Personality Disorders, Schizophrenia, Aspergers Syndrome

SITE SEARCH ENGINE

HOMEPAGE

BRIEF..DETAILS

FOR..PRINTING

TREATMENTS EXPLAINED

OTHER SERVICES

FEES..AND REFERRALS

CONSULTANT INFORMATION

CONSULTING ROOMS

AREA..MAP LOCATIONS

EMAIL now

MENTAL..HEALTH INFORMATION

OTHER HELPLINE ADDRESSES

PRINTED PAMPHLETS

LINKS PAGE

NEWS..AND FEATURES

FEEDBACK

Mental Health Information:

This page contains detailed information about:

personality disorders
schizophrenia
aspergers syndrome

These can all be treated by our specialists. Please feel free to print out a copy for your personal use.

Personality Disorders:

Personality disorders are pervasive chronic psychological disorders, which can greatly affect a person's life. Having a personality disorder can negatively affect one's work, one's family, and one's social life. Personality disorders exists on a continuum so they can be mild to more severe in terms of how pervasive and to what extent a person exhibits the features of a particular personality disorder.

There are ten different types of personality disorders that exist, which all have various emphases.

Antisocial Personality Disorder: Lack of regard for the moral or legal standards in the local culture, marked inability to get along with others or abide by societal rules. Sometimes called psychopaths or sociopaths.

Avoidant Personality Disorder: Marked social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and extremely sensitive to criticism.

Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) : Lack of one's own identity, with rapid changes in mood, intense unstable interpersonal relationships, marked impulsively, instability in affect and in self image.

Dependent Personality Disorder: Extreme need of other people, to a point where the person is unable to make any decisions or take an independent stand on his or her own. Fear of separation and submissive behavior. Marked lack of decisiveness and self-confidence.

Histrionic Personality Disorder: Exaggerated and often inappropriate displays of emotional reactions, approaching theatricality, in everyday behavior. Sudden and rapidly shifting emotion expressions.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Behavior or a fantasy of grandiosity, a lack of empathy, a need to be admired by others, an inability to see the viewpoints of others, and hypersensitive to the opinions of others.

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD): Characterized by perfectionism and inflexibility; preoccupation with uncontrollable patterns of thought and action.

Paranoid Personality Disorder: Marked distrust of others, including the belief, without reason, that others are exploiting, harming, or trying to deceive him or her; lack of trust; belief of others' betrayal; belief in hidden meanings; unforgiving and grudge holding.

Schizoid Personality Disorder: Primarily characterized by a very limited range of emotion, both in expression of and experiencing; indifferent to social relationships.

Schizotypal Personality Disorder: Peculiarities of thinking, odd beliefs, and eccentricities of appearance, behavior, interpersonal style, and thought (e.g., belief in psychic phenomena and having magical powers).

i) Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

BPD is a severe, chronic, disabling, and potentially lethal psychiatric condition. People who suffer with this disorder have extreme and long standing instability in their emotional lives, as well as in their behaviour and their self-image. This is a common disorder affecting 2% of the general population.

The instabilities of emotion, behaviour, and self-image have devastating and sometimes deadly consequences. People with BPD have repeated and frequent difficulties in their relationships and work lives and they feel alternating extremes of anger, depression, and emptiness. All too frequently, 69% to 75% of individuals with BPD resort to self-destructive behaviours such as self-mutilation, alcohol and drug abuse, serious over or under eating, and suicide attempts to attempt to escape from their emotional turmoil.

There are as many potential causes of personality disorders as there are people who suffer from them. They may be caused by a combination of parental upbringing, one's personality and social development, as well as genetic and biological factors. Research has not narrowed down the cause to any factor at this time.

What support is available?

Compounding the seriousness of Borderline Personality Disorder is that it is difficult to treat. The very characteristics of the disorder, such as unstable relationships and intense anger, interfere with establishing the therapeutic relationship that is necessary to any treatment, whether psychotherapy or medication. We do know, however, that these disorders will most often manifest themselves during increased times of stress and interpersonal difficulties in one's life. Therefore, treatment most often focuses on increasing one's coping mechanisms and interpersonal skills.

ii) Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder (OCPD)

This disorder is not like obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) which is characterised by obsessions and compulsions. People with obsessive-compulsivepersonality disorder do not have obsessions and compulsions. Their pre-occupation is not intense enough to be considered an obsession. The one word that best describes obsessive-compulsive personality is perfectionistic.

Individuals with this disorder are prone to depression, especially as they grow old and reflect on their lives. They realise they have not done or been everything they had hoped. This personality disorder occurs in about 1% of the population and twice as many men are diagnosed with it than women.

The three predominant traits associated with this disorder are:

Perfectionism : People with this disorder have inflexible ethical standards that they feel people, including themselves, should follow. They are hesitant to delegate work for fear that it will not be done to their exact specifications. Since, they are unwilling to settle for imperfection, the disorder requires organisation and discipline.

Preoccupation with orderliness : People with this disorder pay excessive attention to details, rules, lists, and schedules to the extent that a larger purpose is lost. They may get so involved in the process of working toward a goal that they never reach the goal.

Mental and interpersonal control : People with this disorder have difficulty in expressing warm emotions. Expressing these emotions would be a sign of emotional or mental weakness which they despise. Instead, they value emotional and mental control. Many of their thoughts begin with the words, "I should." They think rather than feel. When a person overanalyses things in an attempt to distance themselves from the attached emotion, it is called intellectualisation.

