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Comment by metacritic12 | Hacker News Reader

I agree that psychologists too readily dismiss people who are weird as having a disorder.

Any non-nomrmal behaviour, taken to an extreme, can cause a disorder in the sense that that person can't function (e.g. to keep herself fed and employed). This means unless we literally are the most average person, we all have the starts of a disorder. It does not mean we have a disorder because it's the magnitude that makes it a disorder.

Genuine question: in this case, what is in fact the disorder? Reading through the description of Schizoid, they like to be alone, they don't meet people's emotional expectations -- these don't sound like disorders.

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Behaviors become disorders when they severely affect your ability to function. “In society” is often added.

The “in society” is a sticking point for many people because a great many diagnoses are only disorders due to modern society or cultures.

Some disorders are largely independent of culture. Severe executive function problems are on par with more visible disabilities. Even if having vision from God are acceptable, a bipolar person will be clearly marked as ”not normal” in any culture.

Such approach assigns disproportionate importance to conformance at the cost of integrity.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

> Genuine question: in this case, what is in fact the disorder?

To quote from Appendix B of the Jargon file (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/weaknesses.html):

"Many hackers have noticed that mainstream culture has shown a tendency to pathologize and medicalize normal variations in personality, especially those variations that make life more complicated for authority figures and conformists. [...] [T]hus, any social system that depends on authority relationships will tend to helpfully ostracize and therapize and drug such ‘abnormal’ people until they are properly docile and stupid and ‘well-socialized’."

It's bad for marketing too: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/adults-wi...

Oh, wait, pharma marketing, waaaaiiit... So, a mortal enemy of big pharma.

It's been described as "the personality disorder that lacks a personality". It's a deficit disorder, because the person lacks certain traits that you'd expect to see in a "normal" person.

It meets the requirements for a disorder, since it's a deviation from social norms and can interfere with a person's life to various degrees. SzPD doesn't get a lot of attention, so the diagnosis itself isn't desperately well developed. It's more of a baffling psychological curiosity to many. Something they don't quite know how to deal with.

Conformance is personality now? Your normie lens are too thick.

I'm talking about a clinical definition of a "personality disorder".

> A personality disorder is a way of thinking, feeling and behaving that deviates from the expectations of the culture, causes distress or problems functioning, and lasts over time.[1]

What I personally think wasn't stated and is not relevant to my point.

[1] https://psychiatry.org/patients-families/personality-disorde...

First line at your link:

>Personality is the way of thinking, feeling and behaving that makes a person different from other people.

So tell me how SPD lacks a personality. A person without a personality would be indistinguishable from other people.

If you read the definition of SPD, it doesn't quite satisfy the definition of disorder, nothing there implies distress or problems. Deviations are expected alright, because people are different. Seems to not care? It's not an expectation of the culture that you're entitled to be relevant everywhere, you're relevant only where you earned it, and care about praise is deeply personal.

Disorders aren't intended to dismiss, they diagnose based on a standard criteria and can provide a toolset for care (if desired).

And unfortunately in the US, a diagnosis is often required to continue seeking therapy (due to insurance requirements).

Schizoid personality disorder disorder is a set of criteria that can probably be described as "extreme introversion" — it's a disorder in the sense that this isn't the norm in society. What someone decides to do with that information is up to them; some choose to do nothing and that's ok.

No, Schizoaffective disorder is when someone displays the symptoms of schizophrenia and also the symptoms of a mood disorder (bipolar, depression). You're likely thinking of schizoid personality disorder, which is characterized by solitary behavior and lack of attachments.

Ah yes you're right, my mistake. I've edited my post. Thank you.

communication becomes impossible in extreme cases - there are too many prior assumptions in a typical conversation between humans for it to occur without the ability to orient in a shared reference frame.

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