How to Help Someone With This

Hello everyone --

I'm writing because a friend of mine, someone I met online several months ago, has told me of his background with this condition and I would like to understand better how to help him.

Briefly, he is a young man (early 20s), and as a teenager had a history of some self destructive behaviors and a suicide attempt, and was diagnosed in his late teens with HPD and schizophrenia. He was placed on medication at the time (anti-psychotic and anti-depressants) but has since taken himself off the medication. He seems generally stable without it, but it's not always easy to tell from a distance, as it were.

When I learned of his diagnosis I did some research relating to HPD, and while I'm certainly not a professional in these areas, the behaviors I have seen in him are closely linked to what is described in many of the descriptions of it, including the one listed in the sticky on this board. He has a constant, driving need for excitement, attention and fresh/novel scenarios; he seeks out multiple intimate relationships, and quickly sexualizes them, but has trouble understanding the concept of commitment and fidelity, even in theory (just doesn't make sense to him); he is gender ambiguous and bisexually flirtatious; he becomes extremely agitated, then depressed, when he is not given the level of attention he feels he needs; he craves the idea of being cared for by someone powerful, seeks to please powerful people to gain their attention and to bind with them, but again not in an exclusive way; he's extremely self-indulgent, not disciplined and self-focused, even when he is interacting with others (including me, which is often bizarre ... he discusses things with me and the conversation is interesting, but afterwards I realize that he's never really inquired much about me or what's happening in my life in any detail, yet we have dwelt on him in exceeding detail, etc.) ... and on and on.

I'm worried. My friend has basically reached a point in his life, and he is young, where he has stopped moving forward. It's like his life has stopped, or is frozen. I'm worried that with the obsessiveness he has for attention and the other HPD-related behaviors he seems to display, he will have a very hard time picking up focus and moving forward with his life. It's complicated by the fact that due to his personal situation, he is fairly isolated physically and tends to live a lot of his life on the internet, where he plays out many of these behaviors with people he meets there (like me, I suppose).

I want to help him move forward with his life. At first, I didn't think this would be a big issue in that effort, but the longer I have known him, and reflected on his behaviors and compared them with the available literature on HPD, I've come closer to believing that this is a critical part of any plan for helping him move forward in life. It troubles me that in what I have read there does seem to be much clear about prognosis for mitigating this, or managing it, in a life-enhancing way. What is the prognosis for this? How can I help my friend with this?

I'm very worried about him. Any advice you can offer (whether from clinical experience or personal knowledge) would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

what ever happened?