Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Risk factors
By Mayo Clinic staffAlthough the precise cause of personality disorders isn't known, researchers have identified certain factors that seem to increase the risk of developing or triggering personality disorders, including:
- A family history of personality disorders or other mental illness
- Verbal, physical or sexual abuse during childhood
- An unstable or chaotic family life during childhood
- Being diagnosed with childhood conduct disorder
- Loss of parents through death or divorce during childhood
Personality disorders are common worldwide, affecting about 10 to 13 percent of people at some point during their life. Personality disorders often begin in childhood and last through adulthood. There's some reluctance to diagnose personality disorders in a child, though, because the patterns of behavior and thinking could simply reflect adolescent experimentation or temporary developmental phases.
