Struggling with personality disorder
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.5042/mhrj.2010.0737 |
| Date | 14 December 2010 |
| Published date | 14 December 2010 |
| Pages | 36-39 |
| Author | Mark Easton |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
Mental Health Review Journal Volume 15 Issue 4 December 2010 © Pier Professional Ltd
36
Mark Easton
BBC Home Editor and First National Personality Disorder Congress Host, UK
Struggling with
personality disorder
Abstract
This article is based on the text of a BBC blog dated 26 November 2009, by Mark Easton. The piece reflects
on The First National Personality Disorder Congress.
Key words
Personality disorder, blog, labels.
‘An emphasis on stories or narratives rather
than naming encourages educators, clinicians
and researchers to view clients not as objects of
knowledge but, instead, as authors of knowledge
from whom others have something to learn.’
(Nehls, 1999)
We like to see the world in black and white:
a landscape of villains and victims; good and
evil; right and wrong. These labels allow us to
make easy moral judgements about others, to
apportion blame and sympathy. It seems to
be an involuntary human response. Who has
suffered? Who is at fault? Indeed, many of the
stories in today’s news are about the process
of allocation: the Iraq War Inquiry; reports of
crimes and the courts; response to the credit
crunch. We extract complexity and nuance
until we have distilled events to the point where
their human constituents can be placed in
monochrome boxes marked ‘saints’ and ‘sinners’.
Every narrative becomes a morality play.
Take the heart-rending story of Baby P. The
toddler we now know as Peter was a tragic
victim of abuse: torture that ultimately led to
his death. Those who carried out the abuse have
been described as ‘evil’. Blame was also heaped
on some of the professionals involved in the
case. But what if Peter had been saved? What
kind of person would he have grown up to be?
We can never know, of course. But we do know
that young children who suffer serious abuse are
more likely to develop a personal ity disorder
(PD) in later life. In a recen t academic paper,
researchers studied 50 people with PD. Of those,
44 had e xperienced abu se and most of them
blamed it for their problems. The deviant and
sometimes a ntisocial beha viour that defines PD
may well result in such individua ls ending u p
in the c riminal justic e system, a t which poi nt
the victim becomes the villain. Peter’s mo ther
was herself seriously abused as a child. At some
point in her life, she was mov ed from the white
box to t he black. T he question about Baby P
was raised by psychiatrists at a conference I
attended la st week.
The First National Personality Disorder
Congress brought together professionals,
PD service users and their carers to ‘celebrate
developments in the personality disorder field’. But
for all its upbeat tone, the event forced me into
uncomfortable territory, a place where moral and
medical judgements are blurred and the idea of
personal responsibility is tested. Where does fate
end and fault begin? Two hundred years ago,
clinicians began to focus on criminals whose
offences were so abhorrent that they appeared
insane and yet didn’t suffer from any recognised
mental illness. The term ‘moral insanity’ was
coined, a description of a condition where
intellectual faculties are unimpaired but morals
are deemed ‘depraved or perverted’. However, as
early as 1874, the pioneer of psychiatry Henry
Maudsley suggested that the phrase portrayed ‘a
10.5042/mhrj.2010.0737
SOCIAL
POLICY
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