I wrote this in part (in comments) on Belinda’s post about Kendra’s Law and wanted to elaborate considerably:

My 15 year old cousin is showing severe signs of Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar. My grandmother’s mother seems to have had it, my mother had it, and now this (female) cousin.

This isn’t teen angst – we all know what that is – it’s clearly, most certainly, 100% Borderline Personality and possibly Bi-polar. BPD isn’t often alone.

She has left home, is living in a drughouse with her 18 year old boyfriend, is violent to the point of knocking my 26 year old female cousin out with a glass mug. She skips school, swears at everyone, yelling, screaming death threats and worse, and at times is docile, shy and sweet.

There are rumors flying through her small town that she has been promiscuous and involved in sexual experimentation with more than one person at a time, been filmed, and possibly took money for favors.

Her parents (my uncle is the brother to my mother) have gotten her an appointment with a psychiatrist at a high financial cost and just tonight, she agreed to go. Here (we aren’t in the states) there are no laws to force anyone of any age into treatment. Even despite my cousin having hurt family members and completely outlining to her sisters how she is going to kill them in their sleep – detail by chilling detail. The only way they could force her into help should she change her mind now is to call the children’s aid authorities and place her in a group home — and obviously that is a mess they don’t want to bring on to the family, reason one being that they would lose her trust and possibly lose her forever.

We tiptoed around her at Christmas, with my grandmother agreeing to send food with her to the boyfriend’s drug house, just to avoid an eruption. Had she said no, we are certain this cousin would have gone crazy for not getting her way.
Everyone in the family is terrified of what she will do if her parents force her to give up the boyfriend and come home. She is a time bomb at all times.

If she hadn’t agreed to see this professional, I really don’t know what my uncle and aunt would have done. I do hope she gets the help she really needs, which will include therapy and drugs, probably for the rest of her life.

Her appointment is in January and all of us are holding our breath, waiting for her to blow up at her parents the next time around and refuse to go. If she does go, this could all go sour anyway – she is an expert liar and we have no idea what will come out of her mouth. Her recollection of angry outbursts are minimal, or she claims to remember nothing. She takes no accountability for any of her actions, she owns no blame for her situation and everything is someone else’s fault. She would rather live in the boyfriend’s drug filled, filthy, dangerous apartment, where his female roommate deals crack cocaine, and have the boyfriend’s roommate (another female) pick on her, use her toothbrush to clean the toilet and be abused in the house she is in, then go home and be without boyfriend. We as a family simply don’t understand this self abuse.

When I reached out to her, I was slapped in the face with “I’m smart and strong. If I need help, I’ll tell you. Stop worrying.”

I’m trying hard to understand how both my mother and my cousin ended up this way — both have been raised in loving homes, free of abuse and full of family time and lots of love. I welcome any insight, advice, whatever.

My next therapy session is mid-January and my focus has shifted to my cousin so I haven’t really thought too much about the re-telling of history I have been doing with the therapist. She did mention EDMR as a therapy we might try for me.