[ExI] "Take a stress pill, Dave"

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2009/4/12 painlord2k at libero.it <painlord2k at libero.it>:

>> For example, personality disorders are stable throughout life and
>> do not respond to the biological treatments we currently have, while
>> Axis I disorders afflict people who were previously well, tend to lead
>> to either progressive disability or severe episodic disability, and
>> often do respond to biological treatments.
>
> We can not treat people with over Axis II for their condition, but we can
> treat the symptoms so they don't handicap too much the life of the person
> affected.

We can treat them if they become depressed or psychotic as we treat
anyone else, but we can't treat the personality disorder itself. It
happens not infrequently in my work as a doctor in public mental
health that a mood or psychotic disorder is misdiagnosed as a
personality disorder, especially early in its course. The two things
that give it away is that that the family say the patient "changed" in
personality at some point, rather than having been that way their
whole life, and a response to medication. In fact, a therapeutic trial
of medication is the only hard biological test we have for these
mental illnesses, with a very high specificity (i.e. low false
positive response rate).


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou