Personality Disorders

The new edition of Personality Disorders continues to provide an in-depth guide to personality disorders, assessment, and treatment, across varied patient groups and settings. Grounded in scholarly review and illustrated with a diversity of case studies, this book covers familiar ground with comprehensive detail, including the description of personality disorders, diagnosis, epidemiology, aetiology, and treatment strategies. Furthermore, this new edition reflects changes in the new ICD-11 and DSM-5, assessment instruments, and state-of-the-art insights from theory-driven research. Part of the popular ‘Clinical Psychology: A Modular Course’ series, Personality Disorders offers excellent coverage on all aspects of personality disorder and will be extremely informative for students and practitioners alike.

Resource added for the Psychology (includes Sociology) 108091 courses.

"Personality is not about what disorders you have but about who you are. It refers to a person's characteristic patterns of thought, feeling, behavior, motivation, defense, interpersonal functioning, and ways of experiencing self and others. All people have personalities and personality styles. While there are as many personalities as people, clinical knowledge accrued over generations has given rise to a taxonomy of familiar personality styles or types. Most people, whether healthy or troubled, fit somewhere in the taxonomy. Empirical research over the past two decades has confirmed the major personality types and their core features.1-5 Most clinical theorists do not view the personality types as inherently disordered. They are generally discussed in the clinical literature as personality types, styles, or syndromes-not "disorders." Each exists on a continuum of functioning from healthy to severely disturbed. The term "disorder" is best regarded as a linguistic convenience for clinicians, denoting a degree of extremity or rigidity that causes significant dysfunction, limitation, or suffering. One can have, for example, a narcissistic personality style without having narcissistic personality disorder. The same personality dynamics give rise to both strengths and weaknesses. A person with a healthy narcissistic personality style has the confidence to dream big dreams and pursue them; they can be visionaries, innovators, and founders. A person with a healthy obsessive-compulsive style excels in areas requiring precise, analytic thinking; they may be successful engineers, scientists, or academics. A person with a healthy paranoid style looks beneath the surface and sees what others miss; they may be investigative journalists or brilliant medical diagnosticians. Our best and worst qualities are often cut from the same psychological cloth"--

"This volume presents the latest theory and research on the diagnosis and treatment of personality disorders"--

The Borderline Personality Disorder Survival Guide is organized as a series of answers to questions common to BPD sufferers: What is BPD? How long does it last? What other problems co-occur with BPD? Overviews what we currently know about BPD make up the first section of the book. Later chapters cover several common treatment approaches to BPD: dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), mentalization-based therapy (MBT), and medical treatment using psychoactive drugs. In the last sections of the book, readers learn a range of day-to-day coping skills that can help moderate the symptoms of BPD.

In this important book, one of the world's foremost psychoanalysts provides the clinician with tools to diagnose and treat severe cases of personality disorder, including borderline and narcissistic structures. Dr. Kernberg not only describes techniques he has found useful in clinical practice but also further develops theories formulated in his previous work and critically reviews other recent contributions. "A splendid book . . . of great value for anyone involved in psychotherapy with patients suffering from one or another variety of personality disorder, as well as for anyone who is teaching or doing research in this field. . . . An outstandingly fine and valuable book.--Harold F. Searles, M.D., Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease "Kernberg is a synthesizing, creative eclectic on the contemporary psychoanalytic and psychodynamic scene, broadly based in theory and in practice, a powerful intelligence, a prolific writer, and a man of ideas....This is a challenging and provocative book."--Alan A. Stone, M.D., American Journal of Psychiatry "A major work that brings together in one volume a host of clinical insights into people with a variety of severe personality disorders.... Anyone who has attempted to work with patients with severe personality disorders will be rewarding by studying this book." --Robert D. Gillman, Psychoanalytic Quarterly

Now in its Third Edition, this book clarifies the distinctions between the vast array of personality disorders and helps clinicians make accurate diagnoses. It has been thoroughly updated to incorporate the changes in the forthcoming DSM-5. Using the classification scheme he pioneered, Dr. Millon guides clinicians through the intricate maze of personality disorders, with special attention to changes in their conceptualization over the last decade. Extensive new research is included, as well as the incorporation of over 50 new illustrative and therapeutically detailed cases. This is every mental health professional's essential volume to fully understanding personality.