Personality Disorders: Myths and Realities

We take a look at movies and how they present some of the personality disorders.

Psychology has been talking for decades about the different personality types and how they influence our way of interpreting the world.

We can find two ways of dealing with this subject, on the one hand the professionals who describe types of normal personality and their predisposition to different physical illnesses, such as the famous type A and type B personality, the former prone to Cardiovascular diseases and stress. And the other way is to treat them as personality disorders.

Myths and facts about personality disorders

But today we want to talk about this second point: personality disorders. Personality disorders are defined as a permanent and inflexible pattern of behavior that is far removed from expectations according to the person's age and culture.. That is, someone who does not behave as one would expect and who interprets the world in a different way. Over the years some diagnostic categories that have had a lot of echo in our culture have been disappearing, such as Multiple Personality Disorder, which has given rise to such well-known film scripts as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydebut which today does not appear as such in the diagnostic manuals (DSM-V).

Were these disorders myths or realities? Their existence or non-existence in the past, the scientific basis that creates the consensus that a psychopathology has its own set of characteristics, is difficult to assess. Nowadays, this diagnostic category has disappeared and we could see similar features in the Dissociative Personality Disorder. What is really interesting about this topic is to observe to what extent sociocultural changes over the centuries correlate with clinical changes, changes in symptoms and mental disorders.

Personality disorders: truths and lies

There are personality disorders that disappear from the manuals and others that emerge and become fashionable, as is the case of borderline personality disorder, one of the most diagnosed in recent times and one of the most difficult to treat. They are impulsive and unstable people who present great difficulties in their interpersonal relationships.

It is curious the fact that most of the most diagnosed pathologies of the 21st century have as common denominator the impulsivity. Such is the case of ADHD, the BPDand so on.

Going back to personality, we could say that there is a continuum that travels from personality disorder to mental illness, in many of the personality disorders there is a mental disorder at the opposite pole:

• Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder - Obsessive-compulsive disorder.
• Schizotypal personality disorder - Schizotypal personality disorder - Schizophrenia
• Paranoid Personality Disorder - Paranoid Schizophrenia

These appear to be less severe manifestations of these pathologies.

Antisocial Disorder in the Movies

Another personality disorder that has been very popular in the movies and that has given rise to multiple films in which some of the characters have this characteristic has been the antisocial disorder (or the psychopathas it is popularly known). Films such as Silence of the Lambs (1991), which show us the psychopath as someone very intelligent and special, who is also a serial killer. There are other movies that have dealt with these issues, as you can see in the article "Movies about psychology and mental disorders" But what is true and false in all this?

The reality is that people with antisocial disorder are often in trouble with the law because of their tendency to commit minor criminal acts, which are a far cry from serial killings. There is a certain disregard and violation of the rights of others for their own benefit and without any sense of guilt. But killing others is not usually their goal, so this is a wrong attribution: people with antisocial disorder are not potential murderers.

We have also seen in the movies some characters with obsessive-compulsive disorder, this time quite faithful to the typical symptomatology of this disorder. In Better... Impossible(1997), Jack Nicholson plays a romance writer with an arsenal of compulsions he has to deal with on a daily basis. Although obsessive-compulsive personality disorder differs somewhat from disorder obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), it is nonetheless a continuum in severity and many of the symptoms are common: a pattern of preoccupation with order, perfectionism and control. This type of personality disorder has been portrayed in thousands of tabletop movies, with people obsessed with work, order and perfectionism, who need to control their environment and who suffocate those around them.

To recapitulate: towards a calm view of personality disorders

But the reality of this disorder goes beyond that, because in its most severe form it can block the person in his daily life, due to his marked slowness in carrying out tasks. To do a perfect thing you must dedicate a lot of time to it, so much that sometimes it is unfeasible to finish it in a reasonable period of time, and this causes that many times they do not start an activity because they know that they cannot do it as they want, thus leaving many things undone and giving the impression that they are unmotivated or lazy. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are many personality disorders that are reflected in our films, but the reality is that they are disorders that are difficult to treat and that greatly affect the day-to-day life of the person who suffers from them.

Surely over the years, we will see some disorders that now exist disappear and new ones appear, because personality is not only genetic, it is also the result of a social, cultural context; it emerges from our beliefs and our interpersonal relationships... and consequently the catalog of disorders will hardly become a fixed image.

Which personality disorders will define the 21st century? 21ST CENTURY?