Experimenting with arts-based methods and affective provocations to understand complex lived experience of a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder

This article draws on arts-based psycho-social research to explore embodied and visceral knowing and feeling in the context of people living with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD). It presents a discussion of creative artworks solicited through a nation-wide online survey conducted in Australia in 2021 that generated intimate and affective understanding about living with a diagnosis of BPD. To investigate what lived experiences of distress associated with a BPD diagnosis communicate through sensation, emotion, image and affective capacity, the authors put to work Blackman's (2015) concept of “productive possibilities of negative states of being” and the broader theoretical framework of new materialism. This approach allows a more transformative feeling-with that exceeds the normative affective repertoires and scripts associated with a diagnosis of BPD. The authors recognise the often unspoken and invisible affects of complex mental distress and trauma, and purposefully open the space for affective and symbolic aspects of creative artworks to communicate what is less known or has less presence in dominant biomedical frameworks about living with a BPD diagnosis. The article foregrounds the lived and living experience of participants to generate experiential rather than clinical understandings of the diagnosis. •Lived experience of borderline personality disorder (BPD) is under researched.•Arts-based research enables understanding the emotional toil of mental illness.•Our data highlight the lived experience of distress associated with BPD diagnosis.•This research calls for countering stigma and creating empathy.•Understanding the complex terrain of mental distress leads to better treatment.