Personality Disorders: Myths and Facts

Psychology has spent decades talking about the different Personality types and how they influence our way of interpreting the world.

We can find two ways of dealing with this issue, on the one hand professionals who describe types of normal personality and their predisposition to different physical diseases, such as the famous type A and type B personality, the former prone to cardiovascular diseases and stress. And the other way is to treat them like personality disorders.

Myths and facts about personality disorders

But today we want to talk about this second point: personality disorders. Personality disorders are defined as a permanent and inflexible pattern of behavior that is far from expectations based on the age and culture of the person. That is, someone who does not behave as expected and who interprets the world in a different way. Over the years, some diagnostic categories that have had a lot of echo in our culture have disappeared, such as Multiple personality disorder, which has given rise to scripts for films as well known as the

Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but that nowadays it does not appear as such in the diagnostic manuals (DSM-V).

Were these disorders myths or realities? Its existence or not in the past, the scientific basis that creates the consensus that a psychopathology It has a set of characteristics of its own, it is something difficult to assess. Currently, this diagnostic category has disappeared and we could see similar features in the Dissociative Personality Disorder. What is really interesting about this topic is to observe to what extent the sociocultural changes that take place over the centuries they correlate with clinical changes, changes in symptoms and mental disorders.

Personality Disorders: Truths and Lies

There are personality disorders that disappear from the manuals and others that arise and become fashionable, as is the case borderline personality disorder, one of the most diagnosed in recent times and one of the most difficult to try. They are impulsive and unstable people who present great difficulties in their interpersonal relationships.

It is curious that most of the most diagnosed pathologies of the 21st century have as a common denominator the impulsiveness. Such is the case of ADHD, the TLP, etc.

Returning to the personality, we could say that there is a continuum that travels from the disorder of the personality to mental illness, in many of the personality disorders there is a mental disorder in the opposite pole:

• Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder - Obsessive compulsive disorder
• Schizotypal Personality Disorder - Schizophrenia
• Paranoid Personality Disorder - Paranoid schizophrenia

It seems that they are less serious manifestations of these pathologies.

Antisocial Disorder in the cinema

Another personality disorder that has been very popular in the cinema and that has led to multiple films in which any of the characters has this characteristic has been the antisocial disorder (or the psychopath, as it is popularly known). Movies like The silence of the lambs (1991), who show us psychopath as someone very smart and special, who is also a serial killer. There are other films that have dealt with these issues, as you can see in the article "Movies about psychology and mental disordersBut what is true and false in all this?

The reality is that people who suffer antisocial disorder they are often in trouble with the law because of their tendency to commit minor criminal acts, which are far removed from serial killings. There is a certain contempt and a violation of the rights of others for their own benefit and without any feeling of guilt. But killing others is not usually their goal, it is therefore a misattribution: people with antisocial disorder are not potential murderers.

We have also seen in the cinema some characters with obsessive-compulsive disorder, this time quite faithful to the typical symptoms of this disorder. At Better... Impossible(1997), Jack Nicholson plays a romance novel writer with a good arsenal of compulsions that he has to deal with on a daily basis. Although the obsessive-compulsive personality disorder differs somewhat from disorderobsessive compulsive (OCD) is still a continuum in terms of severity and many of the symptoms are common: pattern of concern for order, perfectionism And control. This type of personality disorder has been portrayed in thousands of tabletop movies, with people obsessed with it. work, for order and perfectionism, that they need to control their entire environment and that suffocate those who have their around.

Recapping: towards a calm view of personality disorders

But the reality of this disorder goes further, because at its most serious extreme it can block the person in their daily life, due to their marked slowness in carrying out tasks. To do a perfect thing you must dedicate a lot of time to it, so much so that sometimes it is unfeasible to be able to finish it in a reasonable period of time, and this causes that many times do not start an activity because they know that they cannot do it as they want, thus ceasing to do many things and giving the impression that they are unmotivated or are loafers. Nothing is further from reality. There are many personality disorders that are reflected in our cinema, but the reality is that they are disorders that are difficult to treat and that greatly affect the day-to-day life of the person who suffers.

Surely over the years, we will see some disorders that now exist disappear and new ones appear, because personality is not just geneticIt is also the result of a social, cultural context; it emerges from our beliefs and our interpersonal relationships… and consequently the catalog of disorders will hardly become a fixed image.

What personality disorders will define the century XXI?