Personality Disorders, It's Not What You Think

Twenty years ago, very few people had heard of personality disorders. Today there are many relationship websites flippantly labeling people with personality disorders - psychopaths, malignant narcissists, "emotional vampires", "borderlines". What is a balanced perspective on all of this?

What is personality? Carl G. Jung's theory of psychological types [Jung, 1971] is the principle behind what we have all come to know as personality types. Jung created three scales and asserted that people either score high or low on each. Isabel Briggs Myers, a researcher and practitioner of Jung’s theory, added a fourth scale [Briggs Myers, 1980] when developing the Myers–Briggs Personality Type Indicator - a tool used by organizations around the world to help people understand and work through the inherent conflict that develops when certain personality types interact.

Lifelong thinking pattern: Personality types are not about a brief period or phase in someones life. They are permanent thought patterns that have their onset in adolescence or childhood. Outward behaviors can vary but the internal thought patterns are always at work.

What are personality disorders? Personality disorder thought patterns are often described as personality traits with maladaptive "twists" that co-exist with normal personality traits. The maladaptive and normal traits imperceptibly flow back and forth into one another. The maladaptive variants and difficult outward behavior are more common in times of stress.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) defines a personality disorder as a pattern of inner experiences and behaviors that deviate significantly from the expectations of an individual's culture. These patterns create significant emotional distress and/or life impairment (e.g., unstable relationships, employment, addictions, risky behavior).

A continuum between normal and "disordered": Many self-help books and web articles focus on the most severe conditions and the most hopeless cases, yet many problem family members are not impaired enough to receive a full clinical diagnosis. People in this category are difficult personality types -- but not necessarily the hopeless, worst-case scenarios hyped on many social media websites. They can have a shorter path to recovery, especially if treated early in life.

Professor Nina W. Brown, EdD, LPC, says "personality disorders are not an all or nothing thing - in fact there is a large spectrum of severity". Brown points out that short of those with a the full-blown diagnosis or in catastrophic life crisis - what many of us are experiencing are individuals operating with only subtle shades of "destructive" personality disorder traits.

Mental illnesses are not rare: According to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, 22% to 23% of the U.S. adult population have diagnosable mental disorders. Three percent (3%) have both mental and addictive disorders; and six percent have addictive disorders alone. The prevalence for personality disorders is 9.1%. (Regier et al., 1993b; Kessler et al., 1998). It behooves all of us to better recognize and know how to effectively deal with mental illness.

Esoteric area in psychiatry: The science of personality disorders is a very specialized field; most general physicians and family therapists aren't well versed in this area of mental health. This area of psychology has a lot of nuance and some of the concepts are not at all intuitive. One goal of BPDFamily.com is to help the public "navigate these murky waters" by providing intelligent and balanced editorial and pragmatic relationship tools.

Labels were created for constructive purposes: These disease states were not characterized as a means to label and isolate society's outcasts, but rather to profile personality variants so that therapists can treat them and families could come to understand a loved-one and learn to respond in constructive and healthy ways.

Last modified: January 4, 2021