Thread: Personality Disorders

It's normally the result of a chemical imbalance.

(unless you subscribe to the Tom Cruise school of psychology, then its the result of evil alien souls, and the only cure can only be had with a membership fee)

I appreciate your opinion on that Ophelia.

And true Brady, some are more so chemical imbalances...where as others are more a result of nature AND nuture.

Originally posted by Aquanina
I appreciate your opinion on that Ophelia.

And true Brady, some are more so chemical imbalances...where as others are more a result of nature AND nuture

nuture.?? nurture.
Did I catch the almighty grammar Nazi?

What do you people think of SSRI (selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors) to combat these chemical imbalances?

Nurture. Sue me.

Don't SSRIs make you fat. I'd never take 'em.

Originally posted by Seeker

I don't understand the defeatists. Why would anyone resign themselves to living the rest of their life like that. All change begins with the desire to change. Lack of desire to change is just unfathomable to me. It's like saying you are going to leave your hand lying on the hot stove eye because you have just resigned yourself to that fate.

Hmmmm.........interesting. I just don't think you know what someone is going through or has been through unless you are that person. Everyone has a diffrent capacity when it comes to dealing with things. It's a pretty basic concept, isn't it?

Originally posted by Aquanina
Nurture. Sue me.

Don't SSRIs make you fat. I'd never take 'em.

Ahhh~ I would have to pay court costs. I will let it slide this time LucidNinaspelllingfina

I think the drugs themselves don't often cause weight gain. OF coarse they state that it may to cover their ass.
But I believe it is do to the persons anxiety or whatever they are combating is lifted. When that is lifted the cause is often contentment. Which may lead to other vices. I am not sure.
I am speaking from my own experience. When I was not on the meds I had no appetite Do to my perplexed feelings.

Sometimes I feel like I'm obsessive-compulsive because, I'll leave for work, but I can't specifically remember if I unplugged the curling iron or not. So I have to turn the car around, go back into the house, unlock the door, go upstairs, and check to make sure its unplugged. It's maddening! And not one time have I EVER found it to still be plugged in. But if I just leave it, and don't check, I'm extrememly anxious and preoccupied all day long that the house is going to burn down, that it's worth it to just go back and check. I do this with locking the house door, too.

I understand this is a crazy behavior but I don't know how to stop it. Yup, so now you all know what a nut job I really am!

Originally posted by burns91
Sometimes I feel like I'm obsessive-compulsive because, I'll leave for work, but I can't specifically remember if I unplugged the curling iron or not. So I have to turn the car around, go back into the house, unlock the door, go upstairs, and check to make sure its unplugged. It's maddening! And not one time have I EVER found it to still be plugged in. But if I just leave it, and don't check, I'm extrememly anxious and preoccupied all day long that the house is going to burn down, that it's worth it to just go back and check. I do this with locking the house door, too.

I understand this is a crazy behavior but I don't know how to stop it. Yup, so now you all know what a nut job I really am!

I do not think you are a nut job burns! In our fast paced lifestyle these days I often wonder if that is some of the cause.
Aside from trying medication you could try relaxation methods. Meditation, yoga, etc.
One thing that helped me was to acknowledge a thought a just that a "thought". Recognize it for what it is. It is the brains reaction. But it may be a false reaction. So to be aware that the thought occurs and it is nothing more than a thought your brain will be able to put it into a better perspective.
Does that make any sense?

lol burns, that does sound a bit obsessive compulsive

but it's just a label, so I wouldn't worry too much unless it got so bad that it was inhibiting you from enjoying life, or like, causing you to lose your job, lose friends etc

I used to not be able to walk down the hall without tapping my foot twice in each room that I passed (I finally stopped when I kept smashing my little toe and my mom made fun of me for it: "Why do you always have to go TAPPITY TAP in every single room you walk by Lisa?!?!?!")

[quote]

I do not think you are a nut job burns! In our fast paced lifestyle these days I often wonder if that is some of the cause.
Aside from trying medication you could try relaxation methods. Meditation, yoga, etc.
One thing that helped me was to acknowledge a thought a just that a "thought". Recognize it for what it is. It is the brains reaction. But it may be a false reaction. So to be aware that the thought occurs and it is nothing more than a thought your brain will be able to put it into a better perspective.
Does that make any sense?

Yes, that makes a great deal of sense. (And I'm glad you don't think I'm a wacko!) LOL. I do acknowledge that I'm being overly paranoid about these things, but I haven't quite gotten to the point that I can shut off the feeling altogether. I have tried meditation, but I always get so relaxed that I fall asleep! I've gotten some feedback about that and how to try not to put myself into a meditation stupor.

Anyway, thanks for the advice - I think my biggest problem is that I rush, so when I do unplug the curling iron, or lock the door, I don't remember doing it because I'm rushing - which causes me to double-guess myself later on. I need to just SLOW DOWN!

Originally posted by OpheliaBlue
lol burns, that does sound a bit obsessive compulsive

I used to not be able to walk down the hall without tapping my foot twice in each room that I passed (I finally stopped when I kept smashing my little toe and my mom made fun of me for it: "Why do you always have to go TAPPITY TAP in every single room you walk by Lisa?!?!?!")

