Personality Disorders
Sexual Fetishism: The Object is Desire
There are three types of fetishes.
The Depressive Patient - A Case Study
How does he react to good news? - I ask him - What if I had just informed him that he has won a million bucks in a game of chance? He contemplates this improbable good fortune and then shrugs: "It wouldn't make much of a difference, Doc."
Victim reaction to Abuse by Narcissists and Psychopaths
Constant feelings of guilt, self-reproach, self-recrimination and, thus, self-punishment.
Psychosis, Delusions, and Personality Disorders
Psychotics are fully aware of events and people "out there". They cannot, however separate data and experiences originating in the outside world from information generated by internal mental processes.
Empathy and Personality Disorders
Narcissists and psychopaths lack empathy. It is safe to say that the same applies to patients with other personality disorders, notably the Schizoid, Paranoid, Borderline, Avoidant, and Schizotypal.
The Sadistic Patient - A Case Study
Why did he force the mother to dump her by now limp and profusely bleeding infant daughter outside the door?
The Negativistic (Passive-Aggressive) Patient - A Case Study
Mike is attending therapy at the request of his wife. She complains that he is "emotionally absent" and aloof. Mike shrugs.
The Masochistic Patient - A Case Study
Sam feels constantly manipulated by people who pretend to care about him. "Love" is a code word for subjugation on the one hand and obsequiousness on the other hand. Only weak people develop such dependence.
Misdiagnosing Personality Disorders as Bipolar I Disorder
The Bipolar Disorder got its name because the mania is followed by - usually protracted - depressive attacks.
Misdiagnosing Personality Disorders as Asperger's Disorder
The Asperger's Disorder patient is self-centered and engrossed in a narrow range of interests and activities.
Misdiagnosing Personality Disorders as Anxiety Disorders
Patients with personality disorders are often anxious. Narcissists, for instance, are preoccupied with the need to secure social approval or attention (Narcissistic Supply).
Sex and Personality Disorders
The sexuality of patients with personality disorders is thwarted and stunted.
Personality Disorders as an Insanity Defense
All "mentally-ill" people operate within a (usually coherent) worldview, with consistent internal logic, and rules of right and wrong (ethics). The problem is that these private constructs rarely conform to the way most people perceive the world.
The Hateful Patient - Difficult Patients in Psychotherapy
Groves described four types of such undesirable patients: "dependent clingers" (codependents), "entitled demanders" (narcissists and borderlines), "manipulative help rejectors" (typically psychopaths and paranoids, borderlines and negativistic passive-aggressives), and "self-destructive deniers" (schizoids and schizotypals, for instance, or histrionics and borderlines).
Body Language and Personality Disorders
The psychopath is likely to be expansive (dominate and invade other people's personal territory), swaggering, and vaguely menacing.
Changes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) IV
The DSM-IV considerably expanded and updated the introductory text while emphasizing dimensional models of personality and listing for the first time some of the dimensions espoused by the more important models.
Brain and Personality
The DSM is clear: the brain-injured may acquire traits and behaviors typical of certain personality disorders but head trauma never results in a full-fledged personality disorder.
Therapy and Treatment of Personality Disorders
Disillusioned, most therapists now adhere to one or more of three modern methods: Brief Therapies, the Common Factors approach, and Eclectic techniques.
Negativistic (Passive-Aggressive) Personality Disorder
Some people are perennial pessimists and have "negative energy" and negativistic attitudes ("good things don't last", "it doesn't pay to be good", "the future is behind me").
Sadistic Personality Disorder
The Sadistic Personality disorder is characterized by a pattern of gratuitous cruelty, aggression, and demeaning behaviors which indicate the existence of deep-seated contempt for other people and an utter lack of empathy.
Not Otherwise Specified (NOS) Personality Disorder
The NOS diagnosis is a laundry list of all personality-related dysfunctions, signs, symptoms, and complaints that do not fit a specific personality disorder.
Masochistic Personality Disorder
The masochist has been taught from an early age to hate herself and consider herself unworthy of love and worthless as a person.
Genetics and Personality Disorders
To identify the role of heredity, researchers have resorted to a few tactics: they studied the occurrence of similar psychopathologies in identical twins separated at birth, in twins and siblings who grew up in the same environment, and in relatives of patients (usually across a few generations of an extended family).
Gender Bias in Diagnosing Personality Disorders
Maybe personality disorders are not objective clinical entities, but culture-bound syndromes.
Five Factor Personality Model
The Model consists of five high level dimensions. These are comprised of lower level facet traits.
Factor Models of Personality
The Livesley model dispenses with openness to experience as an evaluative dimension. The authors regard it of limited use in describing and diagnosing personality disorders.
