Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T18:45:18.710Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

20 - Personality Disorders and Traits

from Part II - Targets of Pharmacotherapy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2021

Joseph F. Goldberg
Affiliation:
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York
Stephen M. Stahl
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
Get access

Summary

No psychotropic drug has ever been developed specifically to treat any personality disorder, and the extent to which personality in all its developmental and biopsychosocial complexity even lends itself to the “disease” model – for which pharmacotherapy can be “reparative” – remains an open and debated issue. Personality represents the confluence of temperament, genetic predispositions, cohesion of identity, moral compass, interpersonal responsivity, and coping patterns that are shaped and developed over the course of early life experiences. Personality traits often reflect the interpersonally driven behavioral characteristics described in earlier chapters such as introversion/extroversion, internalizing/externalizing, aggression, harm avoidance/novelty-seeking, empathy and social cognition, antisocial behavior and interpersonal exploitativeness, and the use of developmentally primitive versus mature defense mechanisms. To the extent that personality traits may be maladaptive (e.g., impairing interpersonal effectiveness, leading to self-sabotage or self-harm) and are ego-dystonic, they represent targets for modification and change.

Type
Chapter
Information
Practical Psychopharmacology
Translating Findings From Evidence-Based Trials into Real-World Clinical Practice
, pp. 465 - 484
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×