Ten things to know about PD (Personality Disorder)

1 Personality disorder is not an illness you catch or are born with, but is a way of being you develop while growing up. It means some aspects of your personality cause repeated problems in life particularly with relationships. The troubled relationships can be with family and friends, work and care services and fre!uently with all of them. 2 There are 10 diagnosable personality disorders. Many clinicians and service users do not find these categories useful, as most people with severe problems have a mixture of them, and the exact diagnosis does not help in deciding on treatments. Many professionals would rather use less perjorative labels such as complex !T"#$ or attachment disorder$, or scales to show how everybody is on a scale from mild to severe% everybody has a personality and nobody is perfect. 3 These "# are often divided into $ clusters, %, & ' () cluster %) odd or eccentric *paranoid, schi+oid, schi+otypal, cluster &) dramatic emotional or erratic *histrionic, narcissistic, antisocial, borderline, cluster () an-ious and fearful *obsessive-compulsive, avoidant and dependent,

4 They are very common some research says up to 1&' of the general population, ()' of *! consultations in deprived urban areas, most people in prisons, at least half of homeless people and between a third and two thirds of inpatients in psychiatric hospitals. +e generally wor, on a figure of about -' who would benefit from help. 5 People diagnosable with personality disorder are more likely to have diagnosable .mental illnesses/ as well for e-ample, depression, eating disorders and panic attacks are very commonly found with P0, and so re addictions including .poly-drug/ abuse. 6 The ones who are unhappiest with their personality and see, help are mostly those who in cluster .% borderline, histrionic and narcissistic. /0ntisocial1 also in cluster . was previously ,nown as /psychopathic1 and is very high in prison populations. Those in cluster 0 /live in their own world1, and do not often see, help from services, although those diagnosable with paranoid !# may be very suspicious of services and ma,e complaints. This is also true of obsessive2compulsives in cluster 3. The others in cluster 3 are often too fearful and shy to see, help. 7 1p until 2##2, doctors and nurses were taught not to diagnose personality disorder unless they had no other option. 3hen people were diagnosed with it, they were usually written off and e-cluded from services, often in hurtful ways. This is why it has previously been called % diagnosis of e-clusion 8 The causes are a combination of what sort of brain you inherit, and what experience you have in early life. 4xperts differ in deciding how much of each, but everybody agrees it is a combination. 9 3hatever the cause, it is now accepted that unsympathetic treatment can make people worse. This has been called the cycle of re4ection, and it can happen anywhere that people diagnosable with P0 relate to others. There are new training programmes to help prevent this. 10 +ithout ,nowing it or doing it deliberately, people diagnosable with !# can stir up emotions in others. !rofessionals must have ways of dealing with this, usually through suitable supervision and chance to /offload1. 5n some treatments, understanding what is happening is part of the therapy. 6ther staff coming across people with these problems also need ways to deal with it, so that they are not left with bad feelings 7for example, angry, hostile or useless8 that are not really /their own1.