A personality is a set of emotions, feelings, and behavior that make one person different from others. It involves interactions with others by expressing your feelings or behavior. Personality Disorder is the condition in which a patient suffers distress and difficulty in his emotions, feelings, and behavior.
It is a particular imbalance in the already defined criteria of emotional level and creates a disturbance in his behavior.
This health illness affects relationships, social activities, and life. Way of thinking, responding, relating, and controlling emotions are altered.
If not treated earlier it may cause long-term effects and unhealthy results.
The major problem with people having a personality disorder is that they consider their emotions and thinking is right. There is no problem with them and they consider it natural.
Nevertheless, there are different types of personality disorders that may differ in their causes.
Let’s have a brief overview of each type.
Types
Borderline Personality Disorder
This is a kind of disorder in which fear of being abandoned and difficulty in relation and life is commonly observed.
Interesting stats show that women are diagnosed as far as three times more than the man.
Intense anger, anxiety, frequent mood swings and instability creates a disturbance in relationships and to understand others’ feelings. It includes several suicidal attempts and self-harming like cutting.
Sometimes small things can initiate severe reactions like reckless behavior. The deep desire for long-lasting love could also change to the hatred that may be temporary or permanent. Staggered trust in others also leads to distortion of self-image.
Stressful childhood can play a role in this disorder. Depression, alcohol misuse, and eating irregularities also become additional changes related to this disease. Symptoms may be acute or severe depending upon the illness. Not all of them occur in every person.
Symptoms of borderline personality disorder
You can observe the following symptoms in BPD patients.
- Different mood swings like happiness, sadness, anxiety, or shame
- Extreme ups and downs of self-image leading to hate or love or changing of your job, friends, or goals
- Strong fear of being alone may result in attempts to keep another person close either by begging, requests, or fights.
- Severe instability in relationships like sudden love, hate, idealize, devaluation, or misunderstanding.
- Uncomfortable or unsatisfactory feelings of emptiness in the personality may cause the use of alcohol, sex, or food.
- Risky behavior like spending money lavishly, overuse of drugs, unsafe sex, and rash driving for temporary satisfaction.
- Sensitivity to the feelings like rejection, acceptance, criticism, failure, success, and isolation.
- Self-harm conditions like suicide, cutting, burning, or anything to hurt yourself.
- Doubt or suspicious thoughts about others or feelings of spaced out.
- Also certain co-related disorders like bipolar disease, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, or stress.
Causes
There are no clear and valid causes that why borderline personality disorder occurs but several factors can contribute like
- Environmental factors
- Family history or Genetics
- Brain structure
- Traumatic childhood
Treatment
Treatment and therapies can cure this disease but it will be time taking. In case of related disorders like stress, anxiety, or depression, medication is done. Psychotherapy helps you learn the ways to lead a happy life and to cope with unnecessary conditions.
Borderline Personality Disorder Test
Till now, there is no clinical test to diagnose BPD disorder. Trained healthcare or psychiatrist can diagnose the BPD in the clinic either by interviews or questionnaires related to the mood swings and other extremities. But it is difficult to diagnose BPD as the symptoms may overlap with other health disorders.
As an individual you cannot obsess you have BPD, you need to seek a doctor or expert if you observe the symptoms in you. A borderline personality disorder is treatable after different sessions and therapies.
So, immediately consult a doctor for the treatment in case of doubt of BPD. Treatment time may vary depending upon the severity of symptoms. You may receive medications for the diseases like stress or depression.
Histrionic Personality Disorder
Histrionic means dramatic. People with histrionic disorder have excessive and abnormal emotions leading to seek special attention from others. They can do some dramatic physical changes to attract other people’s attention. They don’t have self-worth and need attraction and approval from others.
It may start by early adulthood and is more common in women than men.
The patient wants to be the center of attraction for everyone and thus can show seductive behavior. They don’t think before action, make rapid decisions, and lack sincerity. They are sensitive to others’ disapproval and can be easily influenced by others.
The histrionic disorder may be due to family issues, parents having the ability or susceptibility to transfer the disease. Individual psychology and temperament also govern how they learn and deal with stress. Such persons can perform well in society.
Symptoms
HPD patients can prove to be beneficial to society as they are highly functional, have good social skills, and also professional. Following symptoms may be the outcomes of the PPD patients
- Hypersensitive to criticism, disapproval, and hatred
- Need appreciation and approval of others
- Emotional, and dramatic to have an attraction
- Act inappropriately to seek attention
- Behave seductively to present sexual nature
- Completely self-centered and may attempt suicide
- Easily influenced by others
- Cannot put up frustrations and failures
- Proud of personality and unwilling to change
- Sensitive to relationships loyalty and lifetime
- May find difficulty in maintain relationships
- Drastic changes in mood swings
- Making rapid decisions
- Changing many jobs
Causes
There is very little research and findings on the HPD disorder. It may relate to environmental, biological, or genetic factors.
Consequently, HPD disorder tends to run in families and children easily inherit it.
Excessive or unwanted attention given in childhood can cause the PPD
Or the psychological styles of child and ways of coping with different situations
HPD symptoms appear unless the age of 15 and can be treated at the age of 40.
Treatment
Psychotherapy can be its treatment with all the challenges because the patient may exaggerate his symptoms. Therefore, the treatment must be cooperative to understand all the needs of emotional balance because the patient seeks a doctor often when they are in depression. Proper care and therapy can help the HPD patient to live a balanced life.
Paranoid Personality Disorder
PPD is a mental health disorder also known as eccentric disorder suffering from a group of diseases. Additionally, PPD patients have paranoia in which people shows mistrust and suspicious act for others. It starts from early adulthood and is more common in men than women.
According to Cleveland Clinic, about 4.4% of the general population suffers from PPD.
The major difficulty that relates to paranoid personality disorder is comorbidity. Comorbidity is a medical situation of overlapping of different symptoms in one disorder like with the schizotypal in case of paranoid disorder.
People with the paranoid disorder are keen observers and are always in search of signs validating their fear and dangers.
Symptoms of Paranoid Personality Disorder
Various symptoms are observed in the paranoid personality disorder mostly relate to the suspects and doubts that other people are trying to deceive and harm. Patients with PPD disorder may express the following symptoms:
- Unforgiving and cannot put up with the insults or injuries
- Misjudge that other are deceiving and cheating them with no loyalty
- Hypersensitive to the criticism and insult
- Don’t trust anyone for their secrets and sharing of information
- Always in search of hints to make their fear come true
- Strong suspicious about their lover or partners
- Argumentive, stubborn, defensive, hence hard nut to swallow
- Sensitive or cold in their relationships, may show jealousy
- May lead themselves to social isolations or detachments
- Always found trouble in relaxing
Causes
As like BPD, the causes of paranoid personality disorder are still unknown. Yet following symptoms can contribute to the PPD.
- Childhood trauma
- Genetic link with a family history of schizophrenia
- Or environmental factors
Treatment
Treatment for the PPD is more critical as the patient doesn’t trust the therapist, which plays major role in treatment. Depending on the severity of symptoms, treatment also varies. There may be medication in the severe conditions for anti-anxiety or anti-depression. But generally, psychotherapy can treat the PPD disorder. Therapists work to increase the confidence, trust, cooperation and self-esteem of the patients.
If the patients seek the treatment they can lead a life with health and trust in relationships otherwise the downside may include the devoid of jobs or extremities in the relationship.