD community.

That being said, if you're willing to take the information for what it is and cynically maybe 25% is actually of use, the rest is unsupportive and personally I wish this book was never published in the first place. I read this book, skimming the case studies in later chapters, as it was a doctor recommendation, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who's trying to understand and come to terms with a diagnosis as it gives a bleak and relatively negative/narrow-minded view as to prognosis, even with therapy and medication.

To save your money and spare you the pain of this book, I would recommend instead:

"The Borderline Personality Disorder Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Living with BPD" by Dr. Alex Chapman and Dr. Kim Gratz