Lecture
A borderline state can have different meanings in various contexts, including medicine, psychology, and physics. Here are a few examples:
Medical context: In medicine, a "borderline state" can refer to a patient's condition that lies between health and disease and does not amount to a clear diagnosis. This may mean that the patient has symptoms or laboratory findings that do not correspond to any specific disease or condition.
Psychological context: In psychology, a "borderline state" (or "boundary state") refers to a mental disorder characterized by instability of mood, relationships, and self-esteem. People suffering from this condition may have difficulty forming stable relationships and controlling their emotions.
Neurophysiological context: A borderline state, borderline syndrome, or borderline level (English: borderline state) is a relatively mild degree of severity of a mental disorder that does not reach the level of pronounced pathology. In the psychoanalytic tradition the term is narrower and denotes a level of personality organization that is more "disturbed" than the neurotic level but less "disturbed" than the psychotic level. In this sense, the term "borderline state" was introduced in 1953 by Robert Knight.
What all these contexts have in common is that "borderline state" denotes a condition that lies on the boundary, between two different conditions, and can often be difficult to define or classify unambiguously.
Borderline states are also a subject of study in neurophysiology and the medicine of borderline conditions. Borderline states are represented by syndromes of psychosomatic, neurotic, neurosis-like, and shallow affective disorders, as well as by amorphous, variable, fluctuating symptom complexes with a varied mosaic of mildly expressed mental, neuroendocrine, neurovegetative-visceral, and neuroimmune disorders. The core disturbance and basic experience in patients with borderline states (symptom complexes, at the very least) manifest as psychophysical discomfort. The symptom complexes of borderline states that fit this definition shape the clinical picture of diatheses (constitutionally determined adaptation disorders), "warning signs," pre-morbid (pre-nosological) health disorders, and remissions of various chronic diseases.
In the psychoanalytic approach, a borderline state is generally considered to be characterized by a number of features by which it can be diagnosed:
The concept largely overlaps with the concept of "Borderline Personality Disorder" found in ICD-10 and DSM-IV
Borderline states may include:
Affect in legal practice covers a number of legally significant emotional reactions and states that limit the accused's ability to fully comprehend and voluntarily regulate their own actions. The criminal codes of many countries contain the concept of "affect," used as a synonym for
a sudden onset of intense emotional turmoil.
Articles of the criminal code in many countries dealing with crimes committed in a state of affect are treated as privileged offenses, with the sentence limited to two or three years.
Commentaries on the criminal code note that in a state of affect, the ability to comprehend the actual nature and social danger of one's actions, and to control them, is diminished, which serves as grounds for regarding a crime committed in such a
state as less socially dangerous than a crime committed in a calm state of mind.
A necessary component of the forensic examination is establishing the cause of the
provocation of the affect - violence,
abuse, grave insult, or a prolonged
psychologically traumatic situation.
This line of research examines the relationship of affect to feelings,
emotions, moods, and passions, the functions of affect, and their role in
the regulation of activity.
Affect can produce a discharge in action that is not subject to conscious volitional control.
There are states no less disorganizing to activity than affect: stress, frustration, conflict.
A number of authors argue that affects differ from emotions in having greater intensity and shorter duration.
However, A.N. Leontiev points to more substantial functional differences:
1. Affects and emotions are situational experiences, unlike feelings. Emotions reflect an appraisal of a possible or current situation, whereas affects are
a response to a situation that has already occurred - usually unexpected for the subject - that is dangerous or psychologically traumatic.
2. Emotions are perceived by a person as states of their own "self," whereas affects are states that arise against their will.
3. Although affects arise after the fact in relation to the situations that trigger them, becoming fixed as a certain
affective marker of objects and situations, they help increase vigilance toward the possible recurrence of the situation.
Affects can include states of varying modality: both negatively colored (anger, rage) and positively colored experiences (elation).
Forms of affect:
1. Sthenic - leading to aggression.
2. Asthenic - giving rise to fear, flight, and numbness.
Research into affective reactions is difficult because of the complexity of eliciting them under laboratory conditions.
Among the experimental methods for eliciting affective reactions are: sudden turning off of the lights, a gunshot, being sprayed with water, presentation of a decomposed rat carcass, urine, feces, and snakes.
Some of these methods may elicit no reaction at all, while others produce only a number of primitive shock reactions and reflexive changes.
For this reason, A.R. Luria and A.N. Leontiev studied naturally occurring material involving a strong mass affect that took place in the spring of 1924 during an academic inspection conducted across all higher-education institutions.
In the Middle Ages, a depressed state was called sluggishness or laziness.
In the 19th century, the term depression (dejection) became established.
Severe manic-depressive or cyclic depressive forms of the illness, which gave rise to the concept of
"depression," account for a very small proportion of its cases (occurring in about 1% of the population).
Shorter or less severe changes are more common.
Boyd and Weissman (1981) calculated that the lifetime risk of developing depression at least once is 8 to 12% for men and 20 to 26% for women.
Women develop depression twice as often as men,
especially married women aged 25 to 45 who have children.
• By hypothesized cause:
Endogenous (arising from within - a stable environment) or reactive depression (caused by external circumstances - an unstable environment). Primary (depression arises without connection to other mental illnesses) or secondary depression (occurs after the development of another mental illness, such as alcoholism or schizophrenia)
• By severity of clinical manifestations:
Psychotic (goes beyond a reaction that can be understood empathically, often accompanied by delusional ideas) or neurotic depression (develops against the background of a conflict situation)
Affective disorders (a form of illness with a clinically distinct depressive picture with an observable acute, distinct onset) or dysthymic disorders (a subthreshold form of illness with a mild clinical picture of depression, often left untreated, in most cases beginning insidiously and running a long course)
• By type of course:
Seasonal depression is limited to the winter months (this is a rare, still
disputed subgroup of affective disorder), while nonseasonal depression
occurs (this is the most common subgroup of affective disorder)
• All types of depression overlap with one another, so their classification is inherently arbitrary.
Psychological phenomena of depression
Irritation caused by depressive experience, slowed thinking.
A person experiencing depression may lose the sense of taste for particular foods. What used to bring pleasure may now be off-putting.
Altered perception of one's own body - heaviness and numbness. The person perceives their living space as having shrunk, and their own body may be perceived as an empty shell. The experience of heaviness and stiffness is perceived as a sense of being drained.
Altered perception of time - slowed and frozen time.
Altered communication - alienation and emptiness. Avoidance of
contact with other people.
Therapy for depression
If depression is understood as an unconscious, reflexive attempt to protect oneself in an extreme situation, then therapy should give priority to acknowledging the misfortune that has occurred and adopting an emotional attitude toward the affected person. An empathic stance is necessary even when the patient remains unresponsive. The more pronounced the depressive numbness, the more
the patient is convinced that efforts to establish contact with them belong to someone else. The choice of therapeutic methods depends on the severity and stage
of the depressive state.
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