Borderline Personality Disorder and the Disabled Social Experience: Reading Films through the Lens of Mental Disability

This thesis was presented at the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum and the Comparative Studies Undergraduate Research ColloquiumBorderline Personality Disorder (BPD) shares many diagnostic criteria with other common mental disabilities and personality disorders, such as depression and anxiety. Categorized through specific mental, behavioral, and emotional symptoms, BPD’s diagnosis eliminates much of the patient’s social experience and threatens to stigmatize the patient. Erving Goffman suggests stigmatized individuals are those who deviate from cultural norms and fantasies of perfection. Stigmatized individuals are disqualified from receiving certain societal protections and care. The category of mental illness – what I term mental disability – discredits the voices of individuals as incapable of contributing to social discourse and contesting actions that affect them personally. Confronting the vexed diagnosis of BPD alongside its therapeutic model Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), I analyze three experimental films – Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Maya Deren’s At Land (1944), and John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986) – that engage an aesthetic of self-transformation and human variation. Drawing on Tobin Siebers’s use of disability as an aesthetic value in modern art, these films reveal how “symptoms” of strong emotion, varied behavior, and differing mental experiences draw upon social and cultural sources. These films suggest the treatment of symptom as an inadequate method for providing long term solutions to mental disability because it perpetuates stigma. Instead, by privileging varied subjective experience, they signal the importance of accepting difference and the fluidity of experience. Stigma functions in a culture that holds rigid boundaries of abnormal and normal behavior. Valuing essential ideas of DBT, such as nonjudgmental acceptance and being willingly effective instead of willful, these films advocate for the disabled social experience and present a means of reducing the socio-historical consequences of scientific and cultural disqualification.No embargoAcademic Major: Comparative Studie