Understanding Personality Disorders

You may have a personality disorder if:

1. You find it hard to live with yourself and other people.
2. You have difficulties to control your feelings or behaviour.
3. You find it hard to stay out of trouble.
4. You sometimes harm other people when you’re distressed.

The cause of a personality disorder is not clear, but there is some evidence that genes, brain problems and background can play a part.

There are different ways to describe mental disorders, and to put them into categories. The difficulty in describing any personality clearly, makes this more controversial with personality problems than with mental illnesses, such as depression or schizophrenia. That’s why we sometimes prefer to describe personality disorders as ‘personality styles’.

Personality styles are, for example: paranoid, schizoid, antisocial, borderline, narcissistic or obsessive-compulsive.

Personality disorders

A personality is the collection of ways we think, feel and behave, making each of us an individual and allowing us to interact with other people. But some people have trouble with this because they suffer from a personality disorder.

A personality disorder is a set of traits that combine to negatively affect your life. They have a wide range of causes and some are easier to treat than others. It’s thought one in ten people in the UK have some form of personality disorder. Only a trained professional can properly diagnose a personality disorder.