One of the best books out about borderline personality disorder is “The Siren’s Dance: My Marriage to a Borderline,” by Anthony Walker, a psychiatrist. The detailed descriptions of events will give you a strong appreciation for those persons who live with this mood disorder, or suffer from it on a daily basis.

In the book is an appendix about the term, “borderline.” The author writes:

The term borderline is a historical term that many people argue should be changed. These patients were first described in the 1940s by psychoanalysts who theorized that this is a form of pathology lying on the border between psychosis and neurosis. Some clinicians see it as the border between sanity and insanity. Nevertheless, the term is confusing and further has increasingly and unfortunately been used as a pejorative for difficult patients, in particular difficult female patients. In my opinion, a far better term would be self-destructive personality disorder, which would be the psychological equivalent of a autoimmune disorder. Others have proposed emotionally dysregulated personality disorder. 

Sadly, it is common–and wrong–to call any woman who is seen as manipulative, especially one who has emotional problems, a “borderline.” We have to be careful so as not to misuse the diagnosis. Also, at the end of the day, we all manipulate at some level, and manipulation alone is certainly not enough to make a BPD diagnosis.

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