“Another Problem, Another Pill”: Analysing Lived Experience Crisis Accounts of Psychiatric Drug Treatment for People Diagnosed with “Borderline Personality Disorder”
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Despite the absence of any pharmacological treatments formally approved for borderline personality disorder (BPD), individuals diagnosed with BPD are routinely prescribed psychiatric medications in combinations or sequences that shift over time. This research examines the lived experiences of medication use among people with a BPD diagnosis, particularly in the context of mental health crises. Drawing on qualitative case data from six individuals diagnosed with BPD, we suggest that medication may function not solely, or even primarily as a clinical tool, but rather as a symbolic and relational artefact within psychiatric encounters. Participants described medication as necessary and destabilising, protective and punitive. Medication was often experienced less as a targeted intervention than as a communicative gesture, something done by clinicians to convey care, manage risk, or reassert authority in the face of affective volatility. Side effects were not merely peripheral inconveniences, but direct, embodied experiences that shaped participants’ sense of agency, selfhood, and recovery. We suggest that psychiatric medication in the context of BPD operates through a teleological logic: its usage lies not only in its biochemical properties, but also in the relational and institutional functions it performs. This offers a challenge to prevailing biomedical framings and calls for a more critically attuned approach to psychopharmacology that centres the meanings, contradictions, and ambivalences embedded in service users’ narratives of BPD experience.
Authors: Nicholas Norman Adams, Dan Warrender
Institutions: Robert Gordon University, Abertay University
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,400
OpenAlex ID: W7166313270
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