Talk:Personality disorder

I'm sorry but the introduction describes an amorphous psychological blob. I minored in psychology, and I can't understand it. From the first sentence:

″ enduring maladaptive patterns of behavior, cognition, and inner experience, exhibited across many contexts and deviating from those accepted by the individual's culture.″

That describes depression, bipolar, sociopathy, schizophrenia, and pretty much every other mental illness. The rest of the intro seems to go into detail, but there's a lot of repetition of the same abstract phrases; doesn't help. EG:

• enduring behavioral and mental traits
• enduring collection of behavioral patterns
• deviating from those accepted by the individual's culture
• deviate from social norms and expectations

Teach with examples. With bullet points, describe a handful of PD disorders (most common) and also describe similar but non-PD disorders, and why they're not classified as PD. Describe them in enough detail so that one could say "Oh yeah, I know a guy like that". Don't say "patient was deviating from social norms"; be more specific like "patient might pull his pants down in public" or something concrete like that. OsamaBinLogin (talk) 10:39, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

:: @OsamaBinLogin The page is meant to reflect what the relevant commonly uses; IMO many personality disorders in the past are now defunct in part for being arbitrary, and the ones that are still in the DSM-5 are defined fairly anomalously. The way that PDs are defined is that to meet a diagnosis a person only needs some subset of a list of symptoms, which necessarily means that statements about them end up being broad/vague because different PDs don't have much in common.

:: That also means what you are suggesting to add examples seems problematic at face value, as person 1 with a hypothetical 1-PD might "might pull their pants down in public", person 2 with 1-PD may not, and person 3 with another hypothetical 2-PD may only "pull their pants down in public" only when experiencing "frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment." (Which is one of the criteria for BPD.) If you can find a reliable source with qualitative reports that could be used as examples, that could potentially be used, but I think it would be WP:OR in any other case due to the diverse causes and presentations of PDs.

:: I will number the things you have pointed out as 1-4.To illustrate that these are accepted descriptions from the psychology community, I will quote the opening section on personality disorders from the DSM-5:

:: "A personality disorder is an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time, and leads to distress or impairment."

:: 1 and 2: an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior

:: 4: deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture

:: That being said, I do think the article could be better written and structured. I don't think it's possible to summarise all 10 currently recognised PDs in the lead section. But it could help to move the table "Millon's brief description of personality disorders" further to the top of the page, maybe WP:SS at least for the 10 ones in the DSM-5, maybe more clearly distinguishing those from PDs no longer recognised.

:: I started by filling in the epidemiology table, and hope to improve other parts of this article too.

:Darcyisverycute (talk) 14:23, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

::Thanks for your reply and explanation. The issue is comprehension by laymen, vs scientific accuracy. Meanwhile, the DSM will be revised over the years. I know that when I started reading psychology, many terms seemed so nebulous as to not have any meaning. I'm thinking about that level of understanding in the audience. Details must be left out; you can't ram it all into their brains without a BS degree.

::Most people know someone with PD, or see them in the news. While it's dangerous to diagnose people at a distance, seeing concrete examples makes all the difference. Maybe, case study is what's called for - used all over the medical and psychological world.

::Millon's table is a great start - but again, each definition must be very general to be accurate. Brief descriptions of his brief descriptions would help - they all seem very different. And, there's 14 of them. Simplify, simplify. Take 3 or 4 of them - different extremes - and the first sentence in each description is a brief summary. NO MORE. That's good for a quick intro to PD. "Here are some example PDs:" then a bulleted list.

::How about Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman? Specific example, many people know the story, and he seems to exhibit lots of PD symptoms - Borderline, Avoidant, I don't know. The advantage of Willy Loman is you don't have to explain the story - it's already published.

::OsamaBinLogin (talk) 21:21, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

:::There are different phenomena that Wikipedia has pages for that are difficult to understand for a layman. Relativity for example. The reason Personality Disorders (PD), which are very real, are difficult to explain is because it is very meta, and I personally feel the article does a pretty good job explaining why this is. (Everyone has a personality. People with a PD have personalities that aren't working very well for them and often for those around them.)

