subject: Paranoid Personality Disorder [print this page] Symptoms of paranoid personality disorders include:
' Emotional detachment;
' Feelings of anger toward others;
' Believing that people are trying to harm you in some way;
Most personality disordered people are prone to be angry. Their anger is always sudden, raging, frightening and without an apparent provocation by an outside agent. It would seem that people suffering from personality disorders are in a CONSTANT state of anger, which is effectively suppressed most of the time. It manifests itself only when the person's defences are down, incapacitated, or adversely affected by circumstances, inner or external.
We have pointed at the psychodynamic source of this permanent, bottled-up anger, elsewhere in this book. In a nutshell, the patient was, usually, unable to express anger and direct it at "forbidden" targets in his early, formative years (his parents, in most cases). The anger, however, was a justified reaction to abuses and mistreatment. The patient was, therefore, left to nurture a sense of profound injustice and frustrated rage.
Family therapy can significantly decrease relapse rates for the schizoaffective family member. In high-stress families, schizophenic patients given standard aftercare relapse 50-60% of the time in the first year out of hospital. Supportive family therapy can reduce this relapse rate to below 10 percent.
