Moderate personality disorder

Essential (Required) Features:

• All general diagnostic requirements for Personality Disorder are met.
• Disturbances affect multiple areas of functioning of the self (e.g., stability and coherence of identity, self-worth, self-direction; see Table 6.18) and are of moderate severity.
• There are marked problems in most interpersonal relationships and the performance of most expected social and occupational roles is compromised to some degree.
• Relationships are likely to be characterized by conflict, avoidance, withdrawal, or extreme dependency (e.g., few friendships maintained, persistent conflict in work relationships and consequent occupational problems, romantic relationships characterized by serious disruption or inappropriate submissiveness).
• Specific manifestations of personality disturbance are generally of moderate severity (see below for examples).
• Moderate Personality Disorder is sometimes associated with harm to self or others.
• Moderate Personality Disorder is associated with marked impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational or other important areas of functioning, although functioning in circumscribed areas may be maintained.

Examples of specific personality disturbances in Moderate Personality Disorder

Note: This list of examples is not exhaustive and not intended to suggest that all items will be present in any single individual.

• The individual’s sense of self may become incoherent in times of crisis.
• The individual has considerable difficulty maintaining positive self-esteem or, alternatively, has an unrealistically positive self-view that is not modified by evidence to the contrary.
• The individual exhibits poor emotion regulation in the face of setbacks, often becoming highly upset and giving up easily. Alternatively, the individual may persist unreasonably in pursuit of goals that have no chance of success.
• The individual may exhibit little genuine interest in or efforts toward sustained employment.
• Major limitations in the ability to understand and appreciate others’ perspectives hinder developing close and mutually satisfying relationships.
• There are persistent problems in those relationships that do exist. They may be characterized by frequent, serious, and volatile conflict, or be significantly unbalanced (e.g., the individual is highly dominant or highly submissive).
• Under stress there are marked distortions in the individual’s situational and interpersonal appraisals. There may be mild dissociative states or psychotic-like beliefs or perceptions (e.g., paranoid ideas).