Where Are the Protagonists With Borderline Personality Disorder?

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a debilitating mental health condition that affects how someone sees both themselves and others. Living with BPD feels as though your heart is too big for your body, and every living creature wants to leave you behind and hurt you. Unfortunately, the media romanticizes BPD symptoms, like intense or unstable relationships, paranoia, risky behavior, emptiness, mood swings, and inappropriate anger. Writing a character with borderline personality disorder produces an antagonist that’s somewhat easy to empathize with, but it creates a villainous caricature of people with BPD.

One of the biggest issues in fiction is that hardly any characters have a canonical diagnosis of BPD, leading readers to speculate about possible borderline personality disorder diagnoses. This commonly falls onto antagonists with aggressive, violent, or abusive tendencies. The character with “headcanon BPD” is the father-hating murderer, the freedom-seeking jester, the emotionless businessman, or the stalker ex-girlfriend. The “BPD headcanon” never applies to the protagonist and their friends.

The character with BPD is always the villain and never the hero.

Though these “bad folks” may be fun parts of the media that you consume, they’re equally as harmful. Yes, people with BPD can do evil things, but as with many other mental health conditions, most of the people with this diagnosis are kind, caring people. With therapy and symptom management, people with borderline personality disorder can improve their relationships and live full lives.

In real life, most people with BPD don’t do the violent things that we see in the media.

Writers typically want their protagonists to be relatable to a large audience: the powerless boy who wants to be a hero, the orphan who wants to save the world, the ordinary citizen who wants to unite humans and extraterrestrials. When a hero can’t maintain healthy relationships and has fits of paranoia about others’ motives, the audience may find them difficult to understand.

This extends to fandoms. If writers portray characters with borderline personality disorder accurately, then fans who can’t see nuance would despise those characters for their symptoms. Some fans would think the characters with BPD are completely in control of their behavior, making them “evil,” while others would refuse to fault them for any of their actions, no matter how horrific. The truth is that in terms of control, these characters lie somewhere in the middle — not conniving but not blameless either. 

But despite the risks it would pose in fandom groups, seeing protagonists with accurate portrayals of BPD would allow those with the illness to see they’re more than just adversaries.

Audiences yearn to see themselves in characters, but it’s extremely difficult for people with BPD to find well-rounded protagonists who think and feel like they do.

They end up seeing themselves in nothing more than the “vaguely interesting bad guy” with an incredibly tragic past. If BPD makes it into the story at all, the character with the illness ends up either being the “worst, most irredeemable character ever” or someone who can do no wrong. When people with BPD finally see themselves as the hero, they’ll understand that with treatment, their disorder can make them capable of great empathy, not just villainous actions.

Featured Photo by Kevin Woblick on Unsplash.