Women and Borderline Personality Disorder

(Mancke) What can account for this? Why has BPD been said to be a woman's illness? Is it? The following will attempt to answer these questions while also offering up a detailed history and examination of the disorder.
             History and Controversy.
             The recognition of intensely opposing moods within a single individual can be traced as far back as the medical insights of Greek physician Hippocrates, who would write of individuals with unrestrained impulsivity mixed with mania and melancholia. Millenia later, Swiss and German physicians would make note of individuals suffering from unpredictable moods that follow an equally disturbed and unpredictable course. Some physicians would liken it to a form of trigger-detonated insanity latent within the personality of the individual. As the illness seemed to be occuring more often in women than men, physicians of the times would connect it with "female hysteria." Female hysteria, as it was known back then, is an extremely unscientific classification today. It was known as the "signifier par excellence" that would color women as pathological and irrational for nearly two centuries. A feminist writer once observed that even today: "The similarities between the diagnoses of hysteria and borderline personality disorder are striking. Both diagnoses delimit appropriate behavior for women, and many of the criteria are stereotypically feminine." Furthermore, she adds, "what distinguishes borderline personality disorder from hysteria is the inclusion of anger ando ther aggressive characteristics. If the hysteric was a 'damaged woman,' than the borderline woman is a dangerous one [to others and to herself.]" (Wirth-Cauchon) .
             Symptoms.
             BPD is most saliently classified as a disorder featuring the impairment of self-identity. Individuals suffering its ill effects have poorly developed notion of the self, often linked with excessive self-criticism, and chronic feelings of emptiness and dissociation under states of stress Furthermore, this self-identity impairment usually contributes to a general lack of self-direction.