Personality Disorders: Crash Course Psychology #34

I can be smooth and charming and slick. I can make a very confident impression and

it's hard to leave me at a loss for words.

Sometimes I find myself fantasizing about unlimited success and power, and beauty.

I have repeatedly used deceit to cheat, con, or defraud others for my personal gain. To

be honest, I don't have much concern for the feelings of other people, or their suffering.

Doesn't sound like the Hank you know, does it?

These are all statements from the Self-Assessment measure for Personality Disorders, that lets

patients describe themselves, ranking each statement in terms of how accurate they think it is.

To be honest, you can't rely too much on this kind of self-reporting to assess what we are

talking about today because while some people who are over-confident or obsessed with power

or downright deceitful might tell you that they are, there is a certain subset that won't.

Many of the disorders that we have talked about so far are considered, "ego-dystonic"

meaning that people who have them are aware that they have a problem and tend to be

distressed by their symptoms.

Like a person with Bipolar Disorder or OCD generally knows that they have a psychological

condition and they don't like what it does to them.

But some disorders are trickier then that. They are "ego-syntonic," the person experiencing

them doesn't necessarily think that they have a problem and sometimes, they think the problem

is with everyone else.

Personality disorders fall into this category. These are psychological disorders marked by

inflexible, disruptive, and enduring behavior patterns that impair social and other functioning

-- whether the sufferer recognizes that or not.

Unlike many other conditions that we've talked about, personality disorders are often considered

to be chronic and enduring syndromes that create noticeable problems in life.

And as you can tell from these self assessment statements, they can range from relatively

harmless displays of narcissism, to a true and troubling lack of empathy for other people.

Not only can personality disorders be difficult to diagnose and understand, they can also

be downright scary. Most of the extreme and severe disorders go by names that you probably

recognize: psychopathy and sociopathy. I'm talking, like, serial killers here, mob bosses, Vlad the Impaler.

Cultures have been studying human personality characteristics for thousands of years, but