Paper short abstract:

This paper theorizes moral/ethical crises of care parents face over how to support their emerging adult with Borderline Personality Disorder. I suggest coupling anthropological methods of attending to struggles with moral agency with dissemination to broad audiences identifying problems and aids.

Paper long abstract:

This research theorizes crises of care parents face concerning how to morally/ethically support their emerging adult diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The study, grounded in interviews with involved parents and five years attendance at a monthly support group for families living with BPD, asks: How do parents narrate critical moments and transformations of parenting? How does care for a young adult with BPD affect parents’ well-being, sense of self as “good” parents and moral agency? These parents describe anguished struggles over what they ought to do in contexts where risks to their young adults are high and nothing parents do seems right or helpful. Their dilemmas dialogue with Brodwin’s (2011) work documenting the experiences of “futility” among community psychiatrists, and Myers’ (2019) research on how young people, following first episode psychosis, seek ways to recuperate moral agency and personhood. Like Myers, I find Zigon’s (2007) concept of “moral breakdown,” particularly, the need to resolve the ethical demand, characterizes parents’ experiences. Dwelling in the moral breakdown indefinitely is, as Zigon instructs, untenable, yet parents persist in demoralizing caregiving. I argue that parents cannot resolve the moral breakdown while subject to (culturally imposed) unlimited self-sacrifice and while they lack trusted voices and structures supporting their own well-being. For this project, anthropological methods of attending to struggles with moral agency, identifying possible aids and disseminating findings to audiences beyond ourselves (to mental health care professionals, to parents) can be a starting point toward care for young people, and their families, with BPD.