Comprehensive guide and checklist of mental and personality disorders
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia involves a group of mental disorders with characteristic symptoms that involve thinking, emotions, drive, and behavior. Another characteristic of this condition is withdrawal from reality of the external world into a private personal world. Unconcealed episodes of the illness vary widely in duration. In some cases wherein the illness is prolonged, the personality of the schizophrenic may deteriorate and the emotion and drive may be blunted. This will result to tragic failures in the interpersonal relationships and material achievements of the person with the condition. Although there are no specific types of premorbid personality that are seen in all cases, many individuals who have schizophrenia show such common traits as sensitivity, shyness and unsociability, lack of affect, and paranoid attitudes. These traits are often referred to as schizoid personalty.
Schizophrenia has a worldwide distribution, and there are no noticeable differences in incidence in variations in culture. There is a high prevalence of schizophrenia in lower socioeconomic classes and this has been mainly attributed to social disorganization and resulting stresses.
Conduct disorder
Conduct disorder refers to a group of repetitive behavior and emotional problems in young people wherein the rights of others or the social norms are disregarded or disturbed. Children and adolescents who have this disorder have a difficulty following rules and behaving in a way that is acceptable in society. the characteristic manifestations of individuals with this disorder include over-aggressiveness, bullying, physical aggression, cruel behavior, destructive behavior, lying, truancy, vandalism, and stealing. Other people view these children as delinquent, not thinking that this kind of behavior is a mental disorder. A child who has conduct disorder can be a result of many contributing factors, including brain damage, genetic vulnerability, abuse as a child, academic failure, and experiencing life situations that are traumatic. After the age of 18, this disorder may develop into antisocial personality disorder.
Antisocial personality disorder
Antisocial personality disorder is also called psychopathic or sociopathic disorder. It belongs to the group of personality disorders wherein disordered patterns of behavior are characterized by relatively fixed and inflexible lifelong reactions to stress. This personality disorder includes persons who characteristically act out their aggressions and openly ignore normal rules of social order. Characteristic behavior of people suffering from this disorder includes impulsiveness, irresponsibility, amorality, and inability to forego immediate gratification. These individuals cannot form affectionate relationships with other people. They tolerate frustration poorly; and if they experience opposition, they are likely to exhibit hostility, aggression, and do serious violence. Their antisocial behavior shows little foresight and is not associated with remorse or guilt since these affected individuals seem to have a keen capacity for rationalizing and for blaming their behavior on others.
This personality type is often associated with a history of alcohol and drug abuse, sexual deviation, promiscuity, occupational failure, or imprisonment. Men are more often affected than women. The effects of serious cerebral injury or disease may sometimes closely stimulate the picture of a psychopathic or antisocial personality.
Paranoid personality disorder
This is another type of personality disorder wherein it is characterized by the individual’s projection of his own hostilities and aggressiveness as delusions that others are hostile toward him. Individuals with paranoid personality are markedly sensitive to interpersonal relationships and tend to find hostile and malevolent intentions behind trivial, innocent, or even kindly acts by others. Most of the time, a paranoid’s suspicious attitude leads to aggressive feelings of behavior or brings about rejection by others, which seems to justify his original feelings. However, the individual is not able to see his won part in this cycle. The paranoid’s behavior may be designed to prove his adequacy, while his sense of worthiness becomes exaggerated and is accompanied by belittlement of other people. Paranoid tendencies are especially likely to develop among those who feel especially inferior because of a disfiguring effect that makes the individual noticeably different from other people.
Borderline personality disorder
Borderline personality disorder is a chronic psychiatric illness on an individual’s personality and is characterized by abnormally high levels of emotional instability and other characteristics such as emotional dysregulation, extreme “black and white” thinking, or “splitting”, and chaotic relationships. Splitting refers to a situation wherein the individual believes that something is one of only two possible things, and ignoring any possible “in-betweens.” According to mental health professionals, borderline personality disorder is a serious mental illness with manifestations of pervasive instabilities in interpersonal relationships, self perceptions, identity, and behavior, as well as a disturbance in the individual’s sense of self. Indviduals in this group also have fluctuations in their moods between states of high-spirited bouyancy and states of gloom and pessimism. These individuals may also respond poorly to any form of stress. Many individuals who are affected with borderline personality disorder have a history of repeated sexual, emotional and/or physical abuse. Persons who are accused of abuse are often parents, family members and authority figures.
Pedophilia
Pedophilia is a mental disorder of adults characterized by a sexual desire for children. The word pedophilia can also mean the crime of sexual inercourse with a child. Pedophilia is not inherited through genes nor is it biologically based. Rather it is a learned behavior with an addictive quality that escalates in intensity and frequency. The diagnosis of pedophilia requires a six-month period of recurrent intense sexual urges and sexually arousing fantasies that involve sexual activity with prepubescent children (generally age 13 or younger). The pedophile either must have acted on these urges or must be markedly distressed by them. Pedophilia, like child molestation, can be limited to incest, same sex or opposite sex or may involve victims of both sexes. Most pedophiles do not seek treatment because they fear legal consequences or they do not regard their behavior as aberrant.
Hebephilia
The term “hebephilia” is not widely known and used even by mental health professionals. Another term for this disorder is Ephebophilia. Hebephilia is the sexual preference of an adult towards adolescents. This condition is commonly grouped with pedophilia and child molestation. Unlike pedophilia, where adults pursue children under 12 for sex, ephebophilia involves adults engaging post-pubescent minors. Attraction and sexual desire of adults towards adolescents is not considered a serious pathology or disorder unless if it starts to become an obsession and affects other areas of life or causes distress to the object of obsession.
References
Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com
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