Personality Disorders;Are they curable...

I don't think they are curable. But who am I to say so? I don't know anything. lol

I don't know if they can be cured or not. But they are treatable... only time will tell.

Personally, I don't think they're curable. I'm also split on whether they're treatable. I think a lot of the problem with treating it has to do with which PD you're talking about. A Narcissist might appear to be getting better, but are they really? Or are they just manipulating the therapist? Unlike a phobia, for example, treating a PD is basically trying to change the whole essence of a person. It might be possible to change an apple into a pear, but it won't be easy.

personality disorders of the more selfish side like borderline or narcism cant admit fault to themself so that makes it very hard for them to change. avoidents however i think can take a good look at themselfs and see what they are doing that is damaging to their life and how they would like to change it so yea it can definately be improved up, i dont know about removed completely but maybe thats not nessasry anyway.. anything that involved changing an ingrained way of thinking is going to be a slow process with alot of effort but it can be done if yyour willing to, i know i have changed alot over the years because people have told me so.

It depends on what you mean by curable. If you mean, change the personality entirely (such as making an avoidant not only capable of basic social interaction with minimal anxiety but very sociable and extrovert), definitely not. I do think any PD is curable if you mean minimizing it until it becomes more of the personality style rather than the personality disorder and the person can manage their life with minimal difficulty.

Current methods in psychology I think are mostly inadequate for dealing with PDs and difficult cases of other disorders like depression. Of course, they wouldn't be difficult cases otherwise. All disciplines always evolve and develop further ideas and schools of thought and psychology is a discipline that doesn't even have a very strong basis yet. All of this doesn't mean I think PDs are incurable, just that we'll probably have to wait sometime for more reliable cures, though there will always be some success in the meanwhile. Already, there have been people saying that DBT (dialectical behavioral therapy) is great for Borderline PD.

I don't even think it is impossible to cure Cluster B disorders. We'd certainly at least need more research to make it definite. You can't just declare something impossible before doing proper, thorough research and attempts at therapy. Even if this is found out eventually, such disorders should be removed from the DSM as they would no longer have any practical user in psychology, and you do have to be careful with the balance between helping people and judging "normalcy." I think it is often a bit too much to call anyone a monster either, they are human deep down somewhere, even if they refuse to act that way. Of course, if you do come across a potentially harmful person, the best thing to do is to keep yourself away from them and stand up to their behavior as necessary. It doesn't matter if they have a disorder or not, and ignoring them will feed their behavior far less than anything else you can do.

Anyways, enough mindless rambling. The American Psychological Association has a nice summary of an interesting article concerning some research that looked into the possibility of PDs changing, for anyone who is interested.

"Personality disorders may change over time":
http://www.apa.org/monitor/dec04/personality.html

Another, related article on developing PD treatment:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar04/treatment.html

Lost Girl wrote:

Incorrigible wrote:Personally, I don't think they're curable. I'm also split on whether they're treatable. I think a lot of the problem with treating it has to do with which PD you're talking about. A Narcissist might appear to be getting better, but are they really? Or are they just manipulating the therapist? Unlike a phobia, for example, treating a PD is basically trying to change the whole essence of a person. It might be possible to change an apple into a pear, but it won't be easy.

A real NPD would want to get better.NPD is awful.You get narcissistic decompensation.

Would a severely narcissistic disordered person admit or even know they had a PD?

I've had avoidant tendancies all of my life.

But, they did creep away into the shadows for a while when I became more socially active.

So I don't know for sure.

But I think things like AvPD, are...

Essentially: when things are going well in your personal life, they retreat.

That's fine.

The problem is, when you hit a hurdle, your propensity to retreat into your shell is far greater if you have AvPD tendancies and that leads on to a whole other pile of crarp.

Avoidance never leaves, but it can be treated.

I think the cure is to some extent bravery.

Butterfly Faerie wrote:I don't know if they can be cured or not. But they are treatable... only time will tell.

Hi there,

I am totally agree with butterfly faerie...

http://www.dalailama.com/news.112.htm

maybe curable