Scout Tzofiya Bolton painfully illustrates the neglect and brutality that can arise once mental health difficulties are understood as a “disordered personality” (Nobody could help me with my psychosis. Then I was sent to jail for holding up a shop with a toy gun, 18 January).
The emotionally unstable personality disorder diagnosis that harmed Scout can be easily understood as a label given to survivors of abuse, with more than 90% of people with this diagnosis who are hospitalised having abusive experiences in their past.
Last year more than 1,200 clinicians wrote to the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the health representatives of the different political parties to call for this diagnosis not to be used with children. It was signed by 10 past keynote speakers of the British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder. There was no reply and the Royal College advice that children must be diagnosed from age 14 remains.
There is currently great concern and sympathy about the survivors of Rotherham and the grooming gangs. The public will be shocked at the extent to which that sympathy changes once survivors of abuse are branded as having disordered personalities.
Keir Harding
Member, Royal College of Psychiatrists’ expert reference group for personality disorder
Carried on the wave of her affecting prose, and deeply sympathetic with her mental turmoil, I was suddenly brought up sharp. For Scout Tzofiya Bolton had described to me what I had long known, but never actually figured out: that community mental health teams can tinker with psychiatric diagnoses to suit their own purposes.
I have seen this happen with my own adult son. When he was an adolescent, we were told that it was too early to intervene. Once he was an adult, we were kept out of the loop, supposedly for reasons of confidentiality.
So, when a sympathetic professional whispered the term that his fellows had decided upon, that of “borderline personality disorder”, I had to accept that they knew best.
Thank you, Ms Bolton, for shedding light on this matter. With such a diagnosis, the medical professionals were able to abandon him to 20 years of abject misery and loneliness; and counting. It should not take an infringement of the law to be able to solicit support. What sort of society do we have that cannot find adequate resources to help mentally ill people?
Name and address supplied
