How does a personality disorder affect a community?

Answer 1

The word "does" in your question is perhaps inappropriate as the issue really is how "can" a person's personality disorder affect a community and that depends on what category of Personality Disorder (PD) is involved as well as what you really mean by "the community"; but also whether the person who has the PD has gained any position of power over the lives of others in his or her life.

Firstly just to clarify what a Personality Disorder or PD is, do not confuse the term with "personality trait". Only a very small percentage of the human population of Earth suffer from a PD. The term PD essentially means somebody who suffers from one or more of a group of conditions characterized by their general failure to learn from their experiences in their life or to adapt appropriately to changes. The specific types of PD are divided into 3 groups although and there is very often an overlap among types. Other answers on Wikianswers have covered these types so I will not try to expand that information in this answer.

I will merely say, in the majority of cases people who have disorders in their personality that are untreated invariably suffer considerable personal distress themselves throughout their life. Their inappropriate behaviour caused by their PDs will usually make them be disliked or hated by those they encounter and make them total failures. This is particularly so in their having extreme difficulty in getting or keeping a job due their problems with workplace discipline caused by the PD. In many cases they will become involved in criminal activity which may well adversely affect the community they live in until they are caught and perhaps imprisoned, where they can no longer have any effect on a community.

But it is very wrong to assume anyone with a PD as necessarily harmful to others! Perhaps 90% of people with PDs have little or no involvement with communities and are often well meaning if sadly misunderstood people within their community. The individual with a PD will very often be a loner who keeps themself to themself. So a community is unlikely to be affected. In some cases the PD sufferer will develop other mental health issues brought about by his or her behaviour and conduct. Tragically a high proportion of sufferers of PDs end up harming themselves or taking their own life because of the unhappy situations in their life their PD has caused.

But considering PDs overall, generally speaking if somebody has a schizoid, avoidant, self-defeating or borderline personality disorder, he or she is unlikely to ever cause any problems for a community other than him or herself and in some cases, the partner and/or immediate family of the PD sufferer.

But in the case of somebody who has an anti social , paranoid , narcistic, sadistic and/or, histrionic personalty disorder, that person's PD can create considerable problems for communities, but only if that person somehow gains a position of authority over others as can happen in a few cases who gets away with abusing that power at the expense of those subservient to or of lower status hierarchically to him. Doing my conscription in the British forces, I encountered an Officer who had an acute antisocial and sadistic PD, meaning he enjoyed extreme deviant pleasure from making life hell for others at basic training in the forces. His PD brought about extreme misery for hundreds of young recruits, involving punishments and unhappiness.

There are also recorded cases of managers or directors of companies or headmasters of schools who also apparently suffered from severe PDs which led to terrible misery for staff under them or else pupils until the person with the PD was stopped.

But surely the most horrendous example of a PD that really did create the most extreme problems involving unhappiness to a community is the PD a certain infamous person named Adolf Hitler had? From studies on his life, it seems he had a blend of an anti social , paranoid , narcistic and histrionic PDs, but also had a charisma that led to him becoming the evil dictator or Fuhrer everybody knows about.

The consequence of Hitler's PD on "the community" was the deaths of at least eleven million people including two-thirds of the entire Jewish population of Europeand between 200,000 and 1,500,000 Romani people, two million Polish people over 3 million Russian prisoners of war and very many millions of members of communities Hitler disapproved of. These included communists, homosexuals, freemasons, members of religious cults like Jehovas Witnesses and trade unionists. Many millions of members of these communities ended their life being slaughtered in concentration and extermination camps, ghettos, and through mass executions . Many thousands of others died of starvation or disease or while working as slave labourers. Hitleris the most extreme example of just how terrible the consequences to a community of one man's personality disorders can be.