BPD or APD

Recently several young people approached me and asked if I could help them understand the difference between BPD and APD—because they had heard that these two mental disorders varied in incidence based on gender. With all the acronyms floating around these days I thought it prudent to ask what those two acronyms referred to in their vocabularies. After all, they could stand for bad puppy dog or AWOL puppy dog! They laughed and said, "We wondered if you would make an assumption or ask a question." [They had heard me talk about JOT behaviors, the 'J' representing 'jumping to conclusions.'] It turned out that a classmate had been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder or BPD and they wanted to know how that differed from Antisocial Personality Disorder or APD. Interestingly enough, I had just spent some time with a cousin of mine who happens to have spent the last fifty years as a practicing psychiatrist; and who went into the field after a student at the same University committed suicide. In the conversation my cousin mentioned that in his experience BPD is diagnosed much more commonly in females and that likely APD is the male equivalent, it being diagnosed much more commonly in males.