Destigmatizing borderline personality disorder with social justice and intersectional cultural humility: How researchers can construct and deconstruct stigma

Abstract

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a serious psychiatric condition, especially stigmatized in women. Stigma is a social injustice, as it discredits and reduces the wholeness of a person to one of taint and discount. Psychological scientists play a uniquely powerful role in the stigmatization and destigmatization of BPD by constructing the meaning of BPD at each step of the research process. We discuss this powerful role and how to destigmatize BPD by incorporating an intersectionality framework that includes disability as a category of difference (as with gender, race, and sexuality). This framework centers the role of systems and structures in creating and maintaining stigma, while emphasizing the close interactions between interpersonal and structural stigma. This article illustrates researchers’ power to assign meaning to BPD in research and highlights the importance of considering individuals as embedded in intersectional social categories, which are multidimensional and dynamic in nature. We propose that intersectional cultural humility, with its social justice aim and feminist origins, can guide BPD researchers to conduct nonstigmatizing and rigorous research on BPD. To inform clinical practice and advance social justice, we offer action steps for researchers to destigmatize BPD with intersectional cultural humility at multiple steps in the research process.