15.4: Personality and Dissociative Disorders:

Be aware of the characteristics of borderline and psychopathic personality disorders.

We think of ourselves as one unified identity.

It is difficult to identify personality disorders because we all experience variations in personality and sense from time to time.

The least reliable diagnosis of personality disorders is Fowler, O'Donohue, and Lilienfeld.

Sometimes clinicians disagree about whether a patient exhibits certain personality problems.

Features of some situations can lead to distress or impairment.

When students carefully and terns of behavior we've described, whether we perceive someone with a personality dis repeatedly check their responses to test order as abnormal depends on the situational or cultural context in which their behavior questions for mistakes occurs.
A person with a paranoid person ality disorder is an asset to a private investigator.

Two of the disorders have been extensively studied and have caused profound impairment for those around them.

Under Watch BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER stands personality disorders in general.

Many people with borderline personality disorder are married and have good jobs.

Their interests and life goals change a lot.
Their relationships and friends are often different from one day to the next.
This disorder has been described as a pattern of stable instability by some scholars.

People with this condition may threaten and even attempt suicide to manipulate others, reflecting the chaotic nature of their relationships.

Otto Kernberg traced the roots of borderline personality to childhood problems with developing a sense of self and bonding emotionally to others.

According to Kernberg, individuals with borderline personality disorder can't integrate their own perception of people.
An inborn tendency to experience anger and frustration from living with a cold, unempathetic mother is said to be the cause of this defect.

According to Kernberg, borderline individuals experience the world and themselves as Psychologist Marsha Linehan of the unstable because they tend to split people and experiences into either all good or all bad.

Although influential, Kernberg's model of borderline personality is still the leading expert on the treatment of borly researched.

Sociobio surprised many people by acknowledging a logical model, individuals with borderline personality disorder inherit a tendency to publicly that they had been diagnosed with overreact to stress and experience lifelong difficulties with regulating.

According to Linehan's Indeed, twin studies suggest that borderline personality traits are substantially heri courage admission, which may help to dispel some of the stigma surrounding them.
Difficulties controlling emotions is a personality disorder.

Edward Selby and Thomas Joiner's emotional cascade model holds that intense rumination about negative events or emotional experiences may result in uncontrollable "emotional cascades" which prompt self-injurious actions such as cutting.

Although these impulsive and desperate actions succeed in providing brief distraction from rumination, they often fuel further bouts of rumination, creating a vicious cycle of problems with regulating emotions.

For a long time, psychologists believed that borderline personality was a lifelong con dition that never improved over time.

According to data, only 7 percent of treatment-seeking adults that meet criteria for borderline personality disorder still do a decade later.

Don't judge a book by its cover.

Psychopathic personality of irresponsible or illegal actions has been the focus of more psychological research.

Most of the men with psychopathic personality are guiltless, dishonest, callous, and self centered.

According to recent data, many adults with psychopathic personality exhibited a constellation of personality traits as children, perhaps as early as when they were five or three years old.
Children with these characteristics are more likely to get into trouble at school and more likely to get into trouble at home.
There is growing evidence that children with psychopathic personality traits are at increased risk in adolescence and adulthood.

Some children who are labeled with callous-emotional traits grow out of them and don't develop psychopathic personality features later on.

Because of the unpleasant personality trait of psychopathic individuals, one might assume we'd all go out of our way to avoid them.

Many of us seek out people with psychopathic personality as friends and even romantic partners because they tend to be charming, personable, and engaging.

There's no need to panic if the traits we've described fit someone you know to a T.

Most people with psychopathic personality aren't aggressive.

They're at heightened risk for crime compared with the average person, and a few are habitually violent.
The charming ex-psychology major and law school student who raped and brutally murdered as many as several dozen women, as well as about 25 percent of prison inmates, almost certainly met the criteria for psychopathic personality disorder.
People with this disorder are typically not psychotic.
They know that their actions are morally wrong, but they don't care.

There's a chance that people with this condition are in positions of leadership in corporations and politics.

It has been shown that higher estimated levels of a constellation of traits called fearless dominance, which captures the boldness and adventurousness often found in psychopaths, are linked to superior leadership as rated by expert historians.
People with this disorder may be able to get ahead of the rest of the pack if they have some psychopathic skills.
There isn't much research on people with high levels of psychopathic traits who function well in society.

The causes of psychopathic personality are largely unknown despite more than six decades of research.