Depressive Personality Disorder
The Depressive's self-image is distorted: he holds himself to be worthless, inadequate, a loser.
Structured Interviews
The feature that is unique to the SCID-II is that it can be administered to third parties (a spouse, an informant, a colleague) and still yield a strong diagnostic indication.
The History of Personality Disorders
Well into the eighteenth century, the only types of mental illness - then collectively known as "delirium" or "mania" - were depression (melancholy), psychoses, and delusions.
Differential Diagnoses of Personality Disorders
It is not easy to tell when the patient's anxiety and depression are autonomous and neurotic problems or symptoms of a personality disorder. These should, therefore, be ruled out as differential diagnostic criteria.
Axes of Personality Disorders
Personality disorders are like tips of icebergs. They rest on a foundation of causes and effects, interactions and events, emotions and cognitions, functions and dysfunctions that together form the patient and make him or her what s/he is.
Cluster B Personality Disorders
In the DSM, there are 10 distinct personality disorders (Paranoid, Schizoid, Schizotypal, Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic, Avoidant, Dependent, Obsessive-compulsive) and one catchall category, Personality Disorders NOS (Not Otherwise Specified).
Common Features of Personality Disorders
Patients suffering from personality disorders have these things in common.
Diagnosing Personality Disorders
No two people are alike. Even subjects suffering from the same personality disorder can be worlds apart as far as their backgrounds, actual conduct, inner world, character, social interactions, and temperament go.
The Construct of Normal Personality
What constitutes normal behavior? Who is normal?
What is Personality?
Laymen often confuse and confute "personality" with "character" and "temperament".
Anger - The Common Source of Personality Disorders
Anger is a compounded phenomenon. It has dispositional properties, expressive and motivational components, situational and individual variations, cognitive and excitatory interdependent manifestations and psychophysiological (especially neuroendocrine) aspects.
Personality Disorders
Many of the symptoms and signs that you describe apply to other personality disorders as well (example: the histrionic personality disorder or the borderline personality disorder). Are we to think that all personality disorders are interrelated?
Eating Disorders and Personality Disorders
Patients suffering from eating disorders binge on food and sometimes are both Anorectic and Bulimic. This is an impulsive behaviour as defined by the DSM (particularly in the case of BPD and to a lesser extent of Cluster B disorders in general). Some patients adopt these disorders as their way of self mutilating. We may be witnessing a convergence of two criteria: self-mutilation and an impulsive (rather, compulsive or ritualistic) behaviour.
Constant feelings of guilt, self-reproach, self-recrimination and, thus, self-punishment.
Psychosis, Delusions, and Personality Disorders
Psychotics are fully aware of events and people "out there". They cannot, however separate data and experiences originating in the outside world from information generated by internal mental processes.
Empathy and Personality Disorders
Narcissists and psychopaths lack empathy. It is safe to say that the same applies to patients with other personality disorders, notably the Schizoid, Paranoid, Borderline, Avoidant, and Schizotypal.
The Sadistic Patient - A Case Study
Why did he force the mother to dump her by now limp and profusely bleeding infant daughter outside the door?
The Negativistic (Passive-Aggressive) Patient - A Case Study
Mike is attending therapy at the request of his wife. She complains that he is "emotionally absent" and aloof. Mike shrugs.
The Masochistic Patient - A Case Study
Sam feels constantly manipulated by people who pretend to care about him. "Love" is a code word for subjugation on the one hand and obsequiousness on the other hand. Only weak people develop such dependence.
Misdiagnosing Personality Disorders as Bipolar I Disorder
The Bipolar Disorder got its name because the mania is followed by - usually protracted - depressive attacks.
Misdiagnosing Personality Disorders as Asperger's Disorder
The Asperger's Disorder patient is self-centered and engrossed in a narrow range of interests and activities.
Misdiagnosing Personality Disorders as Anxiety Disorders
Patients with personality disorders are often anxious. Narcissists, for instance, are preoccupied with the need to secure social approval or attention (Narcissistic Supply).
Sex and Personality Disorders
The sexuality of patients with personality disorders is thwarted and stunted.
Personality Disorders as an Insanity Defense
All "mentally-ill" people operate within a (usually coherent) worldview, with consistent internal logic, and rules of right and wrong (ethics). The problem is that these private constructs rarely conform to the way most people perceive the world.
The Hateful Patient - Difficult Patients in Psychotherapy
Groves described four types of such undesirable patients: "dependent clingers" (codependents), "entitled demanders" (narcissists and borderlines), "manipulative help rejectors" (typically psychopaths and paranoids, borderlines and negativistic passive-aggressives), and "self-destructive deniers" (schizoids and schizotypals, for instance, or histrionics and borderlines).
