Sigh.

Everyone has one or two symptoms, a little, occasionally. To actually have a personality disorder you have to have lots of symptoms, often, to a severity that it causes problems in your life.

Lots of people have occasional headaches. You could also say those people have symptoms of a brain tumor. But that would be stupid because they lack many other symptoms of a brain tumor.

I think the point of the article was to suggest that personality disorders are a continuum rather than a binary thing. I don't know if this is correct, but it seems a bit more logical than a "you either have it or you don't" philosophy.

Reminds me of this, from last month:

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66Q4BJ20100727

"... many in the psychiatric community are worried that the further the guidelines are expanded, the more likely it will become that nobody will be classed as normal any more."

I took a deviance class in College. The most important thing that I took away from the class is that deviance is normal. Everybody is deviant somehow. Granted, deviance is a sociology concept rather than a psychiatric one, but I doubt that psychiatry is much different.

After all, everyone gets physically ill. Why is it such a stretch to say that everyone gets mentally ill from time to time?

I'm starting to think that much of what is considered disorderly is actually just representative of the diversity of mind within humans. Reminds me of a Robertson Davies quote from The Rebel Angels "[P]eople don’t by any means all live in what we call the present; the psychic structure of modern man lurches and yaws over a span of at least ten thousand years."

We're animals. We're diverse. We're wired radically different to all other species - our civilization demonstrates that. The wild viewpoints and ideas that come out of different mental states pull our species to a net positive.

I find it bizarre that 23% of people could not be considered to have any sort of mental disorder. Everyone I've known personally has either dealt with one of OCD, anxiety, depression, narcissism, paranoia, or low self esteem, at different stages of life. One of mine and my wife's injokes is that we can't think of any close personal friends who haven't ever been on antidepressants except ourselves.

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If we could now adjust the cutoffs for high blood pressure and high cholesterol so as to include 77% of the population, that would totally increase the market cap of the pharmaceutical manufacturers.

If the disorder is the new standard, then the underlying notion of a "normal" personality would become useless. Maybe the concept was wrong right from the beginning. It's interesting though that e.g. for Freud normality rather was something like the majority's disorder -- not the absence of neuroses/psychoses. (At least in Totem and taboo.)

Surely if 77% of the population have something it is the 23% that have the disorder?!

Counterexample: Being overweight.

Or Herpes.

I think you mean HPV: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_papillomavirus#United_Sta...

  Herpetic gingivostomatitis is often the initial 
  presentation during the first herpes infection. 
  It is of greater severity than herpes labialis 
  which is often the subsequent presentations. 
  Around 90% of the U.S. population is affected 
  with this disease

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex

No, I did mean HSV-1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_herpes_simplex

It's the most successful virus.

you're assuming that the 77% all have the same thing.

I wonder what the percentage is among the psychiatrists who established the relevant diagnosis criteria. I suspect it's close to zero.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fmri is useful in diagnosing personality disorders

When they finally figure out that there's only a single sane person in the world, I hope he changes his name to Wonko.

Personality Judo: Being able to quickly identify and optimally deal with personality defects in others.

Everybody has problems, hangups, or just weird quirks. Masking off problems of people while dealing with them makes life easier.

I applaud mission creep. When most problems are labeled mental illnesses, we can unstigmatized psychiatry and easily get everyone the help they need.

I think I see what you're getting at here, and I agree that unstigmatizing mental illness is important. But does "everyone" really need "help" from the psychiatric profession?

If "help" came to mean applying tenets from Positive Psychology, then I'm all for it. If "help" means drugs as so often is the case, then I hope not.

You can spend a lifetime "fixing" all your problems, or you can get on with your life and focus on your positive strengths and learn to manage the negative. http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/

Does "everyone" really need "help" from the medical profession? The dental profession? I think you may be showing signs of stigmatizing mental illness yourself a bit, there.

I'm not the one who downvoted you, so I thought I'd reply. Cos you kind of have a point.

But I'd argue that a psychiatrist is a medical specialist in the same way that a cardiologist or a urologist is. Everyone needs to be aware of their cardiac health and see their General Practitioner if they have concerns. Not everyone needs to be diagnosed with a disease by a cardiologist. Ditto mental health.