DEFINITION:
The phrase “personality disorder” refers to a category of mental illnesses characterized by long-standing and relatively inflexible patterns of negative affect, distorted cognition, and maladaptive behavior.
To qualify as a “personality disorder,” the psychological and behavioral patterns in question—which usually develop during childhood—must rise to the level of causing an individual a significant amount of distress or dysfunction in his normal daily routines.
ETYMOLOGY:
For the history of the medical use of the phrase “personality disorder,” see the discussion below.
For the etymology of the word “personality,” see the Glossary entry, personality.
For the etymology of the word “disorder,” see the Glossary entry, borderline personality disorder.
DISCUSSION:
The general idea of “personality disorder”—i.e., a relatively stable set of normal character traits in a pathological condition or combination—was introduced by the French physician Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) in his 1801 book, Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale [Medical-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Estrangement].
Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the concept personality disorder, as well as the phrase itself, attained increasing prominence through the works of Karl Friedrich Canstatt (1807–1850), Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), Emil Kraepelin(1856–1926), Sigmund Freud(1856–1939), Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939), and many others.
The terminology “personality disorder” gained official status with the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1952.
Over the course of the next six decades—as well as three updated editions of the DSM—the number of personality disorders described in the “Bible of psychiatry” continued to grow.
More recently, however, there has been a general trend towards pruning the concept of “personality disorder” to a central core of well-validated diagnostic categories, by eliminating those disorders that enjoy less empirical support.
This trend was particularly evident in the fifth edition of the DSM (DSM-5), published in 2013, from which several long-standing personality disorders were rejected.