Well the short answer to this is ‘no’ but because there’s so much conjecture on this topic in the Neurodivergent Community I’m going to unravel my own 40 year saga/story/experience a bit & explain why I think not. I fully get that misdiagnosis is really common for folk with ADHD & Autism & I even found a meme on Twitter expressing how similar to Bipolar plus BPD undiagnosed ADHD Autists can be but still I refute the allegation in my own case.
It almost goes without saying that I was repeatedly, extensively & you could almost describe it as determinedly the subject of completely missed diagnoses from the first time I every made it to a GP at 24 explaining that I was awake all night, night after night with intense unbrookable suicidal ideation & then so heavily asleep once there that a herd of trampolining wilderbeast would have failed to stir me for most of the next day. This was apparently not a concern as it was certainly due to my ‘not having a job’ according to most GPs despite the fact that often I had been putting in 60 plus hours a week into (usually somewhat improbable) self employment ideas that I had been having ‘sooooo many’ of just before the low mood set in….. 🙄🤷♀️
I want to take care here because I get resentful looking back at all the times GPs patronised my depressions as a young single mother as being negligible & exaggerated & probably hysterical in some way & well, if I wasn’t interested in SSRIs with their potential side affect of worsened suicidal ideation &/or violence towards others & thereby possible death to self or others then it could not be that serious now could it.
What they didn’t understand is that even then, pre-internet, I knew where the library was & was insistently informing myself. I also certainly mentioned the word Bipolar at 24 to the GP because I’d been saying it since 19 to my own friends having read about it. I wondered at my own tenacity & wilfulness as I read about Spike Milligan unable to leave the house, sedating himself to withstand ‘the absolute horrors’ being his phrase for a Bipolar 1 depression.
The problems with psychiatric medicine as an entire field built largely on conjecture & meds for Bipolar being so disabling long term led me to research entirely away from the mainstream thought bubble. It was 1991 & I had rejected most ‘normal’ mainstream media already as it seemed to affect me really negatively & still does, this made me more capable of dodging the profit friendly push to medicate that was becoming ubiquitous.
I’m really proud to have been MSM intolerant for 40 years, I was like a canary in the coalmine of the fully existent reality of soft brainwashing of the population by framing & omission, gaslighting & straight faced lies that is becoming widely recognised & understood right now.
I don’t need to prove to anyone that I’ve had classic Bipolar type 1 since around age 18, I know it for myself, symptomologically, I have detailed recollection of crashes from highs & depressions that were self propelled, ever getting longer as the years progressed, the hardest thing to remember is the highs because I was invariably, as time went on getting drunk/binge drinking to somewhat control that highly stressful, 99% unconscious, deeply irresponsible, immensely painful state leading inexorably to the crash & the brain damage & the abject confusion, anxiety & low mood that would follow.
A mid piece addendum :- I discovered the work of Dr Amen fairly recently & he introduced to me the idea that General Anaesthetic can cause brain injury in susceptible nervous systems. I had 2 miscarriages followed by questionably necessary D&C operations with General Anaesthetic at 18 & 19 & I had my first, what I now recognise as crash from high just after that, it completely fits with Dr Amens brain damage/nervous system damage observations. A double physical trauma triggering the onset of Bipolar I believe. There was an emotional component of course but it was mild compared to the physical insult of the anaesthetic.
Then you plus BPD.
Ffs.
What was I thinking when I signed up for all this in this lifetime? Yes, let me dig my way out of a massive multi level mental illness sandwich, of which I cannot see the component parts for a very looong time, on my own, oh let me, I pleaded with my own actual self. I genuinely do think that’s what we are like between lives as souls, so concrete in our inhabiting the heart of the collective mind/god/all that is that no game of jeopardy is too great, no exploration of stones unturned too precarious for those so belonging to our ultimate indestructible indivisible ultra Self.
So plus BPD. I remember the childhood Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria of undx auDHD transmuting into BPD at age 14/15, I remember the precise incident, it was like my emotional body catching fire because the irritation of RSD in that particular situation made me sooooo very very angry, I felt so out of control that something, some part of my subtle anatomy for want of a better, transmuted into a flammable gas tank with a serious leak & the trigger was the flame. A flammable gas tank that was to become a huge part of my relationships & even friendships & a backdrop to much social interaction - how not to burst into flames at minutia became a whole way of life trying to work around this freaking dangerous, apparently permanent unstable internal structure. BPD is immensely painful & is accompanied by a sense of being lost & baffled…. add that to not being able to follow a train of thought & forgetting what you are doing constantly.
I gave up relationships at 43 due to increasingly becoming overwhelmed by BPD symptoms & then close friendships also a couple of years later that had become surrogates of that. I was able to wade thru that chin deep pool of early trauma & recover much of that distorted energy by the stealth of growing self reliance & self awareness. I really like the phrase I used before about this; I had a policy of extreme non action socially & thereby sexually for many many years whilst I worked on that stuff, pre dx! Once I got the map, the dx it was so much easier, the disassociation eased up gradually when I read about what it was & that it’s a symptom of trauma especially. I have long worked with material designed to help PTSD, over 20 years looking at it from that angle yet for me the diagnosis as a map has been the most helpful, equally this with auDHD.
I’m disappointed to not just have one or the other out of ADHD or Autism, to miss out on the best bits of each as they are cancelled out by traits of the other is a description that I feel I can concur with at the moment. I can confidently self assess when I have Bipolar+BPD under decent control & when they aren’t & that has been what has enabled me to look at these other traits; the hyper ridgid adherence to routine, social difficulties & differences, the inability to focus most of the time unless I’m in hyperfocus, like right now which is great though the other state is deeply deeply frustrating, it must take me 10 times as long as it should to do most things yet I can play Beethoven on piano for hours & hours & not have a clue how long I’ve sat there.
How I perceive my full line up is kind of visual/feely: Bipolar 1 is like long very loud mood shifts that you can sense coming in & you have time to take various evasive action (see Balancing Brain Chemistry Naturally in the sidebar for more on this) BPD is caused by external things, has specific triggers & the core of it only becomes visible/feelable when you remove those triggers for long enough to feel the generalised dysphoric core which you can then dismantle (it’s trauma, so you feel it/be with it as kindly as possible to heal it - EMDR is absolutely invaluable for BPD)
That leaves my actual self, my well-being self & it’s auDHD facets which, once trauma is minimised as I’ve had to do just to get to feel this true self underneath the emotional & nervous system dysfunction, leaves me with the mental ‘differences’ & the social ‘differences’ so yes maybe there’s some related emotional differences as well - and sure they are more deeply, neuro-developmentally inscribed attributes, like they were the uncomfortable energetic fluctuations that attracted more & more trauma to gather around like scar tissue to protect the innate vulnerability, yet without the trauma they are much more benign & livewithable, I think so anyway.
Yes it’s hard having mental, emotional, learning & social interaction differences in a society that does not wish to cater for differences, does not want to spare the attention, ironically, or the resources to not traumatise people with different, more sensitive nervous systems & brains but it’s definitely doable. If we treat trauma as the cross society common thread that most needs mending, for all of us from the most neuro-normal to the most neuro-diverse, as Gabor Mate would have it, if we strive to make a trauma aware society we may just be able to survive the myriad challenges that face us as a species.
