Category: Archive

Things written when I was younger and dumber.

Personality Disorders 101 : How are PDs diagnosed?

1 June 2018 / Sinead

The study of psychological differences and “abnormal” behaviour has received more public attention than many other branches of psychology, but this attention isn’t always beneficial. “Abnormal” behaviour is associated with sensationalist news headlines more than sensible conversation. As a result, people often know about psychological conditions through their portrayals in mass media, rather than from factual explanations.

Of the many psychological differences, the category of personality disorders is most frequently misunderstood. The individual personality disorders (PDs) are often mis-represented, while the idea of a “disordered personality” sparks criticism from anti-psychiatry groups and people diagnosed with PDs.

So what are PDs, and what do we mean by “personality” in this context?

Currently, personality disorders are defined as groups of traits, experiences and behaviours that are significantly different from the majority of people; that affect someone’s thinking, emotions and impulses; and are associated with personal distress and dysfunction. These general criteria needs to be met for any PD diagnosis.

So to be diagnosed with a PD, someone needs to have a collection of unusal behaviours and traits which affects a large portion of their everyday life. Those behaviours and traits must start before early adulthood. They need to cause negative consequences for the person, who should be upset by or annoyed at those behaviours. The name “personality disorder” attempts to represent how far-reaching and impactful those behaviours and experiences are upon almost every aspect of the person’s understanding of themselves and their ability to relate to others.

“Delaying the Inevitable”- Pessimism in mental health support

30 August 2017 / Sinead

Trigger Warning: This whole post is about themes of suicidal thoughts and responses to them. There isn’t anything graphic or too detailed, but don’t read this post if that theme’s not a good idea for you.

I have a strange history with the word inevitable. One one hand, it’s a warning sign. It’s the red flag which warns me I’m about to lose days to the thoughts rattling around my head and blocking everything I care about. When I start to believe that returning to the past is inevitable, that failure is guaranteed while everything good that’s happened since was just temporary solace- that’s how I know a bad time is imminent. When things are bad, the word inevitable gets lodged in my mind, poisoning everything I experience. But at one point, the phrase “delaying the inevitable” was the most helpful thing I’d heard for months.

Resources

31 May 2016 / Sinead

I’m a digital hoarder. Right now my laptop has thousands of hours of unplayed games on it, hundreds of archived podcasts and as many unread articles and eBooks.

With the amount of tutorials and resources stored and accessible on there, a motivated person could learnt how to do anything they wanted by now. I’ve barely done anything. I’ve had free access to so much knowledge and ignored almost all of it.

My Diagnosis (or lack of) Experience…

12 January 2016 / Sinead

I finally got a phonecall back from the CMS, but it wasn’t the phonecall I expected.

In the last appointment, C3 seemed like she understood what I meant and was happy to talk to her team about sorting out what I can do next. But the phonecall was a lot more negative.

Firstly, she said that she didn’t want to progress further as I only met some of the criteria and not others. Considering depersonalisation disorder (the closest thing I could see to my experiences, and what I wanted to focus on) is basically defined by experiencing depersonalisation that causes negative effects and isn’t caused by anything else – in other words, exactly what I experience, and what I tried to explain to her is probably the thing underlying everything else- I don’t really see how she could have reached that conclusion.

The Year of Gaming…

20 December 2015 / Sinead

Yesterday, Xbox sent out round-up emails with stats about our year in Xbox. Usually, I’m interested in that kind of thing, but reading these stats was uncomfortable.

I’m in the top 5% for amount played, at about 1500 hours in 2015. I honestly didn’t expect to be that high a percentile, more like 15/20%. That number annoys me- at least 1/3 of those hours happened as deliberate escapism or inertia. What could I have done with them instead?

The first argument I’m using to justify it is “I don’t play as much as my friends do”. This is kind of true as amongst my group I had the lowest hours, and some had double the hours I did. However, the gap between my time and theirs is smaller than I expect. I’ve been the last person online at night quite a lot, even on nights where I was intending to do something else.

My Diagnosis Experience, Part 5

16 December 2015 / Sinead

Yesterday, I finally had my appointment with C3.

Leading up to yesterday, I’ve been nervous about going back, more so than if I was seeing a stranger. The nerves are mostly from not knowing how she would interpret me, based on her unexpected assessment last time. Because all I remembered from before was the more negative parts, like the conversations I ended up confused by and L’s reaction to meeting her, I was expecting a bad experience. Instead she was friendly, and she remembered me to some extent; asking about church and uni.

Public Engagement?

24 November 2015 / Sinead

In the first year of undergraduate uni, most of us knew what psychology was, and knew what we were studying. If we didn’t, why would we have signed up to study it? Then the further we got through uni, the less sure we were about what psychology actually was, and what we were studying.

Now, the exact same thing is happening with sci-comm. Does this apply to lots of other subjects? Do geographers or chemists start uni and then discover they have no idea what geography or chemistry is?

The cause of this confusion was spending the last week reading up on “public engagement with science”, as it’s the topic for our first exam. So far, the more I read, the more frustrated I get. Everything seems like an infinite loop of dependent ideas. For one thing, even defining it is hard; “public”, “engagement”, and even “science” don’t have one clear meaning. Another is that public engagement with science is supposed to be a rejection of the “deficit model”- the idea that the public were empty containers, ignorant of science, who would understand science if teachers poured in the facts.

Dissociative Disorder Diagnosis Adventure

20 March 2015 / Sinead

For people in the UK, there are two ways to go about investigating dissociative disorders (using that as the catch-all term for everything on the dissociative symptom spectrum).

The first option to to straight-out ask your GP, if you have an alright relationship with them. As the majority of GP’s won’t be knowledgeable about dissociation, that will probably involve bringing some information about it to the appointment. It would also be best to specifically asking for a referral to the Clinic for Dissociative Studies, rather than a local psychologist.

If you’re not sure how your GP will respond, or want extra support in the decision beforehand, then another option is to contact the Pottergate Centre, a dissociation-focused organisation with an office in Norwich, UK. They have an online contact option, where you can get two dissociation screening tests from them, and send the tests back to them to be analysed, all for free. You can then take the results, and their analysis, to your GP- they will also include extra information about dissociation with the results.

This method, asking the Pottergate Centre, is how I’m taking my first steps into exploring whether my experiences fit a dissociative disorder, and if so, whether getting a diagnosis is a good idea.