How to spot Borderline Personality Disorder just by looking at her face

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to this edition of the Jolly Heretic. Now, how can you identify a woman with borderline personality disorder simply from looking at her without even talking to her? What is the physomy of borderline personality disorder in a woman? This is what I want to look at today. But before I do that, could you do me a favor? Could you please please please subscribe? Could you subscribe on YouTube because they are utterly demonetizing me. And uh leave leave a like and leave a leave a comment and hit the bell button and all that stuff. And also subscribe on my Substack. That's jolly heretic.com where I put all the most base I can't put on YouTube in person interviews, vlogs, blogs. And if you like what I do, you can support me for the cost of a pint of beer a month. Okay, back to the video.

[00:00:42]So first of all, what is borderline personality disorder? Borderline personality disorder is a cluster B dark triad trait uh or a condition rather that crosses over with things like psychopathy and narcissism and machavelianism. And it tends to be diagnosed more in women. 75% of those diagnosed are women. It is characterized by highly unstable and extreme moods and poor emotional regulation. A fundamental terror of abandonment and being alone.

[00:01:07]Impulsivity including sexual risk-taking, substance abuse, binge shopping, that kind of thing. Identity disturbance because you're so anxious you keep wondering who you are. So you change your identity and you change your goals and that sort of thing. Chronic feelings of emptiness. A pattern of intense unstable relationships in which you idealize and dealize your partner.

[00:01:23]So basically you you um you love bomb them and get them addicted and then you destroy them and this and make them feel awful and this heightens the addiction and uh and so on. Extreme anger uh self harm and threats of self harm and transient dissociation under stress. So basically paranoid psychosis under stress that is borderline personality uh disorder. Uh it's extremely damaging. Uh a large percentage of women that are in prison have borderline personality disorder. uh and uh in many ways they are kind of like comparable in some respects almost like female uh narcissists to female uh you they are the female expression of dark tri traits. Now I've done another video in which I look at how you can identify them from a first date just from talking to them for a couple of hours. But here I want to look at the physomy. Now the physiology is there because borderline personality is at least 50% genetic. Uh the fathers of girls with borderline personality disorder tend to have borderline traits and the mothers of girls with borderline personality disorder tend to have these kinds of traits and also tend to have things like depression and anxiety. And so this is expressed in in an environment in a genetic environment combination. And because it's partly genetic um it's going to be expressed in the physical nature of the person because it's it's something that's developed at a very early stage at a gestational stage. So it will be expressed the the way that the brain has gone wrong and there is evidence by the way that border lines are higher in mutational load than average. They are higher in various physical illnesses than average indicating uh mutational load. Um something's gone wrong in the brain and this is expressed in the body. Now there are a number of studies on this. Uh first of all identifying mental disorder from the face of women with borderline personality disorder. What this shows is that um in laboratory conditions people can identify the face of a woman with borderline personality disorder at greater than chance would predict.

[00:03:19]So so there must be some e it must be evolutionarily adaptive to be able to identify them because obviously you have to interact with them and whatever and it would be in your interests to be able to work out who has and who hasn't got borderline personality who is and who isn't going to potentially cuckold you.

[00:03:36]who is and who isn't going to potentially just you know break your heart or whatever or be a very unstable um and and and and and antisocial person. So it would make sense that we would have evolved to be able to identify them more than chance would predict. And this is indeed the case. We can identify them at greater than chance would predict. Uh what is it that we we are identifying? That's not clear. It seems to be all kinds of subtle traits.

