A Concise Guide to Personality Disorders

摘要

Clinicians tend to try to avoid treating people with personality disorders, as they present some serious difficulties. A major problem is that of definition. We, all of us, have personality traits which differ in varying degrees from the "normal" or "average" and which inevitably grate on other people or cause us personal difficulties when interacting with other people. This is all part of being human. The decision as to where to draw the dividing line between, say, being a rather selfish person and being someone with antisocial personality disorder has to be fairly arbitrary. The diagnostic criteria in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic & Statistical Manual 5th edition (DSM-5) are even more unsatisfactory than those in the rest of that rather unsatisfactory work (see our review of DSM-5 (RR 2014/102), but we have to put up with them. Conceptually, it is difficult to grasp the idea of a personality disorder. You can be a person who happens to have cancer, you can even be a person who happens to have schizophrenia, but your personality is you.