How to Get a Personality Disorder Diagnosis Changed or Removed From Your NHS Records

Someone wrote three words in a file about you, years ago, possibly after one appointment, possibly after a bad night in A&E. And now every clinician who opens your record sees those words before they see you.

You want them gone. That is not vanity and it is not denial. It is a reasonable response to something that follows you around.

I am going to tell you the honest version of what is possible, because most of what is written about this is either wrong or useless, and the wrong version wastes months of your life. The short answer is that you probably cannot get the diagnosis deleted. The longer answer is that deletion was never the thing worth fighting for, and there is something else you can ask for that works better and that almost nobody knows to ask for.

Why people want it removed, and why that is legitimate

There is a name for what happens next. Diagnostic overshadowing. Once "EUPD" or "personality disorder" is on the file, new symptoms get read through it. Chest pain becomes anxiety. A physical problem becomes attention seeking. A request for help becomes evidence of the disorder.

Both the bodies that ought to know have said this out loud.

NICE guideline CG78 opens its recommendations, at 1.1.1.1, with this:

People with borderline personality disorder should not be excluded from any health or social care service because of their diagnosis or because they have self-harmed.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists position statement PS01/20, Services for people diagnosable with personality disorder, says at recommendation 4:

Patients with personality disorder should not be denied mainstream services based on diagnosis alone.

Guidance does not have to be written down unless the opposite is happening. Both of those sentences exist because people are being turned away. So if you are here because a door shut, you have not misread the situation.

The thing almost every article gets wrong

Here is the bit that changes everything, and it comes from the Information Commissioner's Office, the regulator that enforces data protection law in the UK.

Under Article 16 of the UK GDPR you have the right to have inaccurate personal data rectified. Inaccurate has a legal meaning. The Data Protection Act 2018 says data is inaccurate if it is "incorrect or misleading as to any matter of fact".

An opinion is not a matter of fact. The ICO's guidance says so directly:

Opinions are, by their very nature, subjective, and it can be difficult to conclude that the record of an opinion is inaccurate. As long as the record shows clearly that the information is an opinion and, where appropriate, whose opinion it is, it may be difficult to say that it is inaccurate and needs to be rectified.

So "Dr Okafor diagnosed EUPD on 14 March 2019" is an accurate record. It accurately records that a doctor held that view on that date. Even if the view was wrong.

Now read the ICO's own worked example, which is startling once you notice what it is actually about:

If a patient is diagnosed by a GP as suffering from a particular illness or condition, but it is later proved that this is not the case, it is likely that their medical records should record both the initial diagnosis (even though it was later proved to be incorrect) and the final findings. Whilst the medical record shows a misdiagnosis, it is an accurate record of the patient's medical treatment. As long as the medical record contains the up-to-date findings, and this is made clear in the record, it would be difficult to argue that the record is inaccurate.

Read the bolded part twice. The regulator is not saying you lose. It is saying what makes a record accurate: the old entry and the current position, both there, and the current one clearly marked as current.

That is the whole fight. Not deletion. Currency.

A record that says "EUPD, 2019" is a record that reads as true today. A record that says "EUPD, 2019; reassessed 2026, criteria not met, formulation is complex PTSD" reads as history. Same file. Completely different clinician on the other end of it.

What you can actually ask for, in the order that works

Four different asks, and they are not equally winnable. Do not lead with the hardest one.

1. Correct the plain facts. This one you win.

Go through your records and find anything that is factually wrong. Not the diagnosis. The facts around it. Dates that are wrong. An event described that did not happen. A quote attributed to you that you did not say. "Patient declined treatment" when you were never offered it. Someone else's history pasted into your file. A relationship or a job or a child described incorrectly.

These are matters of fact. They are inaccurate. They must be corrected. And this matters more than it sounds, because a personality disorder diagnosis is usually built on a picture, and the picture is made of these details. Pull three wrong bricks out and the wall is visibly different.

2. Get the current position recorded alongside. This is the strongest move.

This is the ICO's own example, turned into a request. You are asking for the record to be brought up to date, not emptied.

You are on much stronger ground if you have something to point at: a later assessment, a discharge summary, a letter from a psychologist, an autism or ADHD diagnosis that reframes what was being observed, a formulation from a therapist, a period of years with no contact with services. Anything that is more recent than the diagnosis.

If you have that, the request is not "please delete this", it is "my record is incomplete and therefore misleading, because it stops in 2019 and my care did not". That is a much harder request to refuse, and it is the one that changes what a stranger reads.

3. Add your statement of disagreement. This one they cannot really refuse.

If they will not amend, NHS England's guidance on amending records says you can

request for a comment or entry to be made in the record to show that you disagree with the content and what you think it should say.

The ICO calls the same thing good practice: "it is also good practice to place a note on your system indicating that the individual challenges the accuracy of the data and their reasons for doing so."

Keep it short and clinical. Two or three sentences. A calm paragraph is read. Six pages of anger confirms what the reader already thinks, which is unfair but it is what happens, and I would rather tell you than let you find out.