Good! I'm glad I'm not the only one that has some weird personality quirks (except you got over yours and I haven't yet!).

Originally posted by burns91
Good! I'm glad I'm not the only one that has some weird personality quirks (except you got over yours and I haven't yet!).

well...I never really 'get over' my quirks, I replace them with new ones

This book seems interesting...

"Shadow Syndromes: The Mild Forms of Major Mental Disorders That Sabotage Us"

"Neuropsychiatry is now discovering that a great deal of what we thought was due to (poor) upbringing in fact is heavily influenced by the genetics, structure, and neurochemistry of the brain.**Every one of the troublesome personalities made famous by our popular press likely has its roots in an unsuspected brain difference: the Peter Pan syndrome, the Cinderella complex, the women who love too much, the men who can't love, the codependent--the list goes on.**All of these people are doubtless going to turn out to have brain differences that contribute to their Peter Pan-ness or their Cinderella-ness or their codependentness.**Of course, differences in the brain cut both ways: as studies of artists with manic-depressive illness have shown, a brain difference that handicaps us in one realm may also endow us with greater capacities in another.**Our purpose in writing this book is not to pathologize every nook and cranny of everyday life, but to offer help for those areas in which our brain differences do hurt more than help.**Until now there has been no biologically based help for the difficult personalities among us because no one has suspected that their problems might have biological facets.

That is the purpose of this book: to look again at the biology of everyday life one hundred years later--this time from the vantage point of twentieth-century neuropsychiatry.**Our question in this book is: when we--or someone we love--are behaving at our worst, or simply behaving irrationally, what role does biology play? And: how do genuine problems in life, problems like a difficult childhood or a parent who drinks, interact with our biology to create the character traits and flaws that are not just written into our characters but into our neurons as well?


In order to take a second look at normal "craziness," we can learn from the kinds of craziness that are not so normal.**When we speak of schizophrenia or severe manic-depression, there is no question in anyone's mind that the person is ill.**And it is easy enough for us to believe that these illnesses are biological in origin (though it was not so long ago that these illnesses, too, were blamed upon bad parents).

The confusion begins when one sees patients who do not fit the classic categories, but who nevertheless have very real difficulties in life.**Are these difficulties due entirely to upbringing and environment, or do they, too, have some basis in the brain's biology? Modern psychiatry has been struggling to make sense of these people for fifty years.**Doctors diagnose their patients according to the syndromes described in DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition.**A syndrome is a set of behaviors that consistently appear together: a set of behaviors the patient, the doctor, or the patient's friends and family can observe and describe.**A syndrome is not, at this point, a physical marker like the positive result on a test for HIV antibodies that establishes a diagnosis of HIV-positive.**When a psychiatrist diagnoses the syndrome of panic disorder, for example, he cannot--yet--perform an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) that tells him whether the patient does or does not qualify for the diagnosis (although we may be closest to such a test for this particular disorder).**Instead, he looks for symptoms: a pounding chest, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath or hyperventilation, sweating or coldness and changes in temperature regulation, the fear that one is having a heart attack, sometimes a feeling that the person is going to pass out, sometimes a feeling that he or she is going to go crazy.**This is the set of symptoms that make up the syndrome.

The problem is, every patient is different--including every patient with the same diagnosis.**As a result, the number of syndromes recognized by practicing psychiatrists has leapt in the forty years since the first edition of the DSM appeared in 1952.**That volume described 60 categories of abnormal behavior.**DSM-II, published in 1968, more than doubled this number to 145 syndromes, and DSM-III raised the total to 230.**The DSM-IV, which appeared in 1994, lists 382 distinct diagnoses, plus an additional 28 floating, or unassigned, diagnoses--which brings us today to a total of 410 different possible diagnostic labels.**What the ever-increasing number of possible diagnoses means is that a person who comes into a psychiatrist's office complaining of being depressed, for example, could be categorized as belonging to one of four major categories--bipolar disorder, major depression, "other specific affective disorders," or "atypical affective disorder"--with several subcategories included within each of these main categories.**(A patient diagnosed as bipolar could then be further characterized as "mixed," "manic," or "depressed," for instance.) It is a complex business.

As time goes by, we find that the art of diagnosis grows ever more fragmented; seemingly sound diagnostic categories keep breaking down.**Emotional problems do not fit the "concrete blocks" of the DSM-I, -II, -III, or -IV; real people come into the office with bits of this and pieces of that.**A patient might show signs of panic disorder, signs of major depressive disorder, and signs of a narcissistic personality disorder all in the same package.**He or she may have parts of a whole array of syndromes, and yet not suffer from all of the symptoms of any one syndrome.**Or he may fit every aspect of a syndrome down to the smallest detail and yet be so mildly affected compared to other people suffering from that problem that even a good therapist might miss the diagnosis.**Finally, a patient may exhibit only one or two symptoms from a particular syndrome, a condition long known as a forme fruste in conventional medicine.**A patient with a forme fruste of Graves disease, for instance, might have the bulging eyes without the sweaty hands, rapid heartbeat, irritability, and weight loss that accompany a full-blown case of the illness.**A forme fruste is an incomplete expression of an illness, though the term is little used today.**We have chosen to replace it here with the phrase shadow syndrome because the meanings of the word shadow, both literal and metaphorical, capture the nature of a mild mental disorder.**In the literal sense, a shadow is an indistinct form of something all too vivid and real, just as a shadow syndrome is an indistinct and seldom obvious form of a severe disorder.**And metaphorical shadows cast a pall across a day that might otherwise be sunny and clear.**This is what shadow syndromes do in the realms of work and love: they cast a shadow."