[00:04:03]When you ask people, one of the things they focus on is the eyes. So they take the view that there's something peculiar with the eyes, but but but that there's some kind of strange stare that implies hyperarousal perhaps or or or or being dissociated and thus looking vacant, something of that kind. But that's the first thing that we we seem to be able to identify them at greater than chance would predict. What are the actual minor physical abnormalities that they express? Well, there's a paper on this called uh called minor physical abnormalities um in patients with bipolar one disorder. Bipolar one disorder uh correlates quite strongly with borderline personality disorder and often people that actually have borderline personality disorder are diagnosed with bipolar one and related conditions. Now what you find is that these uh these women tend to have minor physical minor physical abnormalities of the feet. Um and in particular a large gap between their big toe and the next toe. Uh the toe might be curved inwards as well. Um so that's that's another minor physical mouth that's that's associated with it and then that will fill fill the gap as it were between between the toes. Uh they tend to have a steepled pallet. So the mouth is a kind of almost well a steeple the a sort of a triangular shape. So basically problems with the mouth problems with dentition and a furrowed tongue. So a tongue that would be a sort of a sort of a triangular sort of shape uh with with with with furrows on it. Now this would be noticed in things like presumably I assume things like kissing that such a girl would would not like kissing. She wouldn't enjoy French kissing because she'd have this weirdly small mouth uh internally. this this strange shaped mouth. So these are the these are the key uh physical markers. In addition, such women will tend to have a wider upper face, a relatively wide upper face, uh relatively prominent cheekbones and a relatively narrow lower face. So I hope I hope that makes sense. So these are the physical traits. In addition, there is evidence that we would expect them to be relatively good-looking, relatively attractive in in terms of their face. Why is this the case? Well, there's a very interesting study called borderline traits in attractive women and low attractive men are relatively favored by the opposite sex. And what this shows is essentially uh when a woman is good-looking, men do not mind that she is mentally unstable and has borderline personality disorder. They literally find the borderline personality woman who is good-looking more attractive than they do controls.

[00:06:49]They favor borderline traits in good-looking women. Now, the reason whereas borderline traits are favored in ugly men or not particularly attractive men, not not amazingly attractive men by women. Now, why would that be the case?

[00:07:03]Well, uh men and women of uh uh pursue slightly different evolutionary strategies. uh a man can have sex with as many women as he can get away with uh and and uh you know hope that some of the offspring survive. He can pump and dump. So he's not particularly selective and if he is selective what he will select for is youth and beauty. Uh a woman um operates a different strategy.

[00:07:26]She will sexually she needs she will be pregnant. She needs someone to look after her. So she will sexually select for status in a man um more than she will for looks. and if he has status, he will have resources and he will be able to look after her and look after the offspring. Um the result is that what women will sexually select for is status and they don't care so much about looks and there's evidence that being dark triad be being a psychopathic man is associated with masculinity is associated with being physically tough uh but but is also associated ultimately with with status with very high status.

[00:08:02]So therefore, women sexually and they don't care as much about looks. Men do the opposite. They they care less about personality because because they don't care if she's going to them or she's going to, you know, pump because because they can just have lots of other women. So they care less about personality. Um and they care more about youth and beauty. So they are prepared to trade um kindness uh lovingness loyalty basically pro-social traits in women for the woman being good-looking. So it follows that uh ne antisocial traits in women would end up being weakly associated with being good-looking. So it further follows that having borderline personality would end up in women would end up being weakly associated with being goodlooking. Uh and in men having those kinds of traits would be weakly associated of course with status. So the the the and possibly with not being particularly good-looking. So with with with the opposite. So you can see in evolutionary terms called player tropy the way these things become bundled together. So men men are making this trade-off and therefore you what you would find is that and there's things that would militate against this such as as I said women who have borderline personality uh tend to be elevated mutational load because we would have kind of selected against across time being antisocial and we would have selected in favor of being pro-social. So therefore mutation would would be associated with being antisocial and having borderline personality hence the minor physical abnormalities.

[00:09:34]But this would be very subtle because on the other hand, being a good-looking woman and being antisocial, having borderline personality would have very very weakly become clumped together, at least in a certain subgroup of women. So those are the key traits to look for in women. I mean, you're not the I'm sure the association is quite weak, but that means that at the extremes, you're going to get manifestations of it. I.e. A woman who is extremely good-looking is more likely to have borderline personality disorder and she's also more likely to have certain subtle physical abnormalities uh which I have already listed. So I hope this is a bit of interest and of course I hope this this demonstrates to you that borderline personality is not a girl who's been abused as a child because if it was then it wouldn't be expressed it wouldn't be 50% or so genetic and it wouldn't be expressed in things like physical abnormalities and in and in uh subtleties with regard to nature of the face. This is something that is significantly genetic. Okay, thank you very much from the Taliho and Glide. Are you ready for the future of the West?