Personality disorders: illegitimate subject positions

Abstract

The diagnosis of personality disorder is common in mental health nurse settings and is a term often used without critical consideration. In clinical practice, the term personality disorder has pejorative connotations, which arise out of the way in which these behaviours are constructed as behavioural rather than psychiatric. The discursive construction of categories of personality disorder are inculcated into clinical practice and become taken-for-granted by those in practice culture. The construction of some personalities as disordered and, therefore, illegitimate becomes natural. This paper provides a critical analysis of the diagnosis and suggests an approach to mental health nursing care that is more legitimizing for those people who receive psychiatric diagnoses.

The New Hysteria: Borderline Personality Disorder and Epistemic Injustice

“…12 Given all of these concerns, the continued use of the BPD diagnosis suggests the following relative to larger societal-psychological norms: the diagnosis of BPD places women in a double bind in which they are punished for both conforming to and breaking away from societal stereotypes and expectations pertaining to femininity as linked to "stability" of self. That the criterion of BPD inherently places women in a double-bind demands a broader conversation about how this diagnosis is used to enforce a certain value-system on women or, at a minimum, relies on and further entrenches it (Crowe 2008). Given these considerations, we agree with the literature surveyed that, at a minimum, the symptomology and criteria behind BPD are too expansive.…”

Masking the self: Understanding the link between eating disorders and child sexual abuse

“…The DSM maintains master status and in doing so, demarcates and frames various forms of distress as illness (LaFrance and McKenzie-Mohr, 2013). From a Bakhtinian (1981) position, the static nature of authoritative discourse removes all traces of internal conflict or meaning; thus, psychiatric diagnoses construct subject positions rather than a person's experience of distress (Crowe, 2008). These discourses, we consider, were disempowering and even destructive.…”