Body Language and Personality Disorders
The psychopath is likely to be expansive (dominate and invade other people's personal territory), swaggering, and vaguely menacing.
Changes in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) IV
The DSM-IV considerably expanded and updated the introductory text while emphasizing dimensional models of personality and listing for the first time some of the dimensions espoused by the more important models.
Brain and Personality
The DSM is clear: the brain-injured may acquire traits and behaviors typical of certain personality disorders but head trauma never results in a full-fledged personality disorder.
Therapy and Treatment of Personality Disorders
Disillusioned, most therapists now adhere to one or more of three modern methods: Brief Therapies, the Common Factors approach, and Eclectic techniques.
Negativistic (Passive-Aggressive) Personality Disorder
Some people are perennial pessimists and have "negative energy" and negativistic attitudes ("good things don't last", "it doesn't pay to be good", "the future is behind me").
Sadistic Personality Disorder
The Sadistic Personality disorder is characterized by a pattern of gratuitous cruelty, aggression, and demeaning behaviors which indicate the existence of deep-seated contempt for other people and an utter lack of empathy.
Not Otherwise Specified (NOS) Personality Disorder
The NOS diagnosis is a laundry list of all personality-related dysfunctions, signs, symptoms, and complaints that do not fit a specific personality disorder.
Masochistic Personality Disorder
The masochist has been taught from an early age to hate herself and consider herself unworthy of love and worthless as a person.
Genetics and Personality Disorders
To identify the role of heredity, researchers have resorted to a few tactics: they studied the occurrence of similar psychopathologies in identical twins separated at birth, in twins and siblings who grew up in the same environment, and in relatives of patients (usually across a few generations of an extended family).
Gender Bias in Diagnosing Personality Disorders
Maybe personality disorders are not objective clinical entities, but culture-bound syndromes.
Five Factor Personality Model
The Model consists of five high level dimensions. These are comprised of lower level facet traits.
Factor Models of Personality
The Livesley model dispenses with openness to experience as an evaluative dimension. The authors regard it of limited use in describing and diagnosing personality disorders.
Depressive Personality Disorder
The Depressive's self-image is distorted: he holds himself to be worthless, inadequate, a loser.
Structured Interviews
The feature that is unique to the SCID-II is that it can be administered to third parties (a spouse, an informant, a colleague) and still yield a strong diagnostic indication.
The History of Personality Disorders
Well into the eighteenth century, the only types of mental illness - then collectively known as "delirium" or "mania" - were depression (melancholy), psychoses, and delusions.
Differential Diagnoses of Personality Disorders
It is not easy to tell when the patient's anxiety and depression are autonomous and neurotic problems or symptoms of a personality disorder. These should, therefore, be ruled out as differential diagnostic criteria.
Axes of Personality Disorders
Personality disorders are like tips of icebergs. They rest on a foundation of causes and effects, interactions and events, emotions and cognitions, functions and dysfunctions that together form the patient and make him or her what s/he is.
Cluster B Personality Disorders
In the DSM, there are 10 distinct personality disorders (Paranoid, Schizoid, Schizotypal, Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, Narcissistic, Avoidant, Dependent, Obsessive-compulsive) and one catchall category, Personality Disorders NOS (Not Otherwise Specified).
Common Features of Personality Disorders
Patients suffering from personality disorders have these things in common.
Diagnosing Personality Disorders
No two people are alike. Even subjects suffering from the same personality disorder can be worlds apart as far as their backgrounds, actual conduct, inner world, character, social interactions, and temperament go.
The Construct of Normal Personality
What constitutes normal behavior? Who is normal?
What is Personality?
Laymen often confuse and confute "personality" with "character" and "temperament".
Anger - The Common Source of Personality Disorders
Anger is a compounded phenomenon. It has dispositional properties, expressive and motivational components, situational and individual variations, cognitive and excitatory interdependent manifestations and psychophysiological (especially neuroendocrine) aspects.
Personality Disorders
Many of the symptoms and signs that you describe apply to other personality disorders as well (example: the histrionic personality disorder or the borderline personality disorder). Are we to think that all personality disorders are interrelated?
Eating Disorders and Personality Disorders
Patients suffering from eating disorders binge on food and sometimes are both Anorectic and Bulimic. This is an impulsive behaviour as defined by the DSM (particularly in the case of BPD and to a lesser extent of Cluster B disorders in general). Some patients adopt these disorders as their way of self mutilating. We may be witnessing a convergence of two criteria: self-mutilation and an impulsive (rather, compulsive or ritualistic) behaviour.