Barbara Fernandez on her unique show at the Edinburgh Fringe
Barbara’s show, Barbara Fernandez Singing, Sagging and Shagging, can be booked here
At an age when most people contemplate retirement (and at the start of lockdown), I got diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD for short – which may sound like a far right wing political group…but is actually an emotional rollercoaster).
I went through 2 years of intense treatment, which has been described by BPD expert Marsha Linehan as “climbing out of hell on a ladder – but the ladder’s on fire.” It’s not for the faint of heart – many don’t succeed in completing it – but it can help manage the condition. Tragically, most people never get access to the treatment (people over 50 are told they are “too old to change”).
I completed the treatment successfully at age 58 – I got better, and my therapist got my savings.
Once I was better, my then-therapist said, “You need a purpose for your life: what’s something you’ve always wanted to do?” I took a deep breath and said… “Standup comedy”.
3 years later…and here I am at Edinburgh Fringe festival with a solo show, Singing, Sagging and Shagging – a comedic story of my highly volatile experiences with trench-digging ex-husbands, suffocating exes (literally), Scientologists and Satanic music producers – told through a series of short parody songs. This is followed by a heartfelt sharing of the truth behind BPD, a tear-jerking parody dedicated to other sufferers, and a culmination of a victory song: my irreverent version of Liza Minelli’s Cabaret song, delivered in what some have called ‘bra-busting style’.
I genuinely believe the only reason I’m still here (BPD is a highly suicidal population) is to be an advocate for BPD and to entertain people while also giving hope to others who have the condition, because BPD is a highly stigmatized mental illness.
The stigma is so bad that when one woman went to A&E with severe stomach pains, when staff saw she had BPD on her medical records, they sent her away saying, “You’re just faking it for attention”.
One university student was studying to be a mental health practitioner and her lecturer told the large audience of potential mental health workers: “If you come across anyone with BPD, they are untreatable and manipulative, so ignore them as they can’t be helped”. She has BPD.
Some psychiatrists will deliberately misdiagnose a young person with bipolar just to avoid them having the stigma of a BPD diagnosis on their medical records (!) (and the treatment is not the same so they never get better).
My show and my songs are part of my efforts to erase this stigma, and one of the very first things I wanted to achieve as a musical comedian was to create a song to share with people in a fun way what it’s like having BPD, so I wrote The BPD Song, which released shortly before this year’s Edinburgh Fringe festival and which you can listen to on all the usual platforms here: https://orcd.co/barbarafernandezthebpdsong
Find out more about Barbara here:
