Symptoms and manifestations of borderline personality disorder: Symptoms of cognitive impairment

Borderline personality disorder mainly manifests as symptoms such as emotional instability, interpersonal conflicts, and self-identity confusion, while cognitive impairment involves symptoms such as memory loss, decreased orientation, and impaired executive function. The core characteristics of borderline personality disorder include abnormal emotional regulation, impulsive behavior, and fear of abandonment. Typical manifestations of cognitive impairment include language barriers, decreased visual spatial ability, and decreased computational power.

1. Borderline personality disorder

1. Emotional instability

Patients experience intense and rapid emotional fluctuations, which may transition from extreme pleasure to deep depression within a few hours. This emotional change often lacks external triggers and is often accompanied by a strong sense of anger or emptiness. Some individuals may experience emotional breakdowns lasting for several hours, which may be accompanied by self harm behavior.

2. Interpersonal Relationship Conflict

shows extreme cognition towards others' evaluations, often quickly switching between idealization and belittling. In intimate relationships, there is a strong conflict between dependence and exclusion, with a fear of being abandoned and a tendency to actively terminate the relationship. This pattern leads to frequent breakdowns in social relationships, often resulting in sudden disconnection followed by strong recovery.

3. Self identification confusion

Significant instability in self-image, career goals, or values. May suddenly change dressing style, social circle, or life plan, and cannot describe clear self characteristics. Some patients experience long-term feelings of emptiness or existential anxiety, attempting to fill their inner emptiness through extreme behavior.

4. Impulsive behavior

Common reckless behaviors such as substance abuse, overeating, dangerous driving, and overconsumption. The incidence of self harm behavior is relatively high, including superficial self harm such as wrist cutting and burns, and suicide attempts often have performative but potentially fatal accidents. These behaviors often occur during intense emotional fluctuations and are often accompanied by feelings of regret afterwards.

5. Transient loss of sense of reality

Transient psychotic symptoms such as paranoid ideation or personality disintegration may occur in stressful situations. Usually lasting from minutes to hours, unlike schizophrenia, patients can realize the unreality of these experiences afterwards. This symptom is often triggered by interpersonal conflicts and is a manifestation of a breakdown in coping mechanisms.

2. Cognitive impairment

1. Memory decline

Early on, it is characterized by forgetting recent conversations or the location of stored items. As the condition progresses, there may be impairment of distant memory, and even the inability to recognize faces of relatives. Alzheimer's disease patients may experience fictional phenomena, filling memory gaps with fabricated content.

2. Decreased directional ability

initially manifests as difficulty in time orientation, gradually developing into obstacles in location and character orientation. Severe patients may get lost at home or mistake their spouse for their parents. This symptom is associated with impaired parietal lobe function and is often accompanied by decreased visual spatial judgment.

3. Executive dysfunction

manifests as a significant decline in planning ability, abstract thinking, and decision-making ability. Patients have difficulty completing multi-step tasks, such as cooking according to recipes or managing finances. Cases caused by frontal lobe injury may be accompanied by personality changes, childish behavior, or social dysfunction.

4. Language disorders

Difficulty finding words is a common early manifestation, and later there may be named aphasia or repetitive language. Cognitive impairment caused by cerebrovascular disease is often accompanied by articulation disorders, while patients with neurodegenerative diseases often have difficulty understanding semantics. Some patients may experience language repetition and continue to repeat the same vocabulary.

5. Decreased visual spatial ability

Unable to correctly determine the position relationship of objects, manifested as difficulty in dressing and loss of drawing ability. Patients with Lewy body dementia may experience visual hallucinations, seeing non-existent characters or animals. This symptom is closely related to injuries in the occipital and parietal junction area, often leading to an increased risk of falls. For borderline personality disorder, it is recommended to establish a regular daily routine, learn emotional regulation techniques through dialectical behavior therapy, and avoid excessive caffeine and alcohol intake. Cognitive impairment patients need to maintain moderate mental activity, undergo memory training and orientation exercises, ensure a safe home environment, and regularly undergo professional cognitive function assessments. Both types of disorders require professional psychological intervention combined with necessary medication treatment, and early identification and systematic intervention can significantly improve prognosis.