Coping with a new borderline diagnosis can be challenging. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to accept your borderline diagnosis and start healing.

Coping skills for borderlines experiencing extreme emotions are critical to develop. Highly intense, emotional reactions are one of the dominant features of borderline personality disorder (BPD). How can we return to ourselves when we're caught in an emotional whirlwind? What coping skills can be we learn for dealing with extreme emotions?

It’s okay -- and sometimes necessary -- to set functional boundaries with people suffering from borderline personality disorder (BPD). Read about setting boundaries with borderline personality disorder sufferers (Setting Functional Boundaries).

It's important to soothe your inner child in borderline personality disorder. When your inner child asks for something, do you listen? If not, it might be time to start paying attention, even if that means indulging in so-called "childish" things. 

For me, the most helpful framework in understanding borderline personality disorder (BPD) comes out of schema therapy, a borderline personality disorder treatment, which includes a concept known as schema modes. The easiest way to understand schema modes is to think of them as personalities. Different personalities take over to protect the borderline when she is hurt or threatened in some way. Schema modes in borderline personality disorder are a form of maladaptive coping that the person learned in response to childhood trauma, and schema therapy is designed to address these modes.

I'll be honest--normally I hate celebrity "news." But one story recently provoked a lot of strong feelings--Amanda Bynes was tricked into going into a mental health facility. It raises a question: Should parents ever deceive their child to get them psychiatric help?

I spent nine months on the borderline personality disorder (BPD) unit at Larue Carter Memorial Hospital in Indianapolis. At the time, it was the only inpatient unit specializing in schema therapy for BPD in the country. Recently I learned that this unit, which changed and probably saved my life, is now closed. It made me think about what happens to patients when psychiatric hospitals close--it rarely ends well.

I recently read an article about a new class of mental health professionals in Kentucky--licensed pastoral counselors. Due to my negative experience with Christian counseling, I am hesitant, but cautiously optimistic. I can understand both sides of the argument, but here's why I think it's a good idea.

I was diagnosed with severe mental illness while I was a sophomore in college. I was suicidal, which prompted an emergency psychiatric evaluation. Unfortunately, it also prompted eviction from the dorm and suspension from school. I later got the director of the counseling center to admit--on the record--that the policy was more for the benefit of other students than the suicidal student. It was not the most compassionate of policies. So how can colleges and universities help students with mental illness?

After being medically discharged from the Army, More Than Borderline's Becky Oberg returned to Indianapolis to begin mental illness treatment. She soon learned that her location determined her access to borderline personality disorder (BPD) treatment almost as much as her insurance. She first saw a doctor in private practice, but transferred to a sliding-scale clinic after her COBRA ran out. She became suicidal and psychotic, but the hospital that treated cases like hers from her county was full. She was admitted to a different hospital, which wiped out her life savings because she was not eligible for its reduced rate.