Rep36 Understanding Personality Disorder

Recommendations
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The government’s policy of ensuring that people with personality disorders are treated as part of
core services in mental health and forensic settings, with access to specialist multidisciplinary
personality disorder teams, is welcomed.
I
Service developments that reflect this policy will require the skills of clinical and forensic
psychologists as clinical leaders.
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Staff in a wide range of health and social care, education, criminal justice, and voluntary sector
agencies require some level of training to understand personality disorder, ranging from basic
awareness to specialist training. 
I
Structured assessments are essential to treatment based on a client’s needs.
Executive Summary

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Personality disorder is a topic of increasing
concern not only to mental health professionals
but also to those working in primary care, social
services and criminal justice agencies. This
report presents an overview of personality
disorders from a psychological viewpoint. Our
purpose is to summarise current knowledge with
a view to informing professional colleagues,
service users and their carers, policy makers and
interested lay people for whom the topic may
still be relatively novel. 
It is widely accepted that the psychiatric
classification of personality disorders is
unsatisfactory, but it provides a common
terminology that is essential as a starting point
for clinical communication and further research.
In this report, we follow the current definition of
personality disorder as a description of those
enduring characteristics of a person that impair
their well-being or social functioning. We
recognise that some professionals and service
users are uneasy with the idea that personality
can be ‘disordered’ or ‘abnormal’, particularly
since ‘personality disorder’ is sometimes used
pejoratively. However, the term ‘disorder’ has no
precise meaning in medicine or psychology, and
criteria of ‘healthy’ functioning always depend
on what society values rather than absolute
standards. We nevertheless believe that these
criteria are not entirely arbitrary. However, we
emphasise that disabling personality
characteristics are most appropriately viewed as