honestly real talk tho the longer and longer i have been really deeply involved with cluster b pd stuff the more i really do believe that the entire catagory needs to be dissolved, reevaluated, and remade. we need to radically change how we view and speak about these symptoms

i used to criticize the dsm6's decision to do just that, and dont get me wrong i still do think the new model needs work, but the current one we have is fundimentally broken and useless. getting diagnosed (or diagnosing urself) with a current cluster b pd is at this point actively harmful to ur own mental health and thats just unnacceptable.

no one knows what they're talking about, no one understands the criteria, no one can agree on the criteria, or understands the history of it, the cultural misinformation is too widespread and great to be properly divorced from it at this point and is infact leeching into practice to do irreparable harm to people, people treat them like hogwarts house identities, theyre not helpful for understanding core underlying disordered thought processes or unpacking where they come from, all 4 catagories are steeped in huge amounts of ableism, sanism, racism, and misogyny, new studies and meta data and long term case studies show most of our understanding is misguided, its really and truly just a mess and its doing more harm than good at this point

and like yea, some of that is because people are stupid and ignorant and dont want to learn and so it'll always be an issue, but when its at *this* scale its a foundational problem. because at the end of the day these diagnosis only exist to help people articulate their experience so they can be heard and get the help and support they need, and so if they arent doing that and the catagories are only making it HARDER for people to be properly understood then they're functionally useless

like at some point i think we gotta conceed that the problem isnt that absolutely everyone is just stupid and that if people are constantly disagreeing about basic criteria and tenants of a disorder, then the problem is the foundational understanding and it should be reevaluated. because peoples lived experiences and their emotions and their distress is whats actually tangibly real and its the catagories we use to explain that experience that is socially constructed and therefore should change