:::To your point, while the initial sentence can be applied to the other mental health maladies you mentioned, all of them have additional diagnostic criteria that must be met for a diagnosis. If you sat in one of my groups for those with PD's, it wouldn't take you long to realize that something wrong was happening with them that was global, resistant to treatment, and resistant to the client's own awareness. Some might have co-occurring mental health issues such as Bipolar, but these are honestly, usually not difficult to tease out of the pathology picture.

:::Finally, all of this are models we use to understand a real world mental health phenomenon that doesn't fit into a "medical model" of mental health very well, one of discrete illnesses - thus a Dimensional approach/model is far more helpful to understanding what is going on, in order to help the client understand what is going on, in order to help them change it. - Retired 129.228.28.197 (talk) 09:48, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

:I can agree that the intro does a overall good job of going into detail but I also can see how the section you have pulled from the article is more broad and the writer could have wanted it to be this way for others to take it that way. I see the writer wanting everyone to understand what they are trying to say and making it broad can help anyone and everyone understand that. I do think they could have approached it differently and maybe have used a bit different definition as I can see how this can describe any mental illness. Tmbtgx (talk) 01:50, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

::I also can see the intro having some gap content. It seems kind of misleading at the same time when it comes to the section I mentioned above and I can see how the readers could be confused on what exactly they should be getting from that intro. Tmbtgx (talk) 02:00, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

The whole world became witness recently of two professional psychotherapists having completely opposing views on the 'spectrum' and 'disorder' of the same individual. Nothing happened against any of them because they could both rely on the generalized nature of the guidelines that can easily mislead in court towards any 'spectrum' or 'disorder' because of the subjectivity and also broad nature of the guidelines. fs 07:49, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

:How mental health issues/phenomena are presented/used in court such as "Innocent by reason of insanity" and "Incompetent to stand trial" have little to do with the field of mental health, neither diagnosis and/or treatment. Like everything else about our criminal justice system, its twisted, bent and broken by lawyers, judges, and the law. Its - highly - unfortunate that Forensic Psychology is used for this purpose as it damages the general public's understanding and beliefs about mental health, intensifying the stigma, making it hard for those who have mental health issues from getting help and being supported by those around them regarding these issues. 129.228.28.197 (talk) 10:16, 8 November 2024 (UTC)

This article is so long and detailed - it's huge! Maybe it should be broken up? I have no idea how. — Preceding unsigned comment added by OsamaBinLogin (talk • contribs) 21:32, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

:I also agree this is a very very long article. I think being constructed into smaller topics and making those topics could be a good idea and even give the writer the option of finding better support for each topic they want to talk about. The classifications and symptoms part of the article is very long and I think this could be shortened some and made to where the writer can mention everything they do but make it a bit more brief to keep readers interested. Tmbtgx (talk) 01:54, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

Most of this article focuses on the psychiatric views of personality disorders but it could also be beneficial to include clinical, social work, and critiques (like someone else mentioned above) in the article as well so some research into other perspectives of personality disorders would be needed. The "Issues" section is not neutral language and should definitely change, it is also very vague. The categories "in the workplace", "in children","versus normal personality", and "openness to experience" feels like a random section that could use some revision to be neutral and updated information. For example, "in the workplace" the first paragraph is very vague and I think there is more research out there that could make that section more specific with updated information. Additionally, I like a section about the cluster and more depth topic about them could very informative for people reading this article to get a better understanding of personality disorders. While the clusers and personality disorders are mentioned throughout, having one centralized topic would be a lot easier for readers. There is a lot of information in this article and for it to have a C rating means it needs to be reviewed and revised on what is the important information is. All of the tables in the personality trait section could be useful but I'd want to look into that more to see if it could be condensed making it easier for readers to interpret. CeliaGrace (talk) 19:30, 23 February 2025 (UTC)

:If you wish to add information about clusters, I would consider checking out the section titled "DSM-5", as that specifically is where clusters and their descriptions belong, especially when taking into account that this article does not go into depth about previous editions of the DSM. While clusters are mentioned elsewhere in the article, they are DSM terminology. If that is unclear to readers, it could also be made more clear. This should also be in clear contrast to the ICD and AMPD, both of which do in fact not have clusters at all. In their cases, theoretically, we could also mention "severe impairment in the identity domain of personality functioning" (per AMPD terminology) or "moderate personality disorder with anankastia and borderline pattern" (ICD-11 terminology), in the case that these frameworks are used as the conceptual basis for research cited in the article.

