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(Click here for more coverage of Borderline Personality Disorder.)

I’d like to encourage people who are aware of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) to start spreading the news about how devastating this illness is not just for those who have it and their family members, but for the entire United States economy.

I wrote this post to explain to people who may not have the ability to understand how horrific BPD is from personal experience dealing with an afflicted person. Such people can still likely understand the economic impact of this illness and how it would be far more cost-effective for US mental health care policies to be overhauled to raise awareness and get most of the victims into treatment. The increased government spending appears that it would be entirely offset by savings in government expenses (in such areas of courts and law enforcement) and increases in tax revenues due to a significant improvement in worsened productivity harming families affected by BPD.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a devastating but very common mental illness that until recently has been believed based upon DSM-IV (Diagnostics and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition — a widely used reference book in the mental health field) to affect about 2% of the US population or about 6 million people in the US. Common belief is that it afflicts women about 3 times more often than men.

Recent research published in April 2008 suggests that 6% of the population may be affected and the difference between rates for males and females may be little. If this research is accurate, the United States with its population of about 300 million people has 18 million victims of BPD.

The result of BPD is a catastrophic cycle of child abuse and mental illness that runs for generations. The economic impact of this illness is worse than a 9/11/2001 terror attack each and every year. US mental health care policies are badly in need of an overhaul to deal with BPD and similar personality disorders and the drastic economic impact they have on any tens of millions of US citizens.

Read more…

Those of you who found the posts on William Stoneking’s ongoing problems (click here to see them all) at the hands of the Missouri family law courts may be interested to know that Mr. Stoneking has a blog documenting his continuing battles to see his daughter Alexis. After re-establishing contact with Alexis for a while, his ex has yet again blocked his access. As of January 2009, he hasn’t seen or talked with his daughter in about 6 months. His ex, Shirley Anne Lincoln, is apparently in violation of the custody orders that Alexis should have spent summer 2008 in Illinois with her father.

This case is apparently full of problems with parental alienation, violation of court orders, perjury, and other problems associated with high-conflict divorces involving child custody. If you’re going through such an experience, Mr. Stoneking’s thoughts may be useful to you.

William Stoneking’s Blog: Victims of Family Court Violence & Corruption

Parental alienation is the systematic denigration committed by an alienating parent against a target parent in order to influence their children to dislike and mistreat the target parent. It typically also involves blocking of access to the target parent, often in violation of court orders regarding custody, exchanges, and visitation.

J. Michael Bone, Ph.D. is an eminent authority on parental alienation. [See Wikipedia: Parental Alienation] Dr. Bone’s website offers pre-recorded teleseminars on how targeted parents can overcome Parental Alienation. Available titles include:

Dr. Bone has also written a number of journal articles on parental alienation. One of these is available for electronic purchase and download here: Parental alienation syndrome: how to detect it and what to do about it.: An article from: Florida Bar Journal.

Books

This is part of William Stoneking’s story that he posted after learning that Judge Kathryn Elizabeth Davis was promoted to circuit court by Missouri Governor Matt Blunt, ignoring her clearly demonstrated misconduct and poor judgement that should disqualify her from being a judge. He cites not only his own experience, but that of multiple others including some people who have died as a result. For instance, Thadd Mize was allegedly murdered by his ex-wife’s father Jimmy Williams and mother Brenda Williams after Judge Davis refused him an Order of Protection (Restraining Order in many other states) to protect him from his ex-wife and her father. In another example, Shawn O’Banion apparently committed suicide due to the alleged abuses of his ex-wife and Judge Kathryn Davis by blocking him from access to his children.

This text was originally posted in multiple pieces at:

http://www.topix.com/forum/city/kearney-mo/TKTLTQ0VIUL5S6OKP

It is much easier to read here, plus links have been added to readily order Mr. Stoneking’s book if you want to read more. The site above, however, has continued to accumulate comments of people who are fed up with the abuse of Judge Kathryn Davis.

Read more…

Domestic Abuse Assessment in Child Custody Disputes:
Beware the Domestic Violence Research Paradigm 

by Donald G. Button
Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia

Abstract:

In some states custody assessors are now required to become familiar with the dynamics of prevalence of domestic abuse since the presence of one or more abusive parents in the house has impact on the “best interests of the child”. The domestic abuse literature is misleading in setting a framework for abuse incidence and threat source for children. Males are represented as primary perpetrators of physical abuse although data from meta-analytic studies show otherwise. Indirect aggression is scarcely mentioned in the literature, although prevalent in research on aggression. Physical violence directed towards children is actually more likely to be mother–perpetrated. Child safety may be compromised if attention is focused solely on the possibility of abuse from a male perpetrator.

