Personality Disorder - Causes

Causes

There are numerous possible causes of mental disorders, and they may vary depending on the disorder, the individual, and the circumstances. There may be genetic dispositions as well as particular life experiences, which may or may not include particular incidents of trauma or abuse.

A study of almost 600 male college students, averaging almost 30 years of age and who were not drawn from a clinical sample, examined the relationship between childhood experiences of sexual and physical abuse and currently reported personality disorder symptoms. Childhood abuse histories were found to be definitively associated with greater levels of symptomatology. Severity of abuse was found to be statistically significant, but clinically negligible, in symptomatology variance spread over Cluster A, B and C scales.

Child abuse and neglect consistently evidence themselves as antecedent risks to the development of personality disorders in adulthood. In the following study, efforts were taken to match retrospective reports of abuse with a clinical population that had demonstrated psychopathology from childhood to adulthood who were later found to have experienced abuse and neglect. In a study of 793 mothers and children, researchers asked mothers if they had screamed at their children, and told them that they didn’t love them or threatened to send them away. Children who had experienced such verbal abuse were three times as likely as other children (who didn't experience such verbal abuse) to have borderline, narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive or paranoid personality disorders in adulthood. The sexually abused group demonstrated the most consistently elevated patterns of psychopathology. Officially verified physical abuse showed an extremely strong correlation with the development of antisocial and impulsive behavior. On the other hand, cases of abuse of the neglectful type that created childhood pathology were found to be subject to partial remission in adulthood.