For most of her 30 years, Beth McMullen has lived amidst a hectic swirl of emotional turmoil. As a woman living with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), Ms McMullen’s life has involved riding a rollercoaster of emotions — a struggle that ebbs and flows even to this day….
Three-and-a-half years ago, Ms McMullen was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. After suffering through a major low, she vividly remembers the day she sought help at Newcastle’s Mater Hospital. “It was as though this sense of calm and ultimate, radical acceptance had come over me,” she said. “When you get given a diagnosis, it’s sort a double-edged sword in that you can look at it as though it’s a label and there’s something wrong with me, or you can look at it as a beacon of hope in that maybe you’ll be getting the right treatment.”
Despite the diagnostic process being confusing and stressful, Ms McMullen said it was affirming when the psychologist asked her questions about her symptoms. “It was like I’d been spending my years in a darkened room bumping into things, and once he identified that this was perhaps the specific struggle I was having, it was like the lights came on,” she said. “For the first time, I really felt like I could see my way through the obstacles, and that there was a clear path of treatment ahead of me.” But her journey began feeling harder and harder as it went along…. –Robert Virtue, 1233 ABC Newcastle, Oct 13, 2015
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