Do you know anyone who has extremely intense relationships—one minute totally in love with someone; the next, flying into a rage and calling them the worst person ever? It’s possible that they have borderline personality disorder.

Whatever that is. What is a “personality disorder”, anyway? How is one diagnosed? In this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart discuss a disorder that gets a lot of attention online, but which seems pretty tricky to define. And it’s somehow both surprising and entirely predictable that Tom relates this disorder back to his favourite topic: the Reverend Thomas Bayes.

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Show notes

* Mayo Clinic page on personality disorders

* NHS page on Borderline Personality Disorder

* Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2021 essay “It is Obscene”

* Tom’s Unherd article on this controversy

* 2009 paper on Dissociative Identity Disorder and its overlap with Borderline Personality Disorder

* Comparison of patients with DID and BPD, with a discussion of the overlap

* Pieces by people with BPD diagnoses who’ve regularly changed their dress/style

* Tom’s book on Bayesianism

* Sceptical article about top-down effects on perception

* Paper on the “predictive processing” theory of BPD

* Scott Alexander article on the same topic

* Twin study on the overlap between BPD and antisocial personality disorder, and potential sex differences

* Longitudinal studies on whether people “age out” of BPD

* People higher in “dark tetrad” traits are more likely to enjoy trolling people online

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.

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