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
Causes
By Mayo Clinic staffPersonality is the combination of thoughts, emotions and behaviors that makes you unique. It's the way you view, understand and relate to the outside world, as well as how you see yourself. Personality forms during childhood, shaped through an interaction of inherited tendencies and environmental factors.
When someone chronically feels or behaves in an inappropriate way, that person has a personality disorder.
In normal development, children learn over time to accurately interpret social cues and respond appropriately. For people with schizotypal personalities, something goes wrong during this process, leading to illogical beliefs, magical thinking and paranoia. What exactly goes wrong isn't known, but it's likely that one or more factors — such as childhood abuse, neglect or stress — cause problems with the way the brain functions.
- In: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV-TR. 4th ed. Arlington, Va.: American Psychiatric Association; 2000. http://www.psychiatryonline.com. Accessed July 13, 2010.
- Skodol AE, et al. Specific personality disorders. In: Hales RE, et al., eds. The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychiatry. 5th ed. Arlington, Va.: American Psychiatric Association; 2008. http://www.psychiatryonline.com. Accessed July 13, 2010.
- Blais MA, et al. Personality and personality disorders. In: Stern TA, et al. Massachusetts General Hospital Comprehensive Clinical Psychiatry. Philadelphia, PA: Mosby; 2008. http://www.mdconsult.com/das/book/body/208922830-3/1022719999/1657/387.html#4-u1.0-B978-0-323-04743-2..50041-X--cesec11_990. Accessed July 13, 2010.
- Silk KR. Personality disorders. http://www.uptodate.com/home/index.html. Accessed July 13, 2010.
- Cohen P. Child development and personality disorder. Psychiatric Clinics of North America. 2008;31:477.
- Skodol AE, et al. Positive childhood experiences: Resilience and recovery from personality disorder in early adulthood. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. 2007;68:1102.
- Hall-Flavin DK (expert opinion). Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.
Find Mayo Clinic on