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People that are most at risk are individuals that really come from unstable households. Now, when I say unstable households, there’s a caveat that people need to talk about. Because we’re not just talking about individuals that come from lower socioeconomic households. You can come from a very high socioeconomic household, but despite the immense wealth that you share, that house within some of the family can be very, very dysfunctional. So we’re not just talking about socioeconomic. We talk about truly households that are unstable, there’s untreated mental illness, whether it’s substance abuse, whether it’s mood disorders, whether it’s psychotic disorders. So individual that coming from that type of environment tend to be more at risk of developing the borderline personality disorder. Because fundamentally, how do we feel that these disorders manifest itself? A lot of it comes to a matter of upbringing. As a baby, as an infant, were your needs met? When you were crying and needed to be hugged, was there somebody to provide comfort? When you had questions or when you needed some emotional support, did you receive that? Oftentimes people with the borderline personality disorder, these emotional needs were neglected or not adequately addressed. Hence, pathological means to deal with these unmet needs were formulated, and that is the etiology of a borderline personality disorder. And you can say the narcissistic personality disorder as well.
