Nicole M. Luongo
1 min readOct 4, 2020

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I’m firmly of the belief that so-called BPD is a catch-all diagnosis for the symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress. There’s a significant literature in the fields of neurobiology and neurophysiology to support this claim (The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is a great primer). The reasons psychiatry hasn’t acknowledged trauma very, but ultimately creating new diagnoses keeps them employed, and acts as an excellent mechanism of social control. BPD is diagnosed in women (particularly rape survivors) at 3x the rate it is in men, and of all the diagnostic categories, BPD is the mostly explicitly misogynistic. If identifying with your label works for you, that’s great. If not, there are many alternate paradigms through which to view one’s humanity outside the disease framework.

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Nicole M. Luongo
Nicole M. Luongo

Written by Nicole M. Luongo

Author. Academic. Mad Woman | Critical takes on health and illness | Pre-order my book: https://www.amazon.ca/Becoming-Nicole-Luongo/dp/177133813X

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