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With great regret, you've made a major mistake here. Admitting yourself into an inpatient psych ward is the opposite of what you should be doing if you want to avoid Cluster B types, they're swarming there like a hive. I am fortunate enough to have been stung just often enough to have developed a tolerance, without progressing into anaphylactic shock.
I've spent time in a psych ward, as a med student, not a patient, and I'm aware. But while I have your ear: what's the deal with borderlines having childhood sexual trauma? All of the ones I met in my 6-week stay reported some form of abuse, and I'm inclined to think becoming a crazy person is some downstream effect of it, but I don't know the modern take on "cluster B as trauma response" discourse.
Ah, I remember now. I'm glad you took my advice to unlurk, it's lonely being one of the handful of active doctors here, and probably the most incompetent one (not that that's changed).
The last time I read up the etiopathogenesis of BPD was a good while ago, but I recall that both genetic and environmental factors contribute significantly. You can have BPD without any serious life trauma, and the correlation and causation are still debated to this day, but the consensus opinion is that BPD-traits make you both more likely to be abused and to abuse, plus that the abuse likely contributes to the phenotype in the first place. This is the annoyingly complex answer that you stumble into every time you go digging about most psychiatric conditions.
I haven't done a formal rotation in an EUPD ward yet, so take this with a massive dose of salt, but I had an ex who I am 90% sure has BPD (I worked through the diagnostic checklist myself, admittedly after we broke up and I learned more about the condition) and she didn't have any sexual trauma in her childhood. Her dad was most likely schizophrenic, and I'm pretty confident that her mom had BPD. Even though she made my life hell, I did love her, and I still pity her.
Since I'm not maximally lazy, I did check after writing what I did above, and it seems my memory hasn't failed me. You'll see heritability figures from 40-60% for BPD, depending on the study, and it's well established that childhood trauma is neither necessary nor sufficient for causing BPD. Yay, if only this was relevant for my upcoming MRCPsych exam...
(And it's worth noting that the cases that warrant admission are almost certainly much more severe than you'd find on community sampling. It's not impossible to have BPD while leading a reasonably normal life.)
How do they figure because I'm sure if I uttered this phrase elsewhere I'd get cancelled for victim-blaming.
Well shit, my SIL is BPD. I guess I'll try super hard not to beat my kids lest they inflict that terror upon us all.
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There's one explanation that says sexual trauma causes these personality disorders. However, I believe a simpler explanation is the personality disorder results in fabrication of sexual trauma.
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