General Personality Disorder
A. An enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual's culture.
1. Cognition (i.e., ways of perceiving and interpreting self, other people, and events).
2. Affectivity (i.e, the range, intensity, lability and appropriateness of emotional response).
3. Interpersonal functioning
4. Impulse control.
B. The enduring pattern is inflexible and pervasive across a broad range of personal and social situations.
C. The enduring pattern leads to clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
D. The pattern is stable and of long duration, and its onset can be traced back at least to adolescence or early adulthood.
Diagnostic Features
Personality traits are enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself that are exhibited in a wide range of social and personal contexts. only when personality traits are inflexible and maladaptive and cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress do they constitute personality disorders.
Development and Course
The features of a personality disorder usually become recognizable during adolescence or early adult life.
Culture-Related Diagnostic Issues
Judgments about personality functioning must take into account the individual's ethnic,cultural, and social background.
Differential Diagnosis
Other mental disorders and personality traits. Many of the specific criteria for the personality disorders describe features (e.g., suspiciousness, dependency, insensitivity) that are also characteristic of episodes of other mental disorders.
Psychotic disorders. for the three personality disorders that may be related to the psychotic disorders (i.e., paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal), there is an exclusion criterion stating that the pattern of behavior must not have occured exclusively during the course of schizophrenia, a bipolar of depressive disorder with psychotic features, or another psychotic disorder.
