Personality Disorder Flashcards
What is the definition of personality disorder?
Lifelong, persistent, deeply ingrained maladaptive behaviour that characterises an individual and deviates markedly from culturally expected ‘normal’ range.
What is the aetiology behind personality disorders?
Developmental conditions that appear in childhood or adolescence and continue into adult life
Genetic and environmental influences
Not secondary to other psychiatric disorder or brain disease
What are the cluster ‘A’ personality disorders?
Odd and eccentric:
- Paranoid
- Schizoid
- Schizotypal
What is the diagnostic criteria for paranoid personality disorder?
Any 4 of:
- Excessive sensitivity to setbacks
- Tendency to bear grudges
- Suspiciousness and tendency to misconstrue the neutral/friendly actions of others as hostile/contemptuous
- A combative and tenacious sense of personal rights out of keeping with the actual situation
- Recurrent suspicions, without justification, regarding sexual fidelity of partner
- Persistent self-referential attitude, associated particularly with excessive self-importance
- Preoccupation with unsubstantiated ‘conspiratorial’ explanations of events in the world at large
What is the diagnostic criteria for schizoid personality disorder?
Any 4 of:
- Few, if any, activities provide pleasure
- Emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened affectivity
- Limited capacity to express warm feelings for others as well as anger
- Indifferent to either praise or criticism of others
- Little interest in having sexual experiences with another person
- Almost always chooses solitary activities
- Excessive preoccupation with fantasy/introspection
- Neither desires, nor has, any close friends or confiding relationships (or only one)
- Marked insensitivity to prevailing social norms/conventions
What is the diagnostic criteria for schizotypal personality disorder?
Any 5 of:
- Ideas of reference
- Odd beliefs or magical thinking, inconsistent with subcultural norms
- Unusual perceptual experiences, including bodily illusions
- Odd thinking and speech
- Suspiciousness or paranoid ideation
- Inappropriate or constricted affect
- Behaviour or appearance that is odd, eccentric, or peculiar
- Lack of close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives
- Excessive social anxiety that does not diminish with familiarity and tends to be associated with paranoid fears rather than negative judgements about self
What are the cluster ‘B’ personality disorders?
Dramatic and emotional
- Antisocial
- Emotionally unstable
- Histrionic
- Narcissistic
What is the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder?
Any 3 of:
- Callous unconcern for feelings of others
- Irresponsible and disregard for social norms/rules/obligations
- Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, though no difficulty establishing them
- Very low tolerance to frustration and low threshold for aggression/violence
- Incapacity to experience guilt, or to profit from adverse experience, particularly punishment
- Marked proneness to blame others
What is the diagnostic criteria for emotionally unstable personality disorder?
Impulsive - 3 of:
- Tendency to act unexpectedly, without consideration of consequences
- Quarrelsome behaviour and conflicts with others, especially when impulsive acts are thwarted/criticised
- Liability to outbursts of anger or violence
- Difficulty in maintaining any course of action that offers no immediate reward
- Unstable mood
Borderline - 2 from impulsive plus 2 of:
- Disturbances in and uncertainty about self-image, aims and internal preferences (including sexual)
- Intense and unstable relationships, often leading to emotional crises
- Excessive efforts to avoid abandonment
- Recurrent threats or acts of self-harm
- Chronic feelings of emptiness
What is the diagnostic criteria for histrionic personality disorder?
Any 4 of:
- Self-dramatization, theatricality, or exaggerated expression of emotions
- Suggestible
- Shallow/labile affectivity
- Continually seeks excitement and activities in which the subject is the centre of attention
- Inappropriately seductive in appearance or behaviour
- Overly concerned with physical attractiveness
What is the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality disorder?
Any 5 of:
- Grandiose logic of self-importance
- Fixation with fantasies of infinite success, control, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love
- Credence that he/she is extraordinary and exceptional and can only be understood by, or should connect with other extraordinary or important people or institutions
- Desire for unwarranted admiration
- Sense of entitlement
- Interpersonally oppressive behaviour
- No form of empathy
- Resentment of others or a conviction that others are resentful of him or her
- Display of egotistical and conceited behaviours or attitudes
What are the cluster ‘C’ personality disorders?
Anxious and avoidant:
- Anankastic
- Anxious
- Dependent
What is the diagnostic criteria for anankastic personality disorder?
Any 4 of:
- Excessive doubt and caution
- Preoccupation with details, rules, lists, order, organisation or schedule
- Perfectionism that interferes with task completion
- Excessive conscientiousness
- Undue preoccupation with productivity to the exclusion of pleasure/interpersonal relationships
- Pedantic, excessive adherence to social conventions
- Rigidity and stubbornness
- Unreasonable insistence that others submit to exactly his or her way of doing things, or unreasonable reluctance to allow others to do things
What is the diagnostic criteria for anxious personality disorder?
Any 4 of:
- Persistent pervasive feelings of tension/apprehension
- Belief that oneself is socially inept/inferior to others
- Excessive preoccupation about being criticised/rejected in social situations
- Unwillingness to get involved with people unless certain of being liked
- Restrictions in lifestyle because of need of security
- Avoidance of social or occupational activities that involve significant interpersonal contact, because of fear of criticism, disapproval, or rejection
What is the diagnostic criteria for dependent personality disorder?
Any 4 of:
- Encouraging or allowing others to make most of one’s important life decisions
- Subordination of one’s own needs to those of others on whom one is dependent, and undue compliance with their wishes
- Unwillingness to make even reasonable demands on the people one depends on
- Feeling uncomfortable or helpless when alone, because of exaggerated fears of inability to care for oneself
- Limited capacity to make everyday decisions without an excessive amount of advice/reassurance
