“I could roam, struggle, do anything and no one judges me.” What does the lives of people fight with a disease of almost 200,000 Romanians look like, but we often talk about whispering

Two young people tell, for the Snoop System Investigation and System Analysis, how life lives on the edge when you have borderline personality disorder.

• At a prevalence of the disease of 1%, according to international studies, in Romania it would be approximately 190,000 people with borderline personality disorder.
• In October 2024, Snoop launched “a system in therapy”, a series of depth journalism that radiographs the problems in the mental health system and tells the stories for which it should work.
• The text contains references to self -help and suicide attempts.

abandoned

Ana* is in the third week of the third grade. If you look for her in the classroom, she is the baby with curly and black hair, tight in tails. It has green eyes like the pelin leaves and the smile of two milk teeth. Today he is Tuesday and he seems to live the most beautiful day of his life, because he has never done so well at hours. She is just waiting to get home and praise Lucreța.

Their house is a fence in the fence with the school. In just two minutes, Ana flies on the gate. She finds Lucretia, mother, mother's sister and her granddaughter at the garden table. They all look at the ground, as if someone had died. The smile on Ana's face dissolves. “What is it, what happened?” Gang the girl. The four women look at each other, but no one has the courage to say something.

Mother Lucreța takes her heart in her teeth. Ana is not her biological daughter, but the child she has grown since three months. After he remained a widow, he took his certificate of assistant and brought Ana to the family. He knows that both will suffer, but it seems reconciled with the decision taken. He lifts his voice and says:

-Yes, look what it is. My mother will go to work for a year in Italy, and I will leave you to another family, but I promise that after a year, I will take you back. I will come to take you back.

The news hits Ana directly into the head of the chest. Mother Lucretia has been left in Italy for shorter periods. Even then, the girl was crying day and night of her longing and the fear that she will not return.

-I don't resist without you for a week and do you want to leave me with other people a whole year? Please take me with you, steal me, I will not tell anyone nothing!

Long stretched into bed, with his eyes tired and the gaze lost among the phosphorescent stars on the ceiling, Ana prays to God: God, take me to you, I can't stand without it. I can't live like that.

He is nine years old and is the first time he wants to die.

He forgot about all the beats received from Mother Lucretia, the days when she was not allowed to play with the other children of her age. He even forgot about how the woman threatened to abandon her, close her in the living room and force her to look at her luggage like a trip just. He forgot everything and feels no more than a large gap he gets inside.

For two weeks, as long as the move from one house to another, from one village to another, everyone is crying. Ana cries. I cry her friends. Mother Lucretia also cries, although she begins to become colder, so she can protect her from suffering. I cry all the ones that Ana has to say goodbye to the day they leave for the new family. From her crying, she even cries the driver who closes the door behind him, definitively separating her from what the first nine years of life meant. On the radio, it is heard Somewhere Over The Rainbowrecalls Ana the present.

Symptoms

Ana is 22 years old, and the first symptoms of borderline personality disorder (abbreviated BPD, from Borderline Personality Disorder) appeared when it had about 15. This is a mental health condition characterized by emotional instability, chaotic interpersonal relationships and impulsive behavior.

Beyond the definitions in the specialized textbooks, BPD is a carousel of emotions and perceptions about self and others. Now you are in ecstasy, and self -esteem and opinions about those around you are on the peaks; In the next half hour you might cry incontrolantly and hate them all, starting with yourself.

In order to better explain this disorder, Snoop resorted to psychotherapist's expertise Cristina Ianuc. At the base of the doctor, she re-profiled on psychotherapy when she realized that she prefers to work with the soul of man rather than with his body. After an experience with this disorder for over 10 years, he describes how Borderline borrows symptoms from other psychiatric diagnoses. “We are talking about the need to always be in the center of attention, specific to histrionism, or, against the background of abandonment, about the withdrawal from social groups, specific to the antisocial disorder. We also speak of behaviors from dissociative disorders, namely that the self -image is very different from what is, in fact, in the outside.

Experts also say that BPD patients tend to see the world in black and white, without shades of gray. According to the “Manual of Diagnosis and Statistical Classification of Disorders” in 2004, Borderline means a persistent pattern of instability in interpersonal relationships, self -image and moods. Also, people with BPD are very impulsive and can easily fall prey to dangerous behaviors for them or those around them. It happens frequently for those with borderline to eat exaggeratedly – much or little – in times of stress, to drunk aggressively, abusing alcohol or drugs or engaging in unprotected sexual acts. Subsequent self -mutations and ideas are also common. A study published in 2019 showed that such ideas appear at a minimum of 46% of BPD patients, 10% of whom become committed.

