Through Glass: How not mentalising creates borderline personality disorder

Mentalisation-Based Treatment is changing how we view mental health — it is in fact revolutionising therapy for BPD.

In 1967, a teenage Hungarian refugee named Peter Fonagy was checked in to a mental health clinic in Hampstead, London. Fifty-two years later that same clinic is now the Anna Freud Centre. Peter Fonagy still resides there — not as a patient, but a doctor. Since the late 1980s he’s been on an incredible journey to understand the root cause of mental illness. A world-renowned expert in Borderline Personality Disorder his Mentalisation-Based Treatment (MBT) could be the new gold standard in therapy. It all begins with that word — mentalisation.

On the outside looking in

Mentalising is the process by which we understand ourselves and each other by mental states. If we are able infer, and imagine the thoughts, emotions and motives of our own, and other people’s behaviour, then we can build a strong sense of self, and regulate our emotions.

Individuals with BPD have problems with mentalising: ‘Hyper-mentalisation’ refers to the desperate almost obsessive attempt to understand the mind of others which verges on paranoia. ‘Hypo-mentalisation’…