What differs AvPD from SPD?

Hello everybody, I'm reading about personality disorders and for some time I thought i had schizoid personality disorder, but now I'm confused if I'm a schizoid or actually an avoidant. What differs these two personality disorders?

Someone with avpd really wishes to be in social situations but they feel socially inept or inadequate to be around others. While someone who is a schizoid doesn't care to be in social situations. There also usually uninterested in relationships and even sex. But thats just part of the criteria for schizoid though some schizoids are interested in sex.

Here is Millon's quick overview of those 2 personalities:
http://www.millon.net/taxonomy/schizoid.htm
http://www.millon.net/taxonomy/avoidant.htm

Emotionally, avoidants and schizoids are total opposites. Avoidants are hypersensitive, while schizoids are hyposensitive. Avoidants tend to connect emotionally too much, so they try to stay away from people to avoid emotional pain. Schizoids are unable to connect emotionally, so they do not avoid people per see, they simply do not seek people since nobody seeks what they do not enjoy.

Since avoidants can connect, their isolation will be subjectively painful. They have a need for others that they cannot fill, so they will tend to feel lonely, feel inept and inferior because of their self-imposed isolation and tendency to escape from emotional pain instead of facing it.

Schizoids cannot connect, so their isolation will not be immediately painful. In the case of schizoids, the "angst" comes from somewhere else. Their incapacity to connect is not limited to people, but is rather part of a greater incapacity to connect emotionally at all, to anything. So they will be stuck with a general sense of emptiness, depersonalization, an incapacity to take pleasure in anything, a sense of boredom that they cannot get rid of no matter what they do (except drugs, but that is cheating the brain reward system).

So both tend to be loners and both tend to be prone to depression, but not for the same reasons, and it will not be the same "flavor" of depression. Avoidants tend to get the emotional/hot kind and schizoids tend to get the void/cold kind.

Sometimes when I get depressed I feel like I'm going schizoid. But the avpd comes back.

So, can you say that AvPD is a less severe case of personality disorder than SPD? I mean, at least we feel the need to connect with others, while schizoids are totally hostile to this feeling. I don't know, I still think AvPD and SPD are very similar to each other. The differences are very subtle.

paul13 wrote:So, can you say that AvPD is a less severe case of personality disorder than SPD?

No, AvPD and SPD are simply different disorders. People should not try to understand SPD in terms of AvPD. It's just interesting to compare personality disorders that have some similar traits. In that case, the tendency toward a solitary life-style. Other than that one should not see AvPD and SPD as different levels of the same thing. SPD also share traits with schizotypal (disconnectedness from the world), obcessive-compulsive (emotional constriction) and depressive (lack of vitality); and probably some others.

paul13 wrote:I mean, at least we feel the need to connect with others, while schizoids are totally hostile to this feeling. I don't know, I still think AvPD and SPD are very similar to each other. The differences are very subtle.

Schizoids are not hostile to the idea of connecting with others; they simply cannot connect with others. Social interaction is to schizoids as music is to deaf people. Deaf people are unlikely to go out of their way to listen to music, because they cannot hear it. It would be as equally "unschizoid" to hate people as it would be to love people; much like a deaf person that insists on intensely hating music is unlikely to be actually deaf.