Invisible diagnosis in statistics

According to the volume “Borderline: How to live with a person with extreme emotions” of mental health experts Paul T. Mason and Randi Kreger, until the 1980s, Borderline was a name given to those patients impossible to fit anywhere. At present, however, due to its complexity, it has become one of the most researched personality disorders, according to an analysis published in 2024 in the Scientific Journal Frontiers in Psychiatry.

Globally, about 150 million people have BPD. To a prevalence of the disease of 1%, according to some international studies, In Romania there would be approximately 190,000 people with borderline personality disorder at this time. This reality is not reflected in the statistics of the Ministry of Health obtained by Snoop.

According to MS, a small number of patients received this diagnosis in recent years, only 10 in 2023 and 4 in 2024. The psychiatrist Mihai Bran offers an explanation: “The private environment does not report any diagnoses, and in the state there is only the centralizer of the insured patients, in relation to the National House of Health Insurance”. The specialist also stressed that Borderline is generally registered in medical acts as a secondary diagnosis. “Patients with personality disorders usually have other comorbidities for which they are presented in medical services such as: depressive episodes, anxiety disorders, insomnia. In this case, the doctor makes the main diagnosis, but does not always put the secondary diagnosis of personality disorder.”

The fear that leaves scars

When he receives the diagnosis, Ana has been in the care of the second family for about 6 years, at Miriam's mother, where she lives with her biological daughter. “There have always been differences,” says the girl. “I was constantly feeling a goal: that I will never love me because I am so. I will never be enough, I will never have someone to be 100%next to me.”

He already has loved, on Tavi, a boy from the village, but, although they have chosen together even at what high school they will go, Ana lives permanently with obsessive fear that Tavi will abandon her. That he will not love her as he is, without waiting for anything in return. Fear causes her to lose contact with reality and wander among the thoughts that drive her crazy, and the first thing she can do to drive them is to cut her hands. He does not do this to self-punishment, but to distract his attention from uncontrollable anxiety.

“It was a difficult and strange suffering,” he tells me as he stroked a scar on his arm. “I felt my meat hurt, I felt the air flowing in my lungs … A somatization from it, dirty. Tavi could not show him anything, so I was getting home and I was starting to cry and scream. They were all afraid of me.”

It is one of the paradoxes of those who live with borderline, explains, for Snoop, Cristina Ianuc: they have a very intense need for closeness, but at the same time, they are deeply afraid of it. Because the simple approach to someone comes to the package with the risk of being abandoned.

Hospitalization. “I could roam, struggle, do anything and no one judge me ”

At 16, self -teaching becomes an increasingly serious problem for Ana, but both she and Miriam try as much as possible to avoid hospitalization. I go to a clinical psychologist together, who diagnoses the BPD. Assist. Univ. Dr. Emanuela Andrei, a psychiatrist of children and teenagers and teacher at the “Carol Davila” University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Bucharest, explains for SNOOOP that, in general, the diagnosis of personality disorder is made in adulthood: “In adolescence, we identify disharmonious features or a disharmonious structuring – a diagnosis It reveals this aspect.

Only with a diagnosis and recipe for herbal soothing in hand, Ana's condition worsens every day. After a new crisis and new scars, hospitalization does not seem such a bad idea for Ana and Miriam mother. In the same year, the girl is first hospitalized at the “Socola” Institute of Psychiatry in Iași, at the age of 16. An experience that today remembers almost fondly:

“It was a great experience. I could externalize my suffering anyway, to roam, to struggle, to do anything and no one judges me. I did many friends, other children in the system, like me, which the state internal to not beat them. Most did not seem to have any psychiatric problem.”

Read on Snoop the story of Ana, but also that of Vera.

How can you get help

Borderline personality disorder is a difficult diagnosis, but specialized help can make the difference. In case of suicidal or self-harm thoughts, here are some support telephone lines:

• Telverde antisuicide: 0800.801.200 – Valfable Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from 7:00 to 19:00.
• DEPREHUB HELPLINE: 0374.456.420-non-stop callable.
• 112 – emergency number.

Editors: Luiza Vasiliu, Alexandra Nistoroiu (snoop.ro)