Posted by happyflower on June 27, 2006, at 14:12:49
In reply to Re: » happyflower, posted by Dinah on June 27, 2006, at 12:13:19
> Current thinking is that many "personality disorders" are actually characteristic ways of dealing with underlying biological problems.
What we were taught is that personality disorders ARE biological or physical problems in the brain and do not go away like mood and anxiety disorders. We were taught almost the exact opposite. We were taught that mood and anxiety disorders are characteristic ways of dealing with a personality disorder. But most do not have a personality disorder, who have mood and anxiety disorders.But now they need to "discover" how to control the biological stuff. I think they would be a huge field of study to get into. Just look what they discoverd about depression, and now there are drugs to help. But from what I was taught is that the meds that are currently out there for personality disorders don't work very well.
< In other words, they're linking borderline personality disorder to mood reactivity that is biological in basis. Have you read about the physostygmine challenge?
Gotta check out about this, haven't read it.
> So medications that control the underlying mood disorder, along with therapy that also seeks to deal with the mood dysregulation can be very helpful.The meds help the mood disorder and may help this part of a person, but the personality disorder still needs to be dealt with somehow.
> They've also noticed that relatives of people with schizophrenia are more likely to exhibit "personality disorders" such as schizotypal or schizoid. And OCPD is so often a response to anxiety that the underlying anxiety disorder really needs to be treated.Yup, we learned this too. We were told that anxiety can bring out schizophrenia to people predisposed to the disorder. I just find this stuff so facinating! ;-)
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> So that personality disorders can be a response to biological disorders.I am not sure what you mean about biological disorders? Are you talking about mood and anxitey disorders? If this is what you mean, then no we didn't learn this in class. But then again it is just an intro class. What I like about our instructor is that she would go deaper into just the basic stuff in the book . I really learned a lot, but I know that I have much to learn if I deceide to study psychology. The thing that really surprised me was how much "nature" affects a person, I thought it was more "nurture", but I have changed my mind now.
> I think there's a lot of bias out there towards people with personality disorders and it might be more of a problem with frustration from professionals that don't have the proper tools than it is lack of treatability.I think another problem too is that this information is always changing so fast that if a T doesn't keep up, they will not know the new stuff.
Just this year they have a pill for people who are suffering from PTSD to take after a tragic event to help "forget" the event. It isn't approved or anything yet. They even say it works on past tragic events, like Vietnam. This would be a HUGE thing!
I think what my instructor was commenting on is that there are meds out there for personality disorders, but they just don't work good enough or cause very bad side effects. Like the meds for schizo, it controls that, but it also can give you alzhimzers too. So they have a lot of work to do in this field. (thank goodness they stoped doing labotomies) But yet they don't do ECT much anymore when it was proven that it works very well on severely depressed people with less side effects than the common pills used to treat depression.
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> We're learning more every day about the brain. Maybe one day these arbitrary divisions will be softened.I hope you are right, Dinah. :-)
poster:happyflower
thread:661741
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20060623/msgs/661866.html