Ever since someone told me their suspicion about my possible BPD. I've read not only books on our disorder, but also on eating disorders, bipolar disorder, AD(H)D (including books that say it doesn't even exist), and my favorite, books on psychopaths (or ASPD as it's more lamely called).


The Psychopath Whisperer has given me the most hope about the nature of our disorder. The non-fiction book is about one of the foremost researcher of the disease discovering the neurological foundations for the disorder. He traces his journey from discovering a tell-tale EEG that correlates with the Hare Psychopathy test, to linking that particular brain-wave (or more exactly reaction to a certain test) to an unrelated group of people with temporal lobe damage, to investigating fMRI images that correlate psychopathy with not only reduced activity, but reduced grey matter in the paralymbic cortex, which from my understanding includes the amygdala, hippocampus, etc. which also seems to be responsible for a borderline's emotional disregulation.


The author systematically makes the case how this identifiable neurological trait is found early in life. Using a mobile MRI he's imaged the brains of both psychopathic adults and young people, which basically points to how complex psychological disorders can be demonstrably biological and inate. 


The more I learn about the nature of ADD and psychopathy the more it seems biology/neurology is at the heart of mental disorders, and at least to me it's nice to think that no matter how good or bad my parents were maybe it wasn't their fault that a person can be born slightly more sensitive than most others. Psychopaths are at a different spectrum, they're born with a propensity to not know what love is beyond sex, who can shoot their siblings over a slight, no matter what their parents have done. 


Aren't there people on this sub, who had an average upbringing, and can't fathom how they went askew? Who feel like the psychotherapeutic literature on the pathogenesis of BPD seems to blame dysfunctional attachment or corrosion of identity by invalidation, but wonder how it could apply to their childhood? Or wonder if maybe they have to really try to actually find "real" instances when their parents may have done these damaging activities? 


Most of all books like these make it clear that neuropsychology is making headway into the nebulous cloud of the origins of mental disorders, and soon offer chemical solutions to the problem. Even if the solutions aren't available for some time, it's good to know that like height or eye color, may only be one more trait that isn't anyone's fault, we were just born that way. There's a certain relief in knowing that it's just the luck of the draw, and not necessarily environmental factors that lead to it.
