How are personality disorders assessed? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages for each assessment technique you described?

Responding to a student DQ
DQ: How are personality disorders assessed? What are some of the advantages and disadvantages for each assessment technique you described?

Student Response:
Shambreka B

People with a personality disorder have unusual ways of thinking about themselves and others (cognitive feature), experiencing and expressing emotions (affective feature), interacting with others (interpersonal feature), and controlling impulses (Kearney & Trull, 2018). Those battling personality disorders have dominant personality behaviors that cause damage to their social, occupational, and everyday lives. Mental health professionals frequently use assessments such as self-report questionnaires, and varying types of interviews and reports when evaluating those suffering from personality disorders.

Advantages of these assessments include reports such as informant reports. In these instances persons, such as the patients friends or family, can provide mental health professionals with a more accurate and detailed account of the patients history and disorder. These can be very helpful to clinicians. Unfortunately, these reports also often conflict with self-reports, and so a clinician may be unsure which perspective is most truthful (Busch et al., 2015). Disadvantages of other assessments include self-report questionnaires and interviews as these rely on the individuals self-report. This is a problem because many people with personality disorders have distorted self-image and self-presentation that can color their answers on these measures (Kearney & Trull, 2018). Essentially, professionals are asking these questions and conducting interviews with patient who struggle with an array of personality complications.

References

Busch, A. J., Balsis, S., Morey, L. C., & Oltmanns, T. F. (2015). Gender Differences in Borderline Personality Disorder Features in an Epidemiological Sample of Adults age 5564: Self Versus Informant Report. Journal of Personality Disorders, 1-14.

Kearney, C. A., & Trull, T. J. (2018). Abnormal Psychology and Life: A Dimensional Approach (3rd ed., p. 283-304). Cengage Learning, Inc.

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