PERSONALITY DISORDERS

At present American psychiatry recognizes ten personality disorders; they are grouped into three groups, ABC, with group A considered the most severe; group B is considered as folks lacking social conscience; group C is considered minor (they are the neurosis).

Personality disorders do not prevent people from working; indeed, many of the top persons in society have personality disorders.

Group A are: paranoid, schizoid and schizotypal personality disorder; group B are narcissistic, histrionic, borderline and anti-social personality disorders; group C are avoidant, dependent, obsessive- compulsive and passive aggressive personality disorders.

Briefly, the paranoid person feels inadequate and compensates with a false grandiose self-concept; he wants every person to see him as he wants to seem, important and powerful; he feels angry at those who see him as not powerful; he is suspicious and fears been demeaned; he does not trust anyone. He is very rational and argumentative and wants to win all arguments so as to seem superior; he suffers from lack of human understanding hence is almost always fighting with people around him (generally he accuses people of doing harmful things to him that they did not do). Such persons do well in the police, law and investigative professions.

The schizoid person does not have a need to socialize with people or have friends; he generally keeps to his self. Such persons do well in science and engineering.

The schizotypal person has eccentric beliefs, such as believe that he has extra sensory abilities. People see him as odd. The new age movement is full of persons who claim to have psychic abilities.

The narcissistic personality believes that he is special and, as such, admirable; he expects all people to see him as their superior even though folks may see him as inferior (consider Donald Trump who believes that he is special whereas to many people he is a buffoon); the narcissist often has low social conscience and uses people to get what he wants and discards them like rubbish. He is usually very successful in society and marries pretty women as parlor trophies, not out of love (he may not even know what love is).

The histrionic person seeks to be the center of attention; she is the drama queen. This diagnosis is generally given to women; in my judgement, it is the same as narcissistic personality disorder. Many actresses and sporting figures have this personality type.

The borderline person is confused all around; this person is not sure that she is a man or woman (these days many of them are homosexuals, lesbians). It will take many books to talk about this personality disorder. Many of them are our insufferable female professors, the confused feminists of this world who want to be freed from male control yet cannot do anything without male attention.

The antisocial personality has low social conscience; he steals, even kills people without feeling guilty and remorseful. These are the criminals of this world (they are also found in business and the military).

The avoidant person is the shy person who feels that as he is he is not good enough and that if other people get to see him as he is that they would reject him; to avoid rejection he keeps to his self and in social isolation nurses a false big self. Many writers have this type of personality.

The dependent person feels powerless and thinks that if only he pleases other people that they would like him and take care of him; of course, people do not take care of him. Most human beings are dependent followers of their work bosses and religious and political leaders.

The obsessive-compulsive person wants to seem perfect and ideal; he is driven to do things that makes him seem perfect in his and other people’s eyes; he uses ideal standards to judge him and people and paralyze him from doing anything. Many geniuses (those with IQ over 140) have this type of personality.

The passive aggressive person so wants other people to like him that he is afraid of asserting his wishes because to do so brings about other people’s rejection of him. Generally, he gets pushed around and occasionally blows up in anger at being pushed around by people. This is the over socialized human being and can be found in all professions.

Obviously I did not provide thorough descriptions of the various personality disorders. If you have one or more of them read up on them.

Regardless of the personality disorder, it is a product of inappropriate thinking patterns and the correction of personality disorders is not from medication but in changing the persons thinking patterns.

Aaron Beck, in his book on Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Personality Disorders, delineated an excellent to approach to healing personality disorders.

For our present purposes the salient point is that changing the individual’s mental processes is how to change his personality disorder.

Personality disorder is not a mental disorder; all of us have personalities; personality is the individual’s habitual pattern of behaving, responding to his environment, especially to people.