Schizoid Personality Disorder - Signs and Symptoms

Signs and Symptoms

People with SPD are often aloof, cold and indifferent, which causes interpersonal difficulty. Most individuals diagnosed with SPD have trouble establishing personal relationships or expressing their feelings in a meaningful way. They may remain passive in the face of unfavorable situations. Their communication with other people may be indifferent and concise at times. Because of their lack of meaningful communication with other people, those who are diagnosed with SPD are not able to develop accurate images of how well they get along with others.

Such images are believed to be important for a person's self-awareness and ability to assess the impact of their own actions in social situations. R.D. Laing suggests that when one is not enriched by injections of interpersonal reality, the self-image becomes increasingly empty and volatilized, which leads the individual to feel unreal.

People with SPD "feel lost" without the people they are normally around, because they require a sense of security and stability. When the patient's personal space is violated, they feel suffocated and feel the need to free themselves and be independent. People who have SPD tend to be happiest when they are in a relationship in which the partner places few emotional or intimate demands on them. It is not people as such that they want to avoid, but emotions both negative and positive, emotional intimacy, and self disclosure.

This means that it is possible for schizoid individuals to form relationships with others based on intellectual, physical, familial, occupational, or recreational activities as long as these modes of relating do not require or force the need for emotional intimacy, which the affected individual will reject. Donald Winnicott explains this need to modulate emotional interaction by saying that schizoid individuals "prefer to make relationships on their own terms and not in terms of the impulses of other people." Failing to attain that, they prefer isolation.