Borderline Personality Disorder Case Study

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At age of 17 things started to take a turn for the worst. Jordan became emotionally unstable and her mood changes were unpredictable. She was now fighting with her parents daily, this included yelling and usually ended with Jordan throwing things. There were still times when Jordan would experience separation anxiety when it came to her mother, but then there were times when she would leave the house upset and would not return for a few days. One day, her mother noticed something on Jordan’s arm. They were scars that Jordan had inflicted on herself. When she was confronted about it by her parent she first said that she had been scratched by the cat. Eventually she admitted to harming herself. She said she did it because she felt alone and …show more content…

In addition, it seems that some individuals with borderline personality disorder have a number of regions on their brain with abnormal function and structure. It is suggested that many individuals with this illness have altered functioning of serotonin, a neurotransmitter in their brain. This alteration has been linked to depression, aggression, and difficulty in controlling destructive urges. Two other neurotransmitter, dopamine and noradrenaline, though little evidence has been found suggests that if altered they may be associated with emotional instability. Researchers have been using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to study the brains of individuals with this mental illness. They discovered that problems in the amygdala, hippocampus, and the orbitofrontal cortex may be linked to the symptoms of borderline personality disorder. (Borderline personality disorder- causes, …show more content…

Those associated with poor parenting are the individuals who are most vulnerable to developing this mental illness. Poor parenting can include failing to protect a child from abuse from an outside, another family or from the other parent. Children can still develop borderline personality disorder even if they have not been subjected to such environmental traumas. (Friedel, 2012) The most frequent childhood abuse was found to be sexual abuse (Bohus, Lieb, Linehan, n.d.). A number of studies have been analyzing the contribution of interpersonal trauma in borderline personality have singled out childhood sexual abuse as a major psychological risk factor. In a study that was done, they found that individual who reported having experienced interpersonal trauma at any point during their lives were eight times as likely to screen positive for borderline personality disorder.(Westphal, Bravova, Gameroff, Gross, Wickramaratne, and Neria, 2013) Another study showed that one possible explanation of emotional dysregulation is linked with traumatic experiences and that traumatic events hinder the development of recognizing and labeling emotional states. Being able to identify and describe emotions is importance to the processing of emotional experiences of daily life. (Gaher, Hofman, Simons, and Hunsaker,

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