The research shows that people with this disorder don't show classical conditioning to unpleasant stimuli.
When asked to sit in a chair for a loud blast of noise, their skin conductance increases only about one-fifth as much as those without psychopathic personality.
Some of the key features of the disorder may be related to a deficit in fear.
Functional brain scans show that people with psychopathic tendencies tend to have less activity in the amygdala when they see faces of terrified people.
The amygdala is an almond-shaped brain structure that plays a key role in fear processing.
People with psychopathic personality tend to repeat the same mistakes in life because they aren't afraid of punishment.

There is an alternative explanation for individuals with this disorder.

There is an important alternative to the other.

People with psychopathic personality disorder can't be rehabilitated.

Some people with this disorder may improve if treatment is long and intensive.

An extraordinary claim is the idea that one person can have more than one identity.

Dissociative identity disorder is one of the most controversial diagnoses.

More than half of adults have had at least one brief episode of depersonalization, and it's especially common among adolescents and college students.

Derealization is the sense that the outside world is not real.

Depersonalization may be caused by sleep disorders.

When people are deprived of sleep for 24 hours, they report more episodes of depersonalization, symptoms, and sleep hygiene techniques.

Some researchers think that a disturbed sleep-wake cycle can cause dreams during the day.

You should write a detailed description of your experience.

Their memory loss is extensive and can include suicide attempts.

Dissociative amnesia is when adults report gaps in their memories for child abuse.

This diagnosis has been controversial for a number of reasons.

Most people don't think about child abuse or other upsetting events when they explain the findings.

There are no convincing cases of amnesia that can be explained by disease, brain injury, normal forgetting, or an unwillingness to think about disturbing events.

We all felt like we were running away from our troubles.

They move to another country or city with a new identity.

The Psychiatric Association has more lengthy fugue states.

A 57-year-old husband, father, and Boy Scout leader from New York was found living under a new name in a homeless shelter in Chicago in 2006 after he left his garage and disappeared.

It's important to know if the fugue was caused by a head Ruling Out Rival Hypotheses injury, a stroke, or another neurological cause.

Some people claim to have lost their memory to avoid responsibilities, relocate to a different area, and get an important alternative fresh start in life.

The role trauma, psychological factors, and neurological conditions play in fugue states are not fully understood by scientists.

These personality states or "alters," as they're sometimes called, are often different from the primary or "host" personality and may be of different names, ages, genders, races, and even species.

These features are different from those exhibited by the host personality.
If the host person is shy and retiring, one or more alters may be outgoing or flamboyant.
He claimed to have reported the number of alters to range from one to hundreds for more than a month, with one case of over 4,000.
Remember anything about his life.
Women are more likely to receive a DID diagnosis than men.

These findings don't provide conclusive evidence for the existence of alters.

Individuals who have been abused are able to cope with intense emotional pain by changing their identities.

The person can feel like the abuse happened to someone else.

According to advocates of the posttraumatic model, 90 percent or more of individuals with DID were abused in childhood.

Many studies that reported this association didn't check the accuracy of abuse claims against objective information such as court records of abuse.
Researchers haven't shown that early abuse is specific to DID because it's present in many other disorders.
These considerations don't exclude a role for early trauma in DID, but they suggest that researchers must conduct further controlled studies before drawing strong conclusions.

There are important alternatives to indwelling identities.

Many DID patients don't show any clear-cut signs of this condition prior to therapy.

Mainstream treatment techniques reinforce the idea that the person has more than one identity.

Using hypnotism to bring forth hidden alters, communicating with alters and giving them different names are some of the techniques used.

The number of alters increases when therapists use these techniques.

The link between dissociation and the tendency to fantasize in everyday life may be related to the production of false memories.

There were 78 documented cases of DID in the world literature as of 1970.

In 1986, the number of DID cases had grown to 6,000, and some estimates in the early 21st century are in the hundreds of thousands.
According to the sociocognitive model, the popular media Sheri Storm was diagnosed with dissocia have played a pivotal role in the DID epidemic.
The book and later alities use suggestive techniques.
The heartbreaking story of a young woman with 16 personality types who reported painting to Storm during a history of child abuse was told in this film.
Audiotapes of therapy suggested that there was no parade of child abuse memories or alters emerging in treatment.

Skyrock eted has been covered by the media over the past two decades.

The media perpetuates myths about the disorder, such as the idea that people with DID have more than one personality.
Roseanne Barr and Hershel Walker claim to have suffered from the disorder.
Although DID is rare in Japan and India, it has recently received more attention in some countries, such as Holland.