Talk:Personality disorder

Bipolar disorder

Bipolar disorder is NOT a PERSONALITY disorder. They might exist together, but are seperate Axis I, and Axis II disorders.

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a mental illness that brings severe high and low moods and changes in sleep, energy, thinking, and behavior.

People who have bipolar disorder can have periods in which they feel overly happy and energized and other periods of feeling very sad, hopeless, and sluggish. In between those periods, they usually feel normal. You can think of the highs and the lows as two "poles" of mood, which is why it's called "bipolar" disorder.

The word "manic" describes the times when someone with bipolar disorder feels overly excited and confident. These feelings can also involve irritability and impulsive or reckless decision-making. About half of people during mania can also have delusions (believing things that aren't true and that they can't be talked out of) or hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that aren't there). Sonurajsharma (talk) 04:36, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

intro too abstract

I'm sorry but the introduction describes an amorphous psychological blob. I minored in psychology, and I can't understand it. From the first sentence:

″ enduring maladaptive patterns of behavior, cognition, and inner experience, exhibited across many contexts and deviating from those accepted by the individual's culture.″

That describes depression, bipolar, sociopathy, schizophrenia, and pretty much every other mental illness. The rest of the intro seems to go into detail, but there's a lot of repetition of the same abstract phrases; doesn't help. EG:

• enduring behavioral and mental traits
• enduring collection of behavioral patterns
• deviating from those accepted by the individual's culture
• deviate from social norms and expectations

Teach with examples. With bullet points, describe a handful of PD disorders (most common) and also describe similar but non-PD disorders, and why they're not classified as PD. Describe them in enough detail so that one could say "Oh yeah, I know a guy like that". Don't say "patient was deviating from social norms"; be more specific like "patient might pull his pants down in public" or something concrete like that. OsamaBinLogin (talk) 10:39, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

@OsamaBinLogin The page is meant to reflect what the relevant commonly uses; IMO many personality disorders in the past are now defunct in part for being arbitrary, and the ones that are still in the DSM-5 are defined fairly anomalously. The way that PDs are defined is that to meet a diagnosis a person only needs some subset of a list of symptoms, which necessarily means that statements about them end up being broad/vague because different PDs don't have much in common.

That also means what you are suggesting to add examples seems problematic at face value, as person 1 with a hypothetical 1-PD might "might pull their pants down in public", person 2 with 1-PD may not, and person 3 with another hypothetical 2-PD may only "pull their pants down in public" only when experiencing "frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment." (Which is one of the criteria for BPD.) If you can find a reliable source with qualitative reports that could be used as examples, that could potentially be used, but I think it would be WP:OR in any other case due to the diverse causes and presentations of PDs.

I will number the things you have pointed out as 1-4.To illustrate that these are accepted descriptions from the psychology community, I will quote the opening section on personality disorders from the DSM-5:

"A personality disorder is an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment."

1 and 2: an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior

4: deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture

That being said, I do think the article could be better written and structured. I don't think it's possible to summarise all 10 currently recognised PDs in the lead section. But it could help to move the table "Millon's brief description of personality disorders" further to the top of the page, maybe WP:SS at least for the 10 ones in the DSM-5, maybe more clearly distinguishing those from PDs no longer recognised.

I started by filling in the epidemiology table, and hope to improve other parts of this article too.

Darcyisverycute (talk) 14:23, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply and explanation. The issue is comprehension by laymen, vs scientific accuracy. Meanwhile, the DSM will be revised over the years. I know that when I started reading psychology, many terms seemed so nebulous as to not have any meaning. I'm thinking about that level of understanding in the audience. Details must be left out; you can't ram it all into their brains without a BS degree.

Most people know someone with PD, or see them in the news. While it's dangerous to diagnose people at a distance, seeing concrete examples makes all the difference. Maybe, case study is what's called for - used all over the medical and psychological world.

Millon's table is a great start - but again, each definition must be very general to be accurate. Brief descriptions of his brief descriptions would help - they all seem very different. And, there's 14 of them. Simplify, simplify. Take 3 or 4 of them - different extremes - and the first sentence in each description is a brief summary. NO MORE. That's good for a quick intro to PD. "Here are some example PDs:" then a bulleted list.

How about Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman? Specific example, many people know the story, and he seems to exhibit lots of PD symptoms - Borderline, Avoidant, I don't know. The advantage of Willy Loman is you don't have to explain the story - it's already published.

OsamaBinLogin (talk) 21:21, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

There are different phenomena that Wikipedia has pages for that are difficult to understand for a layman. Relativity for example. The reason Personality Disorders (PD), which are very real, are difficult to explain is because it is very meta, and I personally feel the article does a pretty good job explaining why this is. (Everyone has a personality. People with a PD have personalities that aren't working very well for them and often for those around them.)

To your point, while the initial sentence can be applied to the other mental health maladies you mentioned, all of them have additional diagnostic criteria that must be met for a diagnosis. If you sat in one of my groups for those with PD's, it wouldn't take you long to realize that something wrong was happening with them that was global, resistant to treatment, and resistant to the client's own awareness. Some might have co-occurring mental health issues such as Bipolar, but these are honestly, usually not difficult to tease out of the pathology picture.

Finally, all of this are models we use to understand a real world mental health phenomenon that doesn't fit into a "medical model" of mental health very well, one of discrete illnesses - thus a Dimensional approach/model is far more helpful to understanding what is going on, in order to help the client understand what is going on, in order to help them change it. - Retired 129.228.28.197 (talk) 09:48, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Neurobiological correlates - hippocampus, amygdala and not prefrontal cortex?

cf #Neurobiological correlates - hippocampus, amygdala - I would think a developmental disorder of the prefrontal cortex would also play a role? Anybody has time to delve into that? Thy, SvenAERTS (talk) 12:32, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

There must be a criticism section somewhere in the academic literature.

The whole world became witness recently of two professional psychotherapists having completely opposing views on the 'spectrum' and 'disorder' of the same individual. Nothing happened against any of them because they could both rely on the generalized nature of the guidelines that can easily mislead in court towards any 'spectrum' or 'disorder' because of the subjectivity and also broad nature of the guidelines. fs 07:49, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

How mental health issues/phenomena are presented/used in court such as "Innocent by reason of insanity" and "Incompetent to stand trial" have little to do with the field of mental health, neither diagnosis and/or treatment. Like everything else about our criminal justice system, its twisted, bent and broken by lawyers, judges, and the law. Its - highly - unfortunate that Forensic Psychology is used for this purpose as it damages the general public's understanding and beliefs about mental health, intensifying the stigma, making it hard for those who have mental health issues from getting help and being supported by those around them regarding these issues. 129.228.28.197 (talk) 10:16, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

Too Long

This article is so long and detailed - it's huge! Maybe it should be broken up? I have no idea how. — Preceding unsigned comment added by OsamaBinLogin (talk • contribs) 21:32, 5 March 2024 (UTC)