Schizoid Personality Disorder | Hacker News Reader

Schizoid Personality Disorder

en.wikipedia.org

31 pointsbursted34 comments

That industry should be taken with a grain of salt, IMHO, because I'm pretty sure you can diagnose literally every person on Earth with _something_ in the DSM.

So, something there, but the methodologies and understanding can be lackluster?

Yes, that's a good way to put it

Maybe some "disorders" in the DSM should just be considered personality types.

You'll be surprised what seemingly benign chemicals like calcium do to peoples personality's. I call hard water and strong black tea, liquid cocaine!

Not a great argument - I'm pretty sure you can diagnose literally every person on Earth with _something_ in the ICD (International Classification of Diseases) as well (kind of cheating because mental health stuff is in there too, but still, even if you exclude that section).

You can diagnose someone with 20/20 vision and no sign of any eye problems with an eye disease? Do tell :)

The ICD isn't limited to eye diseases.

More seriously, I think you need to restrict your argument to a subset of medicine, otherwise your argument is actually just "there are other area(s) of medicine that also exhibit the same issue" which is not really a counterpoint to my original comment but instead an addition to it.

So we can discount psychology as a whole but need to pick and choose medicine? Why don't we consider the various areas of psychology as well instead of just throwing out the whole book?

I'm not sure, I just don't think that a textbook that can be used to diagnose everybody with a disease is very trustworthy. Kind of like how passing a law that can be used to arrest anybody is generally not a good idea, or something like that.

Which brings us back to my inital point - the ICD can be used to do the same thing, therefore medicine isn't very trustworthy.

I would be curious to know what percentage of the diseases in the DSM vs the ICD are based on empirical tests. Questionnaires are not empirical.

I don't think either of us know that, but I makes sense to start asking increasingly hard to answer question while you're pushing the goalpost around.

My original comment in this thread was how anyone could be diagnosed with something in the DSM, and usage of subjective methods is a major way that can happen, so it seems the goalpost didn't move at all.

On paper, in that every person exhibits some symptoms of some disorders to some degree? Yea, anyone will tick some of those boxes.

But are those symptoms long-lasting? Are they severe? Do they impede day-to-day life? Professional diagnosis isn’t like WebMD.

Yes, exactly. Those questions are determined by interactions between the patient and the provider, which is inherently subjective and therefore flawed.

Exactly, people forget that the critical criteria for diagnosis is whether the cognitive features prevent the individual from achieving his personal goals in life, or cause problems from those around him. And indeed, as the article says, schizoid individuals have significantly reduced quality of life and some of the lowest scores of life success among personality disorders. Without this, there would be no basis for diagnosis.

Why would that be a reason not to trust this field? I could understand this argument more if you were talking about a specific disorder being diagnosable in every person on earth--because how is that a disorder if it's the norm?--but you're very much not saying that.

As an example, would you consider dentistry untrustworthy as a whole just because dentists would diagnose almost every person with a cavity or some form of tooth or gum damage at some point in their lives?

Why is this on the front page? This is a well known disorder and unrelated to anything in the news today from what I can tell.

This site isn’t about topical events. In fact, the guidelines say that if the event is being discussed on TV, it probably doesn’t also belong here. Mainly, submissions are encouraged that are intellectually interesting.

What is the progress on moving away from the DSM? [1] "NIMH funding to shift away from DSM categories" From that article it sounds like their are a number of people and groups that can't agree on the value of DSM categories but they will continue to use it. Was it sunk cost? Fear of admitting mistakes leading to malpractice? Numerous categories have been removed throughout the revisions. I recall they created some controversy when removing homosexuality as a disorder. What scientific methods are used to add, change or deprecate a category?

[1] - https://www.apa.org/monitor/2013/07-08/nimh (2013)

RDOC is meant to provide a more objective, interoperable and feature focused approach. But its not very accessible

> in which the schizoid individual can express a great deal of feeling and make what appear to be impressive social contacts yet, in reality, gives nothing and loses nothing ... secret schizoids ... enjoy public speaking engagements but experience great difficulty during the breaks when audience members would attempt to engage them emotionally.

It makes me think psychiatrists have no clue what that schizoid type really is. Rather, they carefully document various semi-related mental qualities, put them in a box, label it DSM-42, and pretend they are doing science.

There seems to be a good deal of armchair skepticism in the comments. Psychiatry relies on identifying patterns in the kind of data that the average person lacks: observations that can only be made within the special social contract of therapy, or cognitive profiles that are statistically rare in the general population. Plus, all psychiatric disorders are necessarily on a spectrum, but the severe end tends to be pretty obvious. Schizoid personality disorder for example looks like this [0] (as a side note, I’m not sure about the ethics of publishing this on YouTube). I think once you see a good example, you realise it’s a pretty well defined condition.

[0] https://youtu.be/P2prjXdnfEU

It's wild how many people in here and elsewhere seem to be ignoring the "disorder" part and assume that any behavior that sounds like it matches the diagnostic criteria is qualifying, and either don't consider degree of impact on daily life or other disorders which might match them better. These aren't supposed to be treated like Myers-Briggs types.

Sounds virtually identical to any number of other so-called personality disorders brought to us by the field of psychiatry.

This is all very subjective and one man's autist seems to be another man's schizoid.

"The Divided Self" by RD Laing is interesting on this

Thanks for posting this. It's better than I remember.

Why hello there hypochondria, my old friend…

Someone with 15 karma gets this article on the front page yer I post this and nothing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36680252

What, is HN algorithm seeking psychiatric help?

Tbh your title is pretty boring. Everyone already knows that "Everything Is a Quantum Wave"

Your title is boring? Is that ad hominem?

The point is the weird mix that shows on the front page versus not.

The reputation system leads to an echo chamber that many consider boring.

No, in fact many people do not think that "Everything Is a Quantum Wave" and I was involved in a long discussion about it the other day right here on HN. which is why I thought more people would see this.

I know I have a bad rep here as my posting speed is severely throttled.

But I realize I need to focus my attention on my unusual need to talk and post here.

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