Cluster C personality disorders
These are personality disorders characterized by anxious, fearful thinking or behavior and include:1.Avoidant personality disorder
Antisocial personality disorder is a mental health condition in which a person has a long-term pattern of manipulating, exploiting, or violating the rights of others. This behavior is often criminal.
People with avoidant personality disorder often consider themselves to be socially inept or personally unappealing and avoid social interaction for fear of being ridiculed, humiliated, rejected, or disliked. Childhood emotional neglect and peer group rejection are both associated with an increased risk for the development of AvPD.
Avoidant personality disorder is characterized by feelings of extreme social inhibition, inadequacy, and sensitivity to negative criticism and rejection. Yet the symptoms involve more than simply being shy or socially awkward. Avoidant personality disorder causes significant problems that affect the ability to interact with others and maintain relationships in day-to-day life.
Symptoms
• Hypersensitivity to criticism or rejection
• Feeling inadequate
• Social isolation
• Extreme shyness in social situations
• Timidity
Causes
People with an antisocial or alcoholic parent are at increased risk. Far more men than women are affected. The condition is common among people who are in prison.
While the exact causes of this disorder are unknown, environmental and genetic factors have been implicated. Genetic factors are suspected since the incidence of antisocial behavior is higher in people with an antisocial biological parent.
Genetic factors and environmental factors, such as child abuse, are believed to contribute to the development of this condition.
Environmental factors are believed to contribute to the development of antisocial personality disorder since a person whose role model had antisocial tendencies is more likely to develop the disorder.
Diagnosis:
Both diagnosis and treatment plan take into account a patient's previous medical and neurologic history. Special attention is paid to stress management, fitness and diet.
A diagnosis for antisocial personality disorder is made by a mental health professional comparing your symptoms and life history . They will make a determination whether your symptoms meet the criteria necessary for a personality disorder diagnosis.
Social phobia and avoidant personality disorder have similar diagnostic criteria and may share a similar causation, subjective experience, course, treatment, and identical underlying personality features, such as shyness
Psychotherapy is the most effective treatment for APD. The goal of psychotherapy is to help you identify your unconscious beliefs about yourself and how others see you. It also aims to help you function better in your social and work lives. Two types of psychotherapy your mental health therapist might use include:
Psychodynamic therapy is a form of talk therapy that helps you become self-aware about your unconscious thoughts and how your past experiences are influencing your current behavior. This allows you to examine and resolve past emotional pains and conflicts.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a goal is to then replace them with healthier ones.tThe herapist will encourage you to examine and test your thoughts and beliefs to determine if they have a factual basis.
Medication
Your doctor may prescribe antidepressant medications to help reduce your sensitivity to rejection. Medication is not a replacement for psychotherapy, but it can help relieve symptoms while you undergo therapy. A combination of therapy and medication might be the most effective treatment option.
2.Dependent personality disorder
Dependent personality disorder is a mental health condition in which people depend too much on others to meet their emotional and physical needs. It is an enduring pattern of distorted thought, behavior, and life functioning. Individuals with this type of personality disorder are more prone to experience anxiety disorders and affects a greater number of women than men.
People who suffer from AVPD often consider themselves socially unsuccessful and tend to remove themselves from social situations in order to avoid the feeling or the risk of feeling rejected by others.They may feel trapped in the relationship and frustrated by their loved-one's tendency to pull them away from family, friends and other "everyday" social settings.
Moreover they feel pressure to protect them from criticism or to create an artificial or ideal environment around them in which they can escape the risk of negative self-thought.
People who suffer from AVPD may use withdrawal as a form of communication or as a form of emotional control over friends, partners and family members.
Symptoms:
• Excessive dependence on others
• Submissiveness toward others
• A desire to be taken care of
• Tolerance of poor or abusive treatment
• Urgent need to start a new relationship when one has ended
Causes:
Researchers today don’t know what causes dependent personality disorder.
The disorder usually begins in childhood.There are many theories, however, about the possible causes of dependent personality disorder. Most professionals subscribe to a biopsychosocial model of causation — that is, the causes of are likely due to biological and genetic factors, social factors and psychological factors .If a person has this personality disorder, research suggests that there is a slightly increased risk for this disorder to be “passed down” to their children.
It is one of the most common personality disorders and is equally common in men and women.
