Taylor: That is the power of the diagnosis, isn’t it? Those stories won’t be heard, because they’re not seen as legitimate stories, because the diagnosis overrides the legitimacy of the story. If you’ve been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, especially as a woman, and then you try and speak out about it?

That diagnosis really just positions you as an attention seeker, a liar, unreliable, disconnected from reality, and also manipulative. That one annoys me the most, because there are so many professionals out there that I’ve spoken to and I interviewed for the book that were directly trained and told, “Do not listen to borderline patients. They will manipulate you, they will lie to you, they will control you, they will wrap you around their little finger, they’ll get you doing everything that they want you to do.”

Professionals will speak to me and they’ll say something like, “We don’t talk to the borderline patients, because they take information about you and then they’ll use it against you.” Whoa—how have you been trained? Even if, let’s say, for example, that borderline personality disorder is real, which I don’t think it is, but say it was. Let’s say that—let’s also accept that mental health is the same as physical health. These are just illnesses, they’re just the names of illnesses. How would you get away with training professionals not to listen to that particular set of patients?

Nobody in med school is told, “Don’t listen to the diabetics. They will lie to you, and they will control you and manipulate you.” Why is it allowed?

I’ve worked in violence against women and girls, now, for 12 years, and it is the most common diagnosis. I can usually predict it before it even happens—weeks or months before it’s come in. I know what’s going to happen, and then I know what medication. I know what the risk assessments are going to say. I know what the rest of their life is going to look like. It shouldn’t be like that. And the fact that it’s used as a slur by professionals as well, professionals in my own field—“She’s a bit borderline.”