Excerpted from Shadow Syndromes by John J. Ratey, M.D., and Catherine Johnson, Ph.D. Copyright © 1998 by John J. Ratey, M.D. and Catherine Johnson, Ph.D.

Oh yeah...and this is just for fun. Though it was quite accurate in "diagnosing" me. Feel free to post your results (or not lol) and thoughts about it. I got 90% Borderline and also scored sorta high on paranoid, schizo, and schizotypal lol.

http://similarminds.com/personality_disorder.html

...and here's a less formal one...but still seemingly accurate...

http://quizilla.com/users/rosiekins/quizze...0You%20Have%3F/

Personality Disorder Test Results

Paranoid |||| 18%
Schizoid |||||||||| 38%
Schizotypal |||||||||||||| 58%
Antisocial |||||| 30%
Borderline |||||| 26%
Histrionic |||| 18%
Narcissistic |||||||||||||||| 70%
Avoidant || 10%
Dependent |||||| 26%
Obsessive-Compulsive |||| 14%

mine:



well I knew about the last 2 and the narcissism, but not the schizotypal lol

Paranoid |||||||||||||||||||| 90% 49%
Schizoid |||||||||||||||||||| 90% 53%
Schizotypal |||||||||||||||||| 74% 53%
Antisocial |||||||||||||| 54% 47%
Borderline |||||||||||||||| 66% 47%
Histrionic |||||||||||||| 54% 43%
Narcissistic || 10% 41%
Avoidant |||||||||||| 50% 39%
Dependent |||||||||||||| 54% 37%
Obsessive-Compulsive |||||||||||||||||| 78% 40% [/b]

Guess that is what you get not only from avoiding people for many years and being hurt by them, but also from being by myself all that time. Hehe...uh...
But I looove DVs. That is one good thing to be obsessive compulsive over, as well as LDing!! And paranoid over hackers would be surprisingly common here!!

lol I am so much Not going to do that test

Paranoid |||||||||||||||||| 74% 49%
Schizoid |||||||||||||||||||| 90% 53%
Schizotypal |||||||||||||||||| 74% 53%
Antisocial |||||||||||| 46% 47%
Borderline |||||||||||||||||||| 82% 47%
Histrionic |||||| 30% 43%
Narcissistic |||||||||||||| 58% 41%
Avoidant |||| 14% 39%
Dependent |||| 14% 37%
Obsessive-Compulsive |||||||||||| 42% 40%

Well, that made me feel very good about myself!

Paranoid |||||||||||||||||||| 86%
Schizoid |||||||||||||||||||| 90%
Schizotypal |||||||||||||||||||| 90%
Antisocial |||||||||||||||| 70%
Borderline |||||||||||||||| 70%
Histrionic |||||||||| 34%
Narcissistic |||||||||| 38%
Avoidant |||||||||||||||| 70%
Dependent |||||| 30%
Obsessive-Compulsive |||||||||||||||||| 74%

Is everyone here crazy or is that test just a bit... exagerated.

Originally posted by Neruo
Is everyone here crazy or is that test just a bit... exagerated.

I vote for everyone here is crazy!! LOL

MY resposne said please call 1-800-help immediatly!

Ha ha JK!

Paranoid |||||||||| 34% 49%
Schizoid |||||||||||||||| 66% 53%
Schizotypal |||||||||||||||||||| 86% 53%
Antisocial |||||||||||||| 54% 47%
Borderline |||||||||||| 46% 47%
Histrionic |||||| 26% 43%
Narcissistic |||||||||||||||| 70% 41%
Avoidant |||||||||||| 42% 39%
Dependent |||||| 30% 37%
Obsessive-Compulsive |||||||||||||||||| 78% 40%

My wife's
Personality Disorder Test Results

Paranoid |||||| 26% 49%
Schizoid |||||||||||||||| 62% 53%
Schizotypal |||||||||||||||| 62% 53%
Antisocial |||| 18% 47%
Borderline |||||| 22% 47%
Histrionic |||||| 26% 43%
Narcissistic |||||||||| 38% 41%
Avoidant |||| 14% 39%
Dependent |||||| 22% 37%
Obsessive-Compulsive |||||||||||||| 54%

Paranoid 90%
Schizoid 82 %
Schizotypal 82%
Antisocial 50%
Borderline 90%
Histrionic 66%
Narcissistic 42%
Anoidant 72%
Dependent 50%
Obsessive-Compulsive 66%

Boy, I need therapy