What support is available?

The best treatment for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder is individual psychotherapy to help them accept themselves and their limitations. This is often accompanied with behavior modification therapy to change inflexible behaviour patterns. Cognitive therapy as a technique for individual therapy has been found to be particularly effective because it directly addresses the person's illogical or rigid beliefs and suits the tendency to intellectualise things. Medications that ease depressive and anxiety symptoms often enhance the results of psychotherapy.

For a great booklet on personality disorders - click here .

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this booklet. (click logo for free download)

Schizophrenia:

The term schizophrenia was first used in 1911 by Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist, to categorise patients whose thought processes and emotional responses seemed disconnected. The term schizophrenia literally means split mind; however, many people still believe incorrectly that the condition causes a split personality (which is an uncommon problem involving dissociation). Schizophrenia is now used to describe a cluster of symptoms that typically include the following:

Delusions.

Hallucinations.

Disordered thinking.

Emotional unresponsiveness.

Because symptoms of schizophrenia arise from various physical processes and respond differently to treatments, some experts recommend classifying the disease based on the presence of the following symptom groups:

i) Negative Symptoms (include Apathy and Social Withdrawal).

ii) Positive Symptoms (include Psychotic symptoms [Hallucinations/Delusions] & Disordered Thinking).

The disease is complicated by the fact that although a schizophrenic patient may have more than one symptom, he or she rarely has all of them. Symptoms also often go into remission.

Negative Symptoms-reflect the following states:

Diminishment of the self.

Lack of emotions.

Colourless speaking tones.

A general loss of interest in life and the ability to experience pleasure.

Inappropriate affect (a condition in which the patient displays inappropriate reactions to an event (e.g., laughing hysterically over a loss).

Often certain negative symptoms (e.g., lack of responsiveness and poor sociability) appear in childhood as the first indications of schizophrenia.

In many patients, however, negative symptoms do not appear until after positive symptoms develop. Negative symptoms tend to be more common than positive symptoms in older patients and typically persist after positive symptoms have been treated.

Positive Symptoms:

These include both psychotic symptoms and disordered thinking:

Psychotic symptoms, particularly delusions and hallucinations, are the most widely recognized manifestations of schizophrenia. Delusions can be bizarre (e.g., invisible aliens have entered the room through an electric socket) or nonbizarre (e.g. the paranoid belief in being watched).

After the initial event, psychotic symptoms usually occur episodically and are interspersed with periods of remission.

Disordered Thinking (Cognitive Impairment)

These symptoms include the following and may occur before other symptoms of schizophrenia:

A lack of attention.

Impaired information processing and an aberrant association between words and ideas. Sometimes this condition is so extreme that speech becomes incoherent.

Patients may connect words because of similarity of sound, rather than by meaning, a condition known as "clang associations."

Memory impairment. In keeping with other aspects of disordered thinking, memory impairment in schizophrenia is likely to involve the inability to connect an event with its source into a complete and whole memory. For instance, a patient may recall and even feel a familiarity with a specific event but unable to remember where, when, how it took place.

Backward masking dysfunction. This is a trait in which a distraction causes a person to forget a preceding event.

In summary, people with schizophrenia do poorly on mental tasks requiring conscious awareness, such as verbal fluency, short-term and working memory, and processing speed. However, they are no worse than the general population in underlying (implicit) learning, such as grammar skills, vocabulary, and spatial skills (e.g., map reading).

What support is available?

No single cause can account for all cases of schizophrenia. Rather, it appears to be the result of multiple hits from genetic factors, environmental and psychological assaults, and possible hormonal changes that alter the brain's chemistry and trigger this devastating disease.

Schizophrenia is now officially categorised as a brain disease, not a psychologic disorder, and drug treatment (antipsychotic medications with monitoring) together with cognitive-behavioural therapy (which aims to reduce delusions and hallucinations) is the primary therapy.

The earlier schizophrenia is detected and treated, the better the outcome. Patients who receive antipsychotic drugs and other treatments during their first episode are hospitalized less frequently during the following five years and may require less time to control the symptoms than those who do not seek help as quickly.

Antidepressants and anti-anxiety agents may also play an important role in treating the patient with schizophrenia, particularly given the role of depression in the high rates of suicide among these patients.

Aspergers Syndrome:

Asperger's Disorder is a milder variant of Autistic Disorder. Both Asperger's Disorder and Autistic Disorder are in fact subgroups of a larger diagnostic category. This larger category is called Autistic Spectrum Disorders. In Asperger's Disorder, affected individuals are characterised by social isolation and eccentric behaviour in childhood. There are impairments in two-sided social interaction and non-verbal communication.

Though grammatical, their speech is peculiar due to abnormalities of inflection and a repetitive pattern. Clumsiness is prominent both in their articulation and gross motor behaviour. They usually have a circumscribed area of interest which usually leaves no space for more age appropriate, common interests. e.g. 19th century french pottery.

What support is available?

There is no specific course of treatment or cure for Aspergers Syndrome. Treatment may include both social and drug therapy.

Social therapies include psychotherapy, parent education and training, behavioural modification, social skills training, educational interventions

Medication includes psychostimulants, mood stabilizers, beta blockers, neuroleptics, and tricyclic antidepressants.

Due to the large number of enquiries about asperger - this section will soon include additional treatment information and links. (march 2003)