A recent headline blared that 1 in 5 young adults have a personality disorder.
Is that really true? Psychiatry fellow Maria over at intueri takes a look at the study and questions the findings.
She takes issue with the broad definition of a “psychiatric condition” and wonders if the vagueness of the diagnosis “encompasses too much of the variation of normal,” which “[does] more harm than good.”
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This study has provoked a lot of comment. Another psychiatrist’s reaction (mine) is the current post at Ars Psychiatrica.
Not everyone who meets DSM-IV criteria for something necessarily needs treatment or constitutes a disorder in a clinically important way. If a person learns to work around it to function in a way that is livable for them and they don’t want to do anything to change it, then, whatever the rest of us think if their life, that is not a clinical issue.
Some “disorders” that are clinicially significant in one person constitute a mere “quirk” in another–at the same objective symptom level.
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