Are personality disorders controversial

Answer 1

No I would not say so there is anything controversial about the idea that certain people have a problem with their personality clinically termed as "a disorder" among mental health professionals but it may sometimes be true that people who have a disorder with their personality controversially fail to understand that fact.

But as the whole idea of personality disorders can be misunderstood in society in general, can I briefly explain what the term really means. Basically as some people grow up, parts of their personality can develop in ways that make it difficult for them to live with other people or live with themselves. There is no general agreement about what causes a personality disorder (PD). There are a number of different theories and debate and research continues; but PDs can take various forms and be manifested in different ways in different people ranging from weird behaviour, to acute anxiety and sometimes inability for them to function independently, to excessively dramatic behaviour to feeling a need to be abusive or antisocial to everybody else they encounter in their life.

Fundamentally the real point is that people with PDs just do not seem able to learn from their bad experiences that happen to them. That has the potential to make them failures and experience a lot of personal distress during their life. So people with PDs very often find it difficult to make friends or keep close relationships, to keep out of trouble with discipline or the law, to control their feelings or behaviour, to listen to others and to get on with people at work. So PD essentially equates to intense unhappiness.

That is what basically spawns the term "personality disorder' in mental health diagnosis PD fundamentally defining the group of conditions in humans characterized by this general failure to learn from experiences in their life or to adapt appropriately to changes so you may be diagnosed as having a borderline PD, or an antisocial PD, or sadistic PD, or schizoid PD or schizotypal PD or histrionic PD or more controversially perhaps a masochistic or self-defeating PD. In many cases a person with a PD may experience sexual excitement in conjunction with a fantasy world or real world experience involving their PD.

But by the word "controversial in your question, perhaps you mean people with PDs often just do not seem to understand what it is about themselves they need to try to change or how they need to modify their future behaviour in their own best interests.

So if you think you may have a PD issue but do not want to talk about it with anybody else you can do a mental health assessment of yourself totally confidentially on line on such internet websites as "Psychology Today" and perhaps you can discover things about yourself you were just not aware of previously. But which others have noticed about you. If you do have a PD you really can benefit from treatment by seeing your doctor and asking to be referred to a mental health professional. PDs may be treated by counselling, by individual psychotherapy and behaviour therapy.