Personality disorders can be commonplace in today’s world. And often the terms of such disorders are tossed around lightly or as insults, which unfortunately causes stigma around seeking help. But there is help for those who have personality disorders, and our team of psychiatrists in Westside Cleveland are here to help.
Let’s take a look at a recent article published by Psychology Today on what makes some of the more common personality disorders distinct:
Paranoid: Vindictive and cold stand out as the two predominant themes. To a lesser extent, people with this personality disorder are also intrusive.
Schizoid: Coldness with a combination of social avoidance form the main traits for this personality disorder’s profile. It’s unlikely that schizoid individuals, according to the findings, will try to exploit you.
Schizotypal: Individuals with this personality disorder score high on all 3 of the above traits—namely, vindictive, cold, and avoidant. This profile fits with the disorder’s main criterion of odd, eccentric, and socially awkward behavior.
Antisocial: The extreme of the psychopathic personality, people with this disorder scored high on the traits of domineering, vindictive, and intrusive, with slightly high scores on coldness.
Borderline: A broad set of interpersonal traits appeared in the studies of people with borderline personality disorder, but the highest scores were on vindictive and intrusive. You might experience this sense when with someone who has this disorder, particularly when you feel that your boundaries are being violated and you’re being held accountable to an extreme degree for your behaviors and possible shortcomings.
Histrionic: This personality disorder is rarely diagnosed, and was almost eliminated in the new DSM. However, the interpersonal trait profile showed distinctly high scores on domineering and, particularly, intrusiveness. These individuals are unlikely, in contrast, to be cold and socially avoidant.
Narcissistic: Remarkably similar to antisocial in the interpersonal style model, individuals with this personality disorder were also high in domineering, vindictive, cold, and intrusive interpersonal style traits. These qualities are ones that you’ll almost invariably encounter when dealing with people who fit this diagnostic category.
Avoidant: As you might expect, people high in avoidant personality disorder are most likely to be high on coldness and social avoidance, but low on domineering and intrusiveness. As the avoidant personality disorder is so aptly described in terms of interpersonal relationships, it makes sense that the profile as revealed in research fits this pattern.
Dependent: The dependent personality disorder showed a pattern of scores marked by the highest scores on intrusiveness and lowest, as you might expect, on domineering. Individuals with this disorder, who have an excessive need to be taken care of, readily submit to others. Their second highest score was on vindictiveness but they were also high on exploitativeness.
Obsessive-compulsive: There were no stand-out, distinguishing, features of this personality disorder in the overall analysis which yielded a relatively flat profile across the 8 traits. This finding suggests that perhaps this personality disorder doesn’t involve as much interpersonal dysfunction as has been thought although individuals who fit the criteria of excessive perfectionism, inflexibility, and restricted expression of emotions may have trouble at work or in relationships. They may also, however, achieve higher status and wealth, as other research has indicated. There’s a trade-off then, when an individual has such an extreme work ethic that he or she may pay less attention to relationships.
To continue reading this article on Psychology Today, click here.