Sunday, November 02, 2014

Brandon Marshall: Football Player with Borderline Personality Disorder

This is a short post to send you over to Clinical Psychiatry News where I wrote an article on an NFL.com television special "A Football Life" special about Brandon Marshall, the Chicago Bears wide receiver, who struggles with borderline personality disorder.  It's not often that I get to write about football and psychiatry in the same post, and I always like it when successful people are public about their psychiatric disorders -- what better to help de-stigmatize conditions that are erroneously associated with people who have been marginalized? 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Great article. I like working with Cluster B patients and rarely find a current celebrity who can be mentioned as a positive role model for patients. Thank you for putting this on your blog.

Dinah said...

TheAlientist: thank you! You have to see the TV special, it was great. On youtube, I found a short clip (about a quarter of the show):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKVlQnAm3kA

check on NFL.com to see if they have the full program.

Mark Osterloh, MD, JD, RPh said...

Borderline Personality Disorder is the most difficult to understand and diagnose mental illnesses. As a consequence there is little awareness of its existence in the general public. If there were greater awareness, more resources would be brought to the table to help these people. I believe the biggest problem is its name. "Borderline" means nothing in helping us understand the condition. I have proposed that we change the name to Faultfinding Personality Disorder based on the most important diagnostic criterion - chronic finding of fault with themselves and others due to their black-and-white thinking which leads to disturbed interpersonal relationships. To back this up I wrote the book "Faultfinders: The impact of borderline personality disorder." I explained the condition using examples of numerous famous people to make the symptoms memorable. One of the examples was Brandon Marshall. I would be interested to hear what others think about a possible name change.