Diagnosis:
IA diagnosis of DPD must be distinguished from borderline personality disorder, as the two share common symptoms. In borderline personality disorder, the person responds to fears of abandonment with feelings of rage and emptiness. With DPD, the person responds to the fear with submissiveness and seeks another relationship to maintain his or her dependency.
A diagnosis for dependent personality disorder is only made after comparing your symptoms and life history
Treatment
Talk therapy is considered to be the most effective treatment. Treatment involves long-term psychotherapy with a therapist that has experience in treating this kind ofpersonality disorderThe aim is to help people with this condition make more independent choices in life.
Because personality disorders affect thoughts, behaviors, and interpersonal relationships,cognitive-behavioral therapy is often very effective. This type of therapy helps individuals develop new ways of thinking, behaving, and communicating.
Medications:
Medicines may help treat other mental health conditions, such as anxiety or depression, that occur along with this disorder.It must be prescribed to help with specific troubling and debilitating symptoms. Certain types of drugs such as antidepressants, sedatives and tranquilizers are often prescribed for patients with dependent personality disorder to treat co-occurring conditions.
3.Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder characterized by unreasonable thoughts and fears (obsessions) that lead you to do repetitive behaviors (compulsions),orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency.
Individuals with Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder may have difficulty in deciding which tasks take priority or what is the best way of doing some particular task that they may never get started on anything.They are prone to become upset or angry in situations in which they are not able to maintain control of their physical or interpersonal environment, although the anger is typically not expressed directly.
With obsessive-compulsive disorder, you may realize that your obsessions aren't reasonable, and you may try to ignore them or stop them. But that only increases your distress and anxiety. Ultimately, you feel driven to perform compulsive acts in an effort to ease your stressful feelings Their everyday relationships have a formal and serious quality, and they may be stiff in situations in which others would smile and be happy (e.g., greeting a lover at the airport). They carefully hold themselves back until they are sure that whatever they say will be perfect. They may be preoccupied with logic and intellect.
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Symptoms
• Preoccupation with orderliness and rules
• Extreme perfectionism
• Desire to be in control of situations
• Inability to discard broken or worthless objects
• Inflexibility
Causes
Researchers today don’t know what causes obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Most professionals subscribe to a biopsychosocial model of causation — that is, the causes of are likely due to biological and genetic factors, social factors.
Faulty parenting has been viewed as a major factor in the development of personality. By people with personality disorders did not have parents who were emotionally warm toward them.
If a person has this personality disorder, research suggests that there is a slightly increased risk for this disorder to be “passed down” to their children
Diagnosis:
In many cases the person with OCPD is unaware of the discomfort that his or her stubbornness and rigidity cause other people, precisely because these traits usually enable them to get their way with others.
Diagnosis of OCPD depends on careful observation and appropriate assessment of the individual's behavior; The differential diagnosis will include distinguishing between obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and OCPD. People with OCPD are preoccupied primarily with managing (however inefficiently) the various tasks they encounter in their daily lives.
It may also be complicated by the fact that behaviors similar to OCPD may be normal variants within a given culture, occupation, or religion; however, in order to fulfill criteria for the personality disorder, the behaviors must be sufficiently severe as to impair the patient's functioning.
Treatment:
Treatments include cognitive behavioral psychotherapy, behavioral therapies, and medications.
Behavioral therapies for OCD include ritual prevention and exposure therapy. Prevention of rituals involves a mental-health professional helping the OCD sufferer to endure longer and longer periods of resisting the urge to engage in compulsive behaviors.
Exposure therapy is a form of behavior modification that involves the individual with OCD getting in touch with situations that tend to increase the OCD sufferer's urge to engage in compulsions, then helping him or her resist that urge.
Cognitive/behavioral therapists help patients change the negative styles of thinking and behaving that are often associated with the anxiety involved with obsessive compulsive disorder.
.Medications
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) are the medications that are most commonly used to treat OCD. These medications increase the amount of the neurochemical serotonin in the brain.
Newer, often called atypical, neuroleptic medications like the ones named above tend to cause fewer side effects than many of the older medications in this class.
Mood stabilizers like carbamazepine (Tegretol), divalproex sodium (Depakote), and lamotrigine (Lamictal) are sometimes used to treat OCD
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