Personality Disorder Flashcards
- Enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself
- Inflexible and maladaptive personality traits across wide range of situations
- Cause significant distress and impairment in functioning in all areas of life
- Problems date back to childhood typically
- Estimated prevalence of 11% in the community
Personality disorder
How is Personality Disorder clustered?
A,B, C
What are 2 personality types in Cluster B Personality Disorder?
Borderline Personality Disorder
Antisocial Personality Disorder
- Instability of interpersonal relationships, self image, and emotions
- Very impulsive behaviors
- Common
- Most widely studied personality disorder
- History of childhood trauma is common but relationship to BPD is unclear
- Sexual/physical abuse, verbal abuse, neglect
- Early parental separation or loss
- “Abandonment issues”
Borderline Personality Disorder
Clinical Features:
- Interpersonal difficulties
- Tend to view others as all good or all bad
- Tend to misinterpret otherwise neutral events, words, or interactions as “negative”
- Affective instability (unstable mood)
- Impulsive behaviors
- Tend to have poorer cognitive function
- Suicidal threats, gestures, and attempts more common
Borderline Personality Disorder
- Pattern of socially irresponsible, exploitative, and guiltless behavior
- Lifelong disorder
- Studies in US cities estimate about 2-4% prevalence in men, 0.5-1% prevalence in women
Antisocial Personality Disorder
Clinical Manifestations:
- Wide range of symptoms, with criminality being common:
- Disregard for and violation of rights of others, history of arrests, poor school history, alcohol abuse, marital difficulties, unstable work history, promiscuous behavior, social isolation, pathological lying, drug abuse, suicide attempts, aliases, lack of remorse.
Antisocial Personality Disorder
Social treatment for Personality Disorder
- Social and therapeutic environments such as day hospitals, halfway houses, and self-help communities utilize peer pressures to modify the self-destructive behavior.
- Patients often have failed to profit from experience, and difficulties with authority impair the learning experience.
- The use of peer relationships and the repetition possible in a structured setting of a helpful community enhance the behavioral treatment opportunities and increase learning
Behavior management for Personality Disorder
- Operant conditioning emphasizes the recognition of acceptable behavior and its reinforcement with praise or other tangible rewards.
- Aversive conditioning usually involves punishment, although this can range from a mild rebuke to some specific punitive responses such as deprivation of privileges.
Psychological treatment of Personality Disorder
- Psychological intervention is best conducted in group settings.
- Group therapy is helpful when specific interpersonal behavior needs to be improved.
- Individual therapy should initially be supportive, (i.e. helping the patient to re-stabilize and mobilize coping mechanisms).
- If the individual has the ability to observe his or her own behavior, a longer-term and more introspective therapy may be warranted.
Medical treatment for Personality Disorder
- Hospitalization is indicated in the case of serious suicidal or homicidal danger.
- In most cases, treatment can be accomplished in the day treatment center or self-help community.
- Antipsychotics may be required for short periods in conditions that have temporarily decompensated into transient psychosis.
- Haloperidol (Haldol), 2-5 mg orally every 3-4 hours until the patient has quieted down and is regaining contact with reality