:I have combined the five FFM tables into one table, in which they are by default collapsed, and the main table contains the abbreviations. Thus, all this information is neatly organized into a single package. Feel free to figure out how this one table could be better integrated into the text of the article. I get what you are pointing out here with regard to "Issues" as the name of a section (both vague and possibly too negative as a word, as well as possibly being a catch-all for what Wikipedians have added here throughout the years), and the heterogeneity of its content judging merely by headings. However, I believe that there should be a suggestion made and discussed here before anything overly radical is done. To counter my own point, also read WP:BEBOLD. Keep in mind that you need to cite sources throughout the content you add. For inspiration check how the already exiting content looks, and maybe some articles of even higher quality, such as of world leaders or the like (you get the point).

:Anyway, I am happy to see that student editors have come to contribute to this article. In this case, I seem to be replying after you assignment has already concluded; however, if you are willing to, and interested in, sticking around, I, and I believe many others, would appreciate the contribution of time and effort! BlockArranger (talk) 21:38, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

In my opinion the introduction is a little all over the place and a little hard to comprehend. I feel there is great information but it just isn't worded the best for everyone to get a good understanding. I was reading an article and think that their introduction was a lot better to understand and I definitely recommend using it along with parts if the introduction provided. I would add this part of their introduction (In everyday clinical practice persons who think, feel, behave, or relate to others differently than the average person are identified. This deviation from the norm is a central feature in all personality disorders (PDs). Although using slightly different formulations over the years, PDs are roughly characterized by ‘a pervasive pattern of thought, feeling and behaviour that characterize an individual’s unique lifestyle and mode of adaptation, which deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual’s culture’ (1). Such characteristics obviously create problems for those who bear them. PDs are likely to have an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, appear to be stable over time, and lead to impairment or distress) in place of the first two sentences of the introduction and leaving the rest of the introduction there. Now obviously this can be adjusted and made more simple but I truly think this gives a good understanding of personality disorders to where everyone can get a good grasp on the topic before diving into the article. I have attached the website I have sued to find this information and will also add it into the edit source portion of this article so it is properly cited. [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6327594/]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6327594/ Tmbtgx (talk) 03:20, 3 March 2025 (UTC)

:Hi Tmbtgx! Please feel free to improve the introduction (we called it the lead / lede). Make sure to avoid Wikipedia:Copyright violations though. As you are new, I also advise you to work in a step-by-step way. First improve a few sentences, then wait to see if come any reactions. If none come, then it all seems fine and you can work on a few more sentences. In this way, you avoid the risk of working for hours on something and then see it all reverted. Lova Falk (talk) 16:52, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

::Thank you for the suggested help since I'm new! Tmbtgx (talk) 02:34, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

{{dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment | course = Wikipedia:Wiki_Ed/Missouri_University_of_Science_and_Technology/Personality_Theory_(Spring_2025) | assignments = CeliaGrace, EmmaJac, Tmbtgx | reviewers = Maddy Offerman | start_date = 2025-01-21 | end_date = 2025-05-16 }}

— Assignment last updated by Bwlnp3 (talk) 18:04, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

I think it would make more sense to rename the article to personality disorders. Even the first sentence says personality disorder and article focuses on multiple disorders making it plural. CeliaGrace (talk) 22:17, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

:I suggest that you take a look at Wikipedia:Naming conventions (plurals). In general, Wikipedia has very good and extensively documented guidelines which you can follow. If you have a hard time finding them, I suggest you first discuss you proposal with an AI assistant with support for searching the web, including Wikipedia guidelines. BlockArranger (talk) 01:44, 21 April 2025 (UTC)