Call Me Borderline

If you or a loved one have been touched by the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, this book will invite you to see this diagnosis as a window into a unique and powerfully human experience. CALL ME BORDERLINE, a psychological memoir, re-examines a label shrouded in stigma and mystery through the eyes of a Hasidic, Yale-trained professional who beat the odds as a survivor of a near deadly eating disorder. Readers are invited into her journey from Hasidic scholar to mental health professional and skeptic. Readers will be brought to the edges of our current understanding of mental health and invited into an exploration that asks us to reinvent ourselves emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually.

As she navigates the gruesome death of a favorite "borderline" patient early in her career, the author is left with a desperate calling to heal patients with borderline symptoms, including eating disorders, and to bring them back from the edges of survival. She brings her Hasidic upbringing and memories of her own psychiatric institutionalization to bear on the most important mission of all: saving the lives of those hanging on by a thread. Traversing worlds from Hasidic community to her professional mission, she opens our eyes to a reinvention of borderline states as an affliction of belonging and disconnection, remedied only by showing up whole in the face of those whose suffering threatens to tear us apart.

Devorah Kamman is a Hasidic woman raised in Brooklyn whose curiosity led her to Yale college to study psychology and writing. She applies her knowledge of Hasidic philosophy, her analytical, seeking mind, and her psychiatric training to solve some of the unsolvable problems that lead bright and sensitive humans over the abyss of suicide and self-destruction.