[click here to see full text of paper]

One of the classic behaviors of a person suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder is the vilification campaign. The target is the person against whom the perpetrator Borderline conducts the vilification.  The intent is to destroy the target’s reputation and thereby destroy the target’s relationships with family and friends, employers, co-workers, doctors, teachers, therapists, and others. The intent may even be to force the target to leave the community, put the target in prison, or even kill the target.  As with so many things involving Borderlines and their typical inability to understand or respect boundaries, there really are no limits. They will use basically any means available to them to cause damage to their target, including denigration, endless disparaging remarks, fabrication, false accusations, and even teaching others (including their children!) to lie on their behalf as part of their vilification campaign.

Read more…

Professor Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire has published a very interesting large multinational study that shows that contrary to popular belief, women can and do commit significant amounts of violence in relationships against men.  The study found that “mutual domestic violence” with men and women both committing violence against each other is most common, that “female only” violence with women attacking men is the next most common, and that “male only” violence is half as common as “female only” violence.

This pattern applies across national boundaries.  Additionally, the study shows that partner dominance in a relationship is highly indicative of likelihood for there to be domestic violence.  Female dominance in relationships leads to higher rates of domestic violence than male dominance, but in both cases it shows that one partner trying to unfairly control the other is likely to involve or provoke violence.

DOMINANCE AND SYMMETRY IN PARTNER VIOLENCE

Harvard Medical School just announced a national survey by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control that examined 11,000 men and women ages 18-28 and found 24% of heterosexual relationships have had violence in them, half of it reciprocal and half non-reciprocal, and women committed more than 70% of the non-reciprocal violence and were more likely to hit first in the reciprocal violence.  Both sexes suffered significant injuries.

Domestic violence: Not Always One Sided

The study was also publicized at:
Men Shouldn’t Be Overlooked as Victims of Partner Violence

Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury Between Relationships With Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence

PC Kidnappers
by K. L. Billingsley

originally published in Heterodoxy: Articles and Animadversions on Political Correctness and Other Follies, Volume 1, No. 8, January 1993

[click here to see original newsletter version]

On the morning of May 9, 1989, eight-year-old Alicia Wade awoke complaining of pain deep in her midsection. Her father, 37-year-old Navy enlisted man James Wade, and her mother Denise, took the girl to the NAVCARE facility in San Diego, where initially she either couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what happened. The doctor found that the child’s anal and vaginal regions had been torn in a sexual attack and would need to be surgically repaired. When informed of this, both parents showed great distress and began to weep uncontrollably. The NAVCARE doctor immediately called the local Child Protection Services.

CPS immediately suspected family involvement for two reasons: the rapist, they believed, had not removed the child from her room, and Alicia did not immediately complain of pain. The CPS worker interpreted the hours the Wades had spent at NAVCARE as a delay in reporting the crime, and thus an additional sign of guilt.

Though shaken by what had happened to their daughter and also by the hints of accusation they felt coming from authorities, the Wades cooperated fully in an interview with CPS. They could not hide the fact that they were overweight, which child welfare authorities often take as evidence of general neglect. They did not hide the fact that Denise Wade had been molested as a child and that James was a recovering alcoholic who twice blacked out while drinking in foreign ports. They did not know that they were waving “red flags” that further substantiated suspicions toward family involvement in the crime. They had no idea that authorities were already beginning to build a case against them and were taking particular aim at James Wade, who was a walking bull’s-eye because he was a white middle-aged male and a serviceman in addition to his other defects.

The Wades were more interested in the facts. During an evidentiary exam at the Center for Child Protection, their daughter Alicia calmly told the physician that a man came through the window, claimed to be her “uncle”, took her out in a green car and “hurt” her. They would have had a better notion of the ordeal ahead of them if they had known that on the space on the medical form for “chief complaint in the child’s own words”, the examining doctor ignored Alicia’s testimony and wrote only that the child showed “total denial”.

Read more…

Background: The historic, one-of-a-kind conference “From Ideology to Inclusion: Evidence-Based Policy and Intervention in Domestic Violence” was held in Sacramento, California February 15-16 and was a major success. The conference was sponsored by the California Alliance for Families and Children and featured leading domestic violence authorities from around the world.

One of the issues Dr. Dutton discussed at the conference is domestic violence between lesbians. This is an important and relevant issue, of course, in part because it provides a look at Intimate Partner Violence without the pervasive assumption that the violence in families is almost always caused by men. It also allows us to examine Intimate Partner Violence outside of the feminist Duluth model, which says that it is men who commit IPV, and they do so as part of their role in the patriarchy.

Dutton cited one study of 1,100 lesbian or bisexual women who are in abusive lesbian relationships. The study, which was conducted in Phoenix, found that the women were more likely to have experienced violence in their previous relationships with women than in their previous relationships with men.

Dutton explained that in general research shows that domestic violence is more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual relationships.

Further reading:

DV Conference Report #8: Violence is more common in lesbian relationships than in heterosexual ones