• Question: What is the hardest Mental disease to help heal.

    Asked by anon-286296 to Victoria on 8 Mar 2021.
    • Photo: Victoria Garfield

      Victoria Garfield answered on 8 Mar 2021:

      This is a difficult question to answer for sure and even more for me, as I’m not a practising psychology, but I work in research and don’t do mental health research as such. However, to the best of my knowledge, Borderline Personality Disorder is very hard to treat and perhaps sometimes considered the hardest to treat and thus, curing it seems also pretty impossible. Perhaps some of the other psychologists also have some insight here. This disorder makes emotions confusing and difficult to control for those diagnosed with it and one big challenge of this disorder is that it can also lead to anxiety or depression, which means that the individual then has another type of mental health issue to deal with on top of the BPD.

Comments

  • laraquartel commented on :

    Hi salina rahman,

    I am going to have to say schizophrenia for two reasons.
    Firstly, symptom wise makes the disorder hard to treat as patients can be seriously unwell where they have lost touched with reality. They often don’t want treatment. As you can imagine if you don’t believe you are unwell and asked to take medication that makes you feel tired and many other sides effects, you wouldn’t want to take them at all let alone for a long time! Other ‘negative’ symptoms, such as depression, lack of motivation and blunted emotions can make it hard for psychologists to help/heal.
    Secondly, on a psychological level, due to the severity of their symptoms and lack of insight, psychological input can be really hard too – though I am an advocate for improving these barriers and to adapt therapies (such as CBT) to this specific population.
    And thirdly, it’s really hard to recover properly from a psychotic episode. Be that a few further relapses or chronic issues for most of their life. It has been described that psychotic symptoms are ‘toxic’ to the brain.

  • Photo: Dennis

    Dennis commented on :

    Hi salina. I will also say schizophrenia, and also borderline personality disorder (BPS; also called emotionally unstable personality disorder). My fellow scientists have already explained the bits about schizophrenia so I’ll focus on BPD. Someone who has BPD may experience paranoid thoughts, dissociative symptoms, chronic feelings of emptiness, and more. Due to it being complicated, that makes full recovery difficult.