RANDI KREGER BIOGRAPHY

Some 24 million people in North America alone have a family member with Borderline Personality Disorder, a serious mental illness characterized by pervasive instability in moods, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. The illness that causes enormous suffering--not only for those who have it, but for their families as well. Author and BPD advocate Randi Kreger has brought the concerns of these family members to an international forefront.

In 1998, she coauthored the book Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder (New Harbinger Publications). Since then, it has sold nearly half million copies, been translated into seven different languages, and been lauded by readers and therapists as the family member “Bible.” In 2002, New Harbinger published her second book, the Stop Walking on Eggshells Workbook: Practical Strategies for Living with Someone who has Borderline Personality Disorder, which met with similar acclaim. Kreger’s website, BPDCentral.com, is one of the longest-established, popular, and largest sites about BPD on the Internet. It contains essential BPD information, articles, therapist listings, excerpts from her books, first persona narrative accounts of people with BPD and their family members, and much more.

The site is also the home of Eggshells Press, which offers several specialized booklets and CDs about BPD by Kreger and others. Many are geared for specific family members, such as parents or partners. These materials include the ABC’s of BPD, Love and Loathing: Protecting Your Mental Health When Your Partner Has Borderline Personality Disorder; and Hope for Parents: Helping Your Borderline Son or Daughter Without Sacrificing Your Family or Yourself.

Much of the material in Kreger’s material comes from “Welcome to Oz,” an Internet support group she founded in 1995. Isolated in the real world, family members gathered online to share stories and offer emotional support to intimate strangers who also felt confused, frustrated, and overwhelmed. The Welcome to Oz community is now home to some 16,000 family members who gather in 15 different lists, or “neighborhoods,” depending upon the type of relationship or living situation.

Kreger was also instrumental in the formation of the Personality Disorders Awareness Network (PDAN), a not-for-profit organization. She speaks and gives workshops about BPD throughout the United States; she has been invited to give three presentations on BPD to laymen and professionals in Tokyo in the fall of 2008. Her newest book, the Essential Family Member Guide to Borderline Personality Disorder: New Tools and Techniques to Stop Walking on Eggshells, will be published by Hazelden Publishing in 2008.