Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder

By Alexander Kriss

A kaleidoscopic biography of borderline personality disorder, revealing the condition’s hopeful – and treatable – future

‘Difficult’. ‘Impossible to treat’. ‘Dropout’.

Patients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are nearly always defined as a problem. Not only by popular culture and its depictions of mercurial, manipulative women (and they’re almost always women), but often too by mental-health workers, those professionally pledged to offer therapy to the traumatized and suffering.

Supervisors warned Alexander Kriss early in his career that BPD patients weren’t worth the trouble. But after a life-changing encounter with a borderline patient named Ana, he became invested in uncovering the truth behind this stigmatized, poorly understood, yet increasingly prevalent condition.

In this deeply researched, humane investigation, Kriss uncovers the lost history of BPD. He reveals a thread of trauma deferred, from hysteria in ancient Greece to the seemingly scattered constellation of symptoms that today we recognize as a distinct disorder. He draws on his extensive work with BPD patients in his psychotherapy practice, painting an intimate portrait of what it’s like to live with the condition. Ultimately Kriss tells a moving story of persistence and life: how individuals struggle and flourish, even in the face of a society that shirks collective responsibility for its individual traumas.