Psychology has been talking for decades about different personality types and how they influence our way of interpreting the world.
We can find two ways of dealing with this issue, on the one hand, professionals who describe types of normal personality and their predisposition to different physical diseases, such as the famous type A and type B personality, the former prone to cardiovascular diseases and stress. And the other way is to treat them like personality disorders.
But today we want to talk about this second point: personality disorders. Personality disorders are defined as a permanent, inflexible pattern of behavior that deviates greatly from expectations based on the person’s age and culture. That is, someone who does not behave as one would expect and who interprets the world in a different way. Over the years, some diagnostic categories that have had a lot of echo in our culture have disappeared, such as Multiple Personality Disorder, which has given rise to scripts for films as well-known as , but which today does not appear as such in manuals. diagnosis (DSM-V).
Were these disorders myths or realities? Its existence or not in the past, the scientific basis that creates the consensus that a psychopathology It has a set of its own characteristics, it is something difficult to assess. Currently, this diagnostic category has disappeared and we could see similar features in the Dissociative Personality Disorder. What is really interesting about this topic is observing to what extent the sociocultural changes that occur over the centuries correlate with clinical changes, changes in symptoms and mental disorders.
There are personality disorders that disappear from the manuals and others that emerge and become fashionable, such as the case of borderline personality disorder, one of the most diagnosed in recent times and one of the most difficult to treat. They are impulsive and unstable people who have great difficulties in their interpersonal relationships.
It is curious that the majority of the most diagnosed pathologies of the 21st century have as a common denominator impulsiveness. Such is the case of ADHD, TLPetc.
Returning to personality, we could say that there is a continuum that travels from personality disorder to mental illness; in many personality disorders there is a mental disorder at the opposite pole:
It seems that they are less serious manifestations of these pathologies.
Antisocial Disorder in the cinema
Another personality disorder that has been very popular in the movies and has given rise to multiple films in which any of the characters have this characteristic has been the antisocial disorder (or the psychopathas it is popularly known). movies like The silence of the lambs (1991), which show us the psychopath as someone very intelligent and special, who is also a serial killer. There are other films that have dealt with these topics, as you can see in the article “Films about psychology and mental disorders.” But what is true and false in all this?
The reality is that people who suffer from antisocial disorder often have problems with the law due to their tendency to commit minor criminal acts, which are very far from serial murders. There is a certain contempt and violation of the rights of others for personal benefit and without any feeling of guilt. But killing others is not usually their objective, it is therefore a mistaken attribution: people with antisocial disorder are not potential murderers.
We have also seen some characters with obsessive-compulsive disorder in the movies, this time quite faithful to the typical symptoms of this disorder. In Better… Impossible(1997), Jack Nicholson He plays a romance novel writer with a good arsenal of compulsions that he has to deal with on a daily basis. Although he obsessive-compulsive personality disorder differs somewhat from disorderobsessive-compulsive (OCD), is still a continuum in terms of severity and many of the symptoms are common: a pattern of concern for order, perfectionism and control. This type of personality disorder has been portrayed in thousands of tabletop movies, with people obsessed with work, order and perfectionism, who need to control their entire environment and who suffocate those around them.
Recapitulating: Towards a calm view of personality disorders
But the reality of this disorder goes further, because in its most serious extreme it can block the person in their daily life, due to their marked slowness in completing tasks. To do something perfect you must dedicate a lot of time to it, so much so that sometimes it is not feasible to finish it in a reasonable period of time, and this causes many times they do not start an activity because they know that they cannot do it the way they want, thus failing to do many things. things and giving the impression that they are unmotivated or lazy. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are many personality disorders that are reflected in our cinema, but the reality is that they are disorders that are difficult to treat and that greatly affect the daily life of the person who suffers from them.
Surely over the years, we will see some disorders that now exist disappear and new ones appear, because personality is not only genetic, it is also the result of a social and cultural context; It emerges from our beliefs and our interpersonal relationships… and consequently the catalog of disorders will hardly become a fixed image.
What personality disorders will define the century XXI?
