I just wanted to clarify something Racingfan wrote. They wrote "at least a borderline personality disorder - maybe bipolar", but Borderline Personality Disorder and Bi-Polar are two separate things. BPD is is a pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self-image and emotions. People with borderline personality disorder are also usually very impulsive.
A person with this disorder will also often exhibit impulsive behaviors and have a majority of the following symptoms:
- Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
- A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation
- Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
- Impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)
- Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior
- Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)
- Chronic feelings of emptiness
- Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)
- Transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms
(
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/sym...lity-disorder/ )
What I was told was that someone with BPD never learned how to cope with emotional feelings as children, and still react as they did when they were young. Fear of abandonment is a big part of it, with suffers trying to bring someone closer and push them away at the same time, as a sort of 'test' to see if they will leave. When someone does leave, it only reinforces the sufferer that they must be a bad person.
It is entirely separate from Bi-polar disorder, but they often occur together.