Resources for coping with Borderline Personality Disorder
Are you in great distress?
Is it the case that you are visiting my website today and you also happen to be in great distress? People with mental illness can sometimes experience moments of tremendous emotional distress. The resources available on a resources page of a website are not adequate to the task of helping someone in great distress.
If you are experiencing some kind of tremendous emotional distress right now it will be necessary for you to reach out for help.
Here are some places that you could get some help right now:
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
800-273-8255.
This resource says it is for people in distress as well as for the prevention of suicide. You do not need to feel suicidal to call this line. You can call with concerns of all kinds. In addition, at the URL https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org they have a chat option.(Good news! The FCC has designated 988 as a future suicide prevention number. It has not been enacted yet and plans are for it to be implemented by July 2022.)
Your County mental health crisis line
Here’s my idea for how you might reach your County mental health crisis line: dial 911 and tell the person who answers that you want the non-emergency dispatcher. When you are connected with the nonemergency dispatcher, tell them that you are experiencing a mental health crisis and you want to know what resources are available to you. Tell them what county you live in. This should work to get you to the resources in your County.
Other Resources
If you are in such distress that you fear that you will harm yourself, it is always okay to call 911. Also, if your therapist or your HMO as some kind of emergency phone number or a crisis number that is for times of distress that are not emergencies, don’t hesitate. Make the phone call.
Now, for people who are not in distress but are looking for resources on various topics, here are some useful links.
NAMI
The National Alliance on Mental Illness
NAMI is the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the nation’s largest grassroots mental health organization dedicated to building better lives for the millions of Americans affected by mental illness.
MentalHealth.gov
MentalHealth.gov provides one-stop access to U.S. government mental health and mental health problems information.
Borderline Personality Disorder Pages at the National Institute of Mental Health
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/borderline-personality-disorder/index.shtml
The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is the lead federal agency for research on mental disorders.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.
Marsha Linehan’s Behavioral Tech
Marsha Linehan invented DBT, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy. Behavioral Tech trains mental health care providers and treatment teams who work with complex and severely disordered populations to use compassionate, scientifically valid treatments and to implement and evaluate these treatments in their practice setting.
Mental Health and Life-Threatening Disease
Here is a resource targeted to sufferers of mesothelioma, a rare but life-threatening lung cancer. It is appropriate for anyone facing a diagnosis of medical issues that could end their life.
Do you have suggestions for additional resources that you think would be a good fit for this list?
Feel free to submit your suggestions to me here for consideration.