My psychiatrist has decided that I have borderline personality disorder. I am not sure if I agree with this, none of my friends agree with it. My therapist however thinks I have ADD. I had finally convinced myself that any borderline symptoms I have are really becasue of the ADD when I saw my psychiatrist again. She flipped it and told me she thinks that my ADD symptoms are actually because I'm borderline. Help! Has anyone else had this happen? I keep going back and forth and I'm just making myself more confused.:confused:

No one likes labels but they are useful for understanding and in determining the best course of action for future courses of action.

The solution to this problem is to go back to your childhood and see if you were ADHD first. Reportcards are good at documenting this, or get some oral history from relatives. If you had ADHD as a child there is no way BPD caused your ADHD "symptoms". You could be both, but that is an entirely different subject.

How well versed in this psychiatrist in Adult AD/HD?

My psychiatrist has decided that I have borderline personality disorder. I am not sure if I agree with this, none of my friends agree with it. My therapist however thinks I have ADD. I had finally convinced myself that any borderline symptoms I have are really becasue of the ADD when I saw my psychiatrist again. She flipped it and told me she thinks that my ADD symptoms are actually because I'm borderline. Help! Has anyone else had this happen? I keep going back and forth and I'm just making myself more confused.:confused:Welcome to the forums, kittyquilt! Pretty confusing to be hearing different things from different professionals. I don't know you at all of course so I can't offer an opinion in your specific case, but in general I have observed that an awful lot of the descriptors for borderline personality disorder also could describe an ADDer. I think there would be a different cause, but the semantics sure could sound similar. One question that is frequently used to differentiate ADD from other diagnosis is that by definition ADD originated in childhood. Are these issues you're dealing with longstanding issues or new ones? Look over the definition for ADD and see if it fit you as a child remembering that girls are often inattentive rather than hyperactive and that their symptoms often because more problematic in their teen years -- before that they are often quiet, daydreamers. (Of course none of that applies to me, since I was hyper from the get go and got better as a teenager and totally bounced off the walls as a kid!:p ). A good book to get a feel for what ADD looks like in gals is Sari Solden's book Women with Attention Deficit Disorder.

I'm probably prejudice on this point, but I tend to think your therapist spends a lot more time with you than your doctor and is likely to have a better feel for which diagnosis fits if they are experienced and competent in this arena.

Take care,
Scattered

kittyquilt,

Listen carefully to Scuro, Tara and Scrattered. They are players in the ADHD game. This disorder can either devastate your life or be asset depending on how you handle it. I am a very cynical 54 yo male with my years only adding more cynism to my ex-hippie mentallity. Many so-called professionals don't know squat about ADHD. You absolutely, positively, need a health care professional that understands ADHD. Fire any and all bozos that exhibit ignorance about ADHD because they are dangerous to your well being.

I found a doc that has two ADHD kids. She knows we aren't playing games and has been a real asset and helper to me.

Bob

I have had a similar experience and have posted elsewhere on this site to that effect. There is an 'opinion' chasing me and my medical notes around from a psychiatrist, who 9 years ago chatted to me for 5 minutes, to the effect that i have an unspecified Personality Disorder. He was probably thinking Borderline because it was/is all the rage, but I am just guessing. My current psychiatrist who has never come accross an adult with ADHD and by his own admission knows little about it, has cast doubt on the ADHD diagnosis and hinted at PD, in spite of me having had an ADHD diagnosis since the 'opinion'. The doubt seems to come from the fact that the ADHD diagnosis came from a psychiatrist over the border in another jurisdicion (as though Irish psychiatrists were unreliable compared to UK ones); also (& this is key) the false assertion by him that there never was any confirmation of me having had these symptoms in childhood. the notes he has for me are in a mess, and incomplete. What I have recently remembered (its that memory thing ...) is that I HAVE had that ADHD diagnosis confirmed by a UK psychiatrist but I had forgotten.

Last week I asked him to chase up the second diagnosis for me. I also sent him some medical and psychiatric journal articles about adult ADHD to refute some of his claims, including the one that 'if the Strattera doesn't work for you and the ritalin didnt work for you then it probably means you don't have ADHD'.

The problem with a Borderline PD diagnosis, apart from the very hurtful label (at least that's what I found), is that they wont perscribe the right medication and they require you to do deep psychotherapy rather than cognitive behavioural therapy and so on. Some time back I did two years of the above (before I had my diagnosis confirmed), and while I found some of it useful, in the main I found the digging around my early childhood relationship to my parents very counterproductive and not helpful at all in helping me to get going in the morning, stay on task, plan, keep time etc.. When this guy responded to my request to try Strattera (after I had been on no meds for 6 years) by suggesting I should consider a PD and go to psychotherapy instead, my alarm bells went off. A sure recipe for me going off the deep end is to have untreated ADHD but instead to have to talk to a therapist about my mother for the rest of my life!

Like the person above said, the key thing is demonstrating that these traits were present in childhood.

Or it may be that your Psychiatrist is ideologically opposed to ADHD diagnoses, in which case you need to get another one.