I will say as someone who was diagnosed with borderline and having interacted with that community, a lot of people do make that their whole identity or at least a massive, structural part of it. It’s also a disorder that’s easy to do that with because one of the key facets of that disorder is an unstable sense of personal identity. So of course the kind of person who would be diagnosed with that is also the same person that’s gonna latch onto it and not let go.

But you could again see this as a society-wide structural issue more than a problem with the individual or even with the mental health system itself. If they could have an identity as a baker or a friend or an artist or a person who likes music they would probably be doing that already. But we’ve commercialized so much of people’s identities that people start feeling like these pathologies are the only thing they have left, and that’s also a very dangerous place to be.