I've read some stuff on cross cultural psychiatry and how, say, bulimia basically appeared from scratch in the 80s, but genuine anorexia has existed for centuries. Manic depression and melancholic depression show up throughout history, but nobody thought shit life syndrome was clinical until Prozac.
So, what did BPD look like pre-Tumblr? Were they threatening suicide and getting locked up on a regular basis? Did they end up at freudian analysts? Did that help?
Most of Freud and Jung's patients were rich young women and there's a lot in their work that correlates to what we now know about bpd - Freud invented the oedipus and electra complexes to explain how his patients were reporting high levels of sexual abuse by their wealthy and influential fathers, grandfathers or uncles; he originally published his findings that took these claims seriously but retracted it after severe backlash. BPD is often comorbid with severe childhood abuse or adverse experiences, although there is also a big genetic component so I would think childhood abuse increases the severity of an inherent tendency rather than causing it. BPD has a lot of narcissistic overlap and would also be present in the male relatives and be a potentially useful trait in ascending the social order (healthy narcissism is a concept from the 1970s, everyone needs to have some self-valuing instinct after all).
Jung talked about suicide quite a lot and while he generally tried to analyse the death urge into being symbolic for some other more useful feeling he did have patients where he 'allowed' them to commit suicide because he felt like their death urge was inevitable anyway.
In the more reflective letter of July 25, 1946, addressed to his acquaintance Dr. Eleanor Bertine, however, he appears to adopt an almost fatalistic attitude toward suicide—“I’m convinced that if anybody has it in himself to commit suicide, then practically the whole of his being is going that way”—and arguing against interference or prevention.
The asylum system wasn’t nearly as bad as it was made out to be.
They used one particularly terrible institution as an example of all of them, and that’s how the campaign against mental asylums got rolling. (A journalist wrote an expose working at the worst of the worst.)
Unfortunately, this happened at a time where Republicans were rallying against big government and the left was taken ill by a particularly delusional idea: That mentally ill people were made WORSE by DA SYSTEM, and if left to their own devices and some meditation and shit, they’d get magically better.
So for both the left and the right the idea that if we just close all these big, mean asylums down and leave mental healthcare to the community, felt like a smashing good plan.
It’s a shame, because someone like Victoria would be ideally suited for an asylum. No responsibility, no worries. Just nurses taking care of her, while she scribbles and draws all day.
Fucking X to doubt. Even if we assume that some evil doctor was plotting to kill her, I very strongly doubt she has enough friends to “sit and watch over her” and make sure he doesn’t kill her.
Gee… It kinda sounds like something cooked up by someone who has very little experience with visiting hours at hospitals.
I think trying to do something about the worst of a system is commendable, but the whole asylum system was done away with basically from the same instinct that RFK jr is displaying now; the money that went on funding them could be absorbed by the elites and care in the community by families could take over instead. Those who can't be cared for at home can be exploited in essentially slave labour. Asylums and prisons in the UK did oak picking and menial seamstress work. It's about finding a nice excuse for the state not to have to pay, the left did not actually believe that. Nobody believes that self-care and meditation and tarot is fixing shit now, it's just an excuse to buy and sell more cheap shit.
I think Vicki would completely shape up if an opportunity befitting her self-perceived status came along tomorrow, and in an asylum setting she would only want to do whatever the most privileged make work is with the other patients being her new competition. She has a lot of ED traits and anachans are competing with each other constantly, look up Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo on the Wicked filmset for an example and how thin they got.
Vicki also has lots of BPD traits and BPDs also often try and socially dominate; they don't just skinwalk their favourite people they try and learn more about their traits or hobbies to be better at it than them; or to replace that person's standing in a social group, copying that person's superficial attributes because they don't understand why the group actually tolerates that person and people don't tolerate them. If enabled they will just keep doing it until they become the focus and queen bee of the group.
IMO bpd is narcissism but bpds don't have a fixed sense of self and narcissists do; I think Vicki does have a weak but fixed sense of self because while she keeps looking for different diagnoses, that's to justify not working, she's not getting into lifestyle trends like tattoos or veganism or hunting, aside from trans but she's not even consistent about that. She's lazy but relatively unimpulsive, she doesn't seem to constantly shop on temu or get tattoos or change majors. She retroactively makes shallow connections seem deep, she isn't actually trying to mirror people beyond the bare minimum to gain credibility.
I do think her parents fucked up or are fucked up in some way to have two troon kids, not sure how though. Might just be generically neglectful rich that is usually made up for by having a nanny, but Vicki has never mentioned having one.
tl;dr I don't think putting Vicki in an asylum would fix shit