4. Ask for a reassessment.

This is the clinical route rather than the legal one, and it is the only one that can actually change the diagnosis rather than annotate it. There is no absolute legal right to a second opinion on the NHS in England. But the General Medical Council requires doctors to respect a patient's right to seek one, and in practice a reasonable request is rarely refused. You go back to your GP and ask to be referred for a reassessment, and you say why.

Worth knowing: diagnoses of personality disorder made in a crisis, in an inpatient setting, or during active substance use are the ones most open to challenge, because the clinical guidance itself says the picture in those circumstances is unreliable.

Where to send it, because this is where people lose a month

There is no single NHS. Your records sit with whoever created them, and each of those organisations is a separate data controller with its own duties.

• Your GP practice holds and controls your GP record. The practice is the controller. Not your ICB, not NHS England.
• The mental health trust holds and controls what its clinicians wrote. Different organisation, different request.
• If a diagnosis was made by the trust and then copied into your GP record, you may need to do both. The GP entry will not change on its own because the trust amended theirs.

Every one of them has a Data Protection Officer, and their contact details have to be published, usually on the privacy notice page of their website. Send it there and copy the practice manager or the PALS team.

On timing. They have one calendar month from the day the request arrives. They can extend by up to two further months if the request is complex, but they must tell you within the first month that they are doing so. And here is a detail almost nobody has caught up with: the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 introduced a "stop the clock" pause while an organisation seeks clarification, but that pause applies to subject access requests only. It does not apply to rectification. Your month is your month.

Get your records first

You cannot argue with a record you have not read. Ask for a copy before you do anything else. That is a separate request, a subject access request, it is free, and the same one month applies.

Ask for it in writing and be specific, because "my records" often produces a thin summary. Ask for the full record including clinical correspondence, referral letters, discharge summaries, assessment reports and free text notes, for the whole period.

Then read it in a good week, with someone else in the house if you can. This is genuinely hard to read. People find things in there they were never told to their face.

A letter you can copy

Send it by email to the Data Protection Officer, and keep the sent copy.

Dear Data Protection Officer,

Full name. Date of birth. NHS number. Address. Current GP practice.

I am making a request under Article 16 of the UK GDPR for rectification of my record, and under Article 18 for restriction of processing while its accuracy is being considered.

Factual inaccuracies. The following entries are incorrect or misleading as to matters of fact, and I ask that they be corrected: [list each one with its date, what the record says, and what is correct].

Incomplete record. My record contains a diagnosis of [term] recorded on [date] by [clinician or service]. It does not record [the later assessment, the discharge, the reformulation, the years since]. I enclose [document]. As it stands the record is incomplete and therefore misleading, because it presents a historical opinion as my current clinical position. I ask that the up to date findings be recorded and clearly marked as current, alongside the original entry.

If you do not amend. If you decide not to make these changes, please add the following statement of disagreement to my record so that it is visible to anyone who reads it: "[your two or three sentences]." Please also confirm your reasons in writing.

I understand you must respond within one calendar month, and that if you refuse you must tell me the reasons, my right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, and my ability to seek a judicial remedy.

Yours faithfully,

Notice what that letter does not do. It does not ask for deletion, it does not argue about whether you have the condition, and it does not read as a complaint. It reads as a person who knows the process. That is what gets it handled properly rather than passed around.

If they say no

Three steps, in order.

1. The organisation's own complaints process. In writing. Ask for it to be treated as a formal complaint, not informal resolution.
2. The Information Commissioner's Office. Free. You complain online, and you do not need a solicitor. The organisation is legally required to have told you about this right when it refused you.
3. A judicial remedy. Rare, and you would want advice first, but it exists and the fact that it exists is part of why the earlier steps get taken seriously.

Realistically, most of what you will get is steps 1 to 3 of the asks above rather than a wiped file. I would rather you go in knowing that. A record with the facts corrected, the current position recorded and your own statement in it is a genuinely different document from the one you have now, and it is achievable in a few months.

The thing worth saying at the end

There is a reason the diagnosis carries what it carries, and it is not you.

In 2018 a group including Mind, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and people with the diagnosis themselves published a consensus statement, Shining Lights in Dark Corners of People's Lives. Its opening position is that most of the people who wrote it would rather not use the term personality disorder at all. The professional bodies are, slowly, arguing about the label. You are living with the label while they argue.

So if you are doing this because you want to be believed the next time you go to a doctor: that is a good reason, and the paperwork above is worth doing. But the diagnosis on your file is not a verdict on your character, however much it feels like a permanent note about the sort of person you are. It is a description, written by one person, on one day, of a pattern that was making sense of pain. And the law is on your side about one thing at least, which is that your record is supposed to say where you are now, not only where you were then.

If what you actually need is a fresh look rather than a correction, here is the route to a BPD assessment on the NHS and what to say to get the referral.

Nothing here is medical advice, it's lived experience, meant to sit alongside real support, not replace it. If you're struggling, please see the support resources. If you're in crisis in the UK, call Samaritans free on 116 123, or dial 999 in an emergency.