Brandon Marshall: Football Player with Borderline Personality Disorder
This is a short post to send you over to Clinical Psychiatry News where I wrote an article on an NFL.com television special "A Football Life" special about Brandon Marshall, the Chicago Bears wide receiver, who struggles with borderline personality disorder. It's not often that I get to write about football and psychiatry in the same post, and I always like it when successful people are public about their psychiatric disorders -- what better to help de-stigmatize conditions that are erroneously associated with people who have been marginalized?
3 comments:
Wow! Great article. I like working with Cluster B patients and rarely find a current celebrity who can be mentioned as a positive role model for patients. Thank you for putting this on your blog.
TheAlientist: thank you! You have to see the TV special, it was great. On youtube, I found a short clip (about a quarter of the show):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKVlQnAm3kA
check on NFL.com to see if they have the full program.
Borderline Personality Disorder is the most difficult to understand and diagnose mental illnesses. As a consequence there is little awareness of its existence in the general public. If there were greater awareness, more resources would be brought to the table to help these people. I believe the biggest problem is its name. "Borderline" means nothing in helping us understand the condition. I have proposed that we change the name to Faultfinding Personality Disorder based on the most important diagnostic criterion - chronic finding of fault with themselves and others due to their black-and-white thinking which leads to disturbed interpersonal relationships. To back this up I wrote the book "Faultfinders: The impact of borderline personality disorder." I explained the condition using examples of numerous famous people to make the symptoms memorable. One of the examples was Brandon Marshall. I would be interested to hear what others think about a possible name change.
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