Personality Disorders and Their Treatment

1. Overview & Epidemiology

A personality disorder (PD) is "an enduring pattern of inner experience and behaviour that deviates markedly from the expectations of the individual's culture, is pervasive and inflexible, has an onset in adolescence or early adulthood, is stable over time and leads to distress and impairment" (Gajdos lecture; DSM definition). Personality features obey a normal distribution — PDs are the extremes of normal traits, not separate "diseases."

• Prevalence: up to ~20% of the general population (Gajdos); at least 15% of psychiatric outpatients and 10% of psychiatric inpatients. ~10% of public-hospital psychiatric inpatients have a PD as the