What was behind my anger attacks?
What was behind my anger attacks? Billie Dee Gianfrancesco, 29, east London
Stepping out of the car,
I could feel my blood boiling.
My mum Trisha, then 47, and I had been rowing.
What about? I really couldn’t tell you.
Some silly comment or look, probably, as we’d driven home from school.
But it was enough to get me riled up.
So much so that I’d just poured a tray of milkshakes over her as we pulled into the driveway.
While poor Mum went inside to clean herself up, I felt my anger dissolve.
‘I’m so sorry!’ I cried later on. ‘I don’t know where that came from.’
But, truthfully, this wasn’t my first angry outburst.
Ever since I was around 6, my moods had been extreme.
I’d become furious over the slightest thing.
As a teen, I was popular, top of my class.
I had nothing to be angry about, yet my moods were out of control – I wasn’t just a teen with hormone issues.
Frustrated, I began to self-medicate.
I started drinking alcohol and doing drugs.
By the time I was 17, it was excessive.
So I started looking on the internet about mental-health disorders. This could explain everything, I thought. I didn’t know what to believe, though.
Over the next 10 years, my binges got worst.
And my moods never improved.
But in 2016, when
Help is out there for mentalhealth disorders
I was 26, I had a massive mental breakdown.
Housebound, I knew that I needed to get some help. I started to see a psychiatrist privately.
A year later, I finally got a diagnosis.
‘You have borderline personality disorder,’ my GP explained to me.
BPD is a disorder of mood and how a person interacts with others.
It can be linked to other mental-health disorders, such as bipolar.
For me, it was combined with complex post traumatic stress disorder (c-PTSD).
My BPD had a series of triggers.
One was my parents’ divorce when I was 6.
My psychiatrist helped me to cope better.
I was put on medication, had regular therapist visits.
Now my rages are under control, I feel at peace.
And I can talk openly about my BPD.
Lots of people don’t really understand mentalhealth disorders. They’re easily dismissed. For that reason, I’ll keep working to educate people about them.
The message is simple. Help is out there – it’s OK not to be OK.