BPD and Dementia or Downhill Behavior

[pookielocks]

My mom is 65 and has undx BPD. i talked to my counselor the other day about her changing behavior and she suggested that is sounded like warning signs of early on-set dementia. for example, my whole life, my mom was always able to maintain a social appearance of the perfect person/teacher/mother when things at home were horrible. she was 2 different people. i've noticed that within the last year, she is no longer able to keep her public persona going and her real self has started to leak out more an more. any ideas? most people with BPD get a bit better as they get older since they're usually "called out" by people for their bad behavior over the long period of their lives. my mom hasn't since she's mostly been able to maintain that public persona, although she can't keep a close friend to save her life. any thoughts?

[Onya]

Oh boy I know exactly what you mean! My mom isn't strong enough at 82 to keep up her false self and seems to have lost her filter, try harder living seems to have ran out and boy is she cruel and so angry and bitter... I see dementia as well, but I see she sees something is wrong and that gets her angry at life as well, she is the forever victim of life and her loss of her expectations of how life should be. I believe my mother has been undiagnosed all her life! I have empathy for you my friend! My mother has smeared me to many people cause, being the only child, I have failed her expectations! You are not alone, I think that there are more of us out there that we realize! It's been painful to have walked away from a mentally ill family member and self care. How are going thru this journey? Best wishes

[Harri]

Hi there.  I think it is fairly common for people to lose their 'inhibitions" as they get older.  Granted, in people with BPD this is taken to a higher level and can seem to be more extreme because their hidden selves are so out there to begin with.  I have heard other people say that BPDs get better with age but in my own experience and in reading stories of people with BPD parents over the years, I think it is more the exception than the rule.  In my case, as my mother aged, she raged less in terms of yelling and screaming but she became far more cold and calculating and the manipulation, as impossible as I thought it was, seemed to ramp up as well.  I suppose if you measure improvement in terms of decibel levels, she did improve, but I would have preferred the yelling and screaming. 

Personality changes in dementia patients are quite common and it seems almost impossible (to my inexpert eyes) to separate out what is due to dementia and what is due to BPD.  It is also common for dementia patients, with or without BPD, to become very upset as they are often aware of their forgetfulness, inability to function and cope like before and are all too aware of what lies ahead. 

My father (a so called Non) had dementia, but fortunately he died before it got too bad.  I could see the fear and sadness in his eyes sometimes when he was able to recognize his decline.  He watched his own father go through it to the point of wearing his boxer shorts on the outside of his pants, peeing in closets and eventually wasting away in a nursing home wearing a diaper and drooling.  My father died in his sleep before he got to that point and I am grateful... and I am sure he would be too.

So, no answers here, but I can relate too.  How involved are you with your mother?  Do you ever go to doctors appointments with her?   The last year of his life, I went with my father and had a hard time getting his internist to believe he was having difficulty with memory until my father forgot having had an EKG right in the doctors office 5 minutes after it happened.  Only then did the doctor believe me and then he put my father on medication. 

Wishing you luck with this.  I can be very difficult to manage your own emotions as this happens.