4 ms·

I found a googleable meta study about it that concluded that BPD traits were associated with women, but also that women who don’t express gender normal behavior

I found a googleable meta study about it that concluded that BPD traits were associated with women, but also that women who don’t express gender normal behavior are perceived as BPD by men. Although men scored higher in individual BPD behaviors, they were not perceived as BPD by themselves or others unless they behaved outside of gender normal behavior (acted more “feminine”). There’s a genetic component by a twin study, but it’s unknown it’s causative effect to gender. There’s studies that women score higher in neuroticism(anxiety, depression, etc) as a personality trait. It is also known child trauma has a causative effect, and may be related to how women are sexually assaulted as children at higher rates than men. Basically, a complex mix of social expectations, social bias, how women are treated in society, and biological aspects of women’s personalities may contribute to an overall significantly higher rate of BPD diagnosis being a female diagnosis. Interestingly, a disorder on the same axis (antisocial personality disorder) has an exact opposite gender disparity (3:1 men over women) and that is also investigated in other studies. http://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/skodol2003.pdf http://www.sakkyndig.com/psykologi/artvit/skodol2003.pdf [2003]

lulmerchant 9y ago
How people perceive others is irrelevant to the question. Women are more often clinically diagnosed with BPD, not simply perceived by others to express it. The rest of your post is mostly unsupported speculation. Apart from the parallel you've drawn with APD, which has a lot of similarities to BPD, except with inverse gender distribution.
- SolaceQuantum 9y ago
  Nothing I wrote wasn’t a conclusion of a paper or genetic study, as according to the meta paper that attempted to understand all facets of why women make the majority of the BPD diagnosis. I understand that because humans are not formally mathematically provable, some conjectures may be made from surveys, genetic relations, and studying behavior to attempt to reverse engineer the program that produced this societal result.
  - lulmerchant 9y ago
    You've started with a presupposition that all of the clinical evidence is simply a misguided outcome based upon social constructs. How we choose to define BPD is entirely constructed, but the evidence is not, and the evidence very clearly shows that this disorder overwhelmingly affects more women than men. Just as APD and various other disorders overwhelming affect more men than women. If you're going to assert that this is due to anything other than genetics, then you're going to have to come up with something better than a weak meta-data study that barely draws any conclusions. Because to do that, you'll be going against decades of clinical data.
    - SolaceQuantum 9y ago
      I'm not the authors. I haven't started with anything. Someone asked a question, I googled and returned the first paper I could find which cited several surveys and clinical studies to prove its point, gave a quick TL;DR because the abstract didn't go into detail. Why are you going so hard on what is essentially the messenger? I don't have beef with you. I don't even have a horse in this race. I just googled a question for someone else. Maybe consider emailing the authors, since you have some serious disagreements with the paper.
      - lulmerchant 9y ago
        I'm not going hard on you at all, only on what you've said. The evidence about BPD is that it affects women far more often than men, the clinical data overwhelmingly supports this, and so does the genetic research on the topic. Instead of considering this evidence, you've tried to find some seperate evidence for gender bias, you found the one paper that examines this, and that paper doesn't even really draw any conclusions. Any time a question is asked about 'why are men and women different in regards to x', you'll have people lining up (like yourself and other commenters in this thread) to say it's gender bias. When the answer is often just because men and women have differences, which is exactly what the evidence points to in this case.
        SolaceQuantum 9y ago
Snowwombat 9y ago
Women make up the majority of Cluster B personality diagnosis. Cluster B is the over all group which has Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Anti Social (aka Psychopaths) personality disorders. https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/10/the_diagnosis_of_borderline_pe.html https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/10/the_diagnosis_of_bor... That article is interesting, in that it seems that the professionals have issues separating out the conditions. At least 2 of the cases in linked article were more likely Narcissists, that borderlines. I've dealt with borderlines, Narcissists and Histrionics, in a professional setting over the years, and they are pretty easy for me to spot now.
HedgeSparrow 9y ago
That's interesting to read in conjunction with the article. I wonder if it's a similar scenario in a lot of gender-skewed mental disorders. Perhaps many of them only appear to be more prevalent in one gender because symptoms are observed from mostly one gender, when in reality different genders express the same disorder differently (and maybe as a product of social pressures). Not that I think there's no scientific process in evaluation, but if the only subjects with major expression are primarily one gender, it seems like it would create a kind of confirmation bias?

lulmerchant 9y ago

How people perceive others is irrelevant to the question. Women are more often clinically diagnosed with BPD, not simply perceived by others to express it. The rest of your post is mostly unsupported speculation. Apart from the parallel you've drawn with APD, which has a lot of similarities to BPD, except with inverse gender distribution.

SolaceQuantum 9y ago
Nothing I wrote wasn’t a conclusion of a paper or genetic study, as according to the meta paper that attempted to understand all facets of why women make the majority of the BPD diagnosis. I understand that because humans are not formally mathematically provable, some conjectures may be made from surveys, genetic relations, and studying behavior to attempt to reverse engineer the program that produced this societal result.
- lulmerchant 9y ago
  You've started with a presupposition that all of the clinical evidence is simply a misguided outcome based upon social constructs. How we choose to define BPD is entirely constructed, but the evidence is not, and the evidence very clearly shows that this disorder overwhelmingly affects more women than men. Just as APD and various other disorders overwhelming affect more men than women. If you're going to assert that this is due to anything other than genetics, then you're going to have to come up with something better than a weak meta-data study that barely draws any conclusions. Because to do that, you'll be going against decades of clinical data.
  - SolaceQuantum 9y ago
    I'm not the authors. I haven't started with anything. Someone asked a question, I googled and returned the first paper I could find which cited several surveys and clinical studies to prove its point, gave a quick TL;DR because the abstract didn't go into detail. Why are you going so hard on what is essentially the messenger? I don't have beef with you. I don't even have a horse in this race. I just googled a question for someone else. Maybe consider emailing the authors, since you have some serious disagreements with the paper.
    - lulmerchant 9y ago
      I'm not going hard on you at all, only on what you've said. The evidence about BPD is that it affects women far more often than men, the clinical data overwhelmingly supports this, and so does the genetic research on the topic. Instead of considering this evidence, you've tried to find some seperate evidence for gender bias, you found the one paper that examines this, and that paper doesn't even really draw any conclusions. Any time a question is asked about 'why are men and women different in regards to x', you'll have people lining up (like yourself and other commenters in this thread) to say it's gender bias. When the answer is often just because men and women have differences, which is exactly what the evidence points to in this case.
      - SolaceQuantum 9y ago

Snowwombat 9y ago

Women make up the majority of Cluster B personality diagnosis. Cluster B is the over all group which has Borderline, Narcissistic, Histrionic, and Anti Social (aka Psychopaths) personality disorders. https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/10/the_diagnosis_of_borderline_pe.html https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2007/10/the_diagnosis_of_bor... That article is interesting, in that it seems that the professionals have issues separating out the conditions. At least 2 of the cases in linked article were more likely Narcissists, that borderlines. I've dealt with borderlines, Narcissists and Histrionics, in a professional setting over the years, and they are pretty easy for me to spot now.

HedgeSparrow 9y ago

That's interesting to read in conjunction with the article. I wonder if it's a similar scenario in a lot of gender-skewed mental disorders. Perhaps many of them only appear to be more prevalent in one gender because symptoms are observed from mostly one gender, when in reality different genders express the same disorder differently (and maybe as a product of social pressures). Not that I think there's no scientific process in evaluation, but if the only subjects with major expression are primarily one gender, it seems like it would create a kind of confirmation bias?