Examples of Schizotypal Personality Disorder Symptom Criteria Manifestations

Ideas of reference: ideas of reference become easily confused with psychosis, hallucinations, and delusions of reference. With this term it really comes down to two things: an unusual connection between unrelated events (sometimes this involves confused cause and effect and sometimes it's just taking two events that have nothing to do with one other and connecting them. An example might be an individual with this disorder may be driving along and see a big sale on car tires and then later on they may see a news story where an accident occurred and it was caused by tire failure. They may connect those two by thinking that the place that was selling the tires was adding new tires and therefore other tires had to fail. There's no reason those two events would be connected, but they might make that connection anyway. Another example of an idea of reference is when an external event has some sort of special meaning to individual and this is above and beyond just being reminded of something. An example here would be say an individual with this symptom was watching television and it was a television show where people were exercising. They might think that's a special message to them or that their lack of exercising caused that television show.
Odd beliefs or magical thinking: One of the examples we see from case studies and from the literature is a real commitment to the idea of paranormal activity. There are a lot of people that do not have schizotypal personality disorder that believe in the paranormal, but it's really the degree to which that belief influences the person's life and the degree to which it's applied by that individual. For example, if they believe that ghosts are all around us and they take certain precautions not to anger the ghosts or not to encounter the ghosts and this is something that interferes with functioning, that would be really more consistent with this symptom criterion than simply someone believing in the paranormal. The magical thinking oftentimes involves the individual believing they have control over other people's minds and this is linked to the ideas of reference. An individual may be in a supermarket and see somebody select a particular item off the shelf and they may think that they caused that by thinking about that item.
Unusual perceptual experiences: This symptom is easily confused with psychosis and hallucinations. We may see this manifested through an individual hearing someone whisper their name or hearing somebody whisper something and that person is not there. Another example of this is when an individual feels like someone is in the room with them they sense the presence of another human being even though there's no one in the room.
Odd thinking or speech: With this one we may see someone creating new versions of a word, so using a word and a way it wasn't intended. One way to think about this is turning a verb into a noun or an adjective into a verb. Another feature we may see is when an individual is extremely abstract in the way they speak.
Suspiciousness or paranoid ideation: This symptom is similar to what we see with paranoid personality disorder and what we see sometimes with schizophrenia. This can manifest a number of ways like somebody can be concerned about infidelity or they can believe that they're being followed.
Inappropriate or constricted affect: A lot of times we see this in the form of eye contact, like when somebody makes too much eye contact too little where or they have a blank stare. We can also see this in terms of the expression of emotions, for example, if throughout a conversation someone is smiling and laughing even though the content isn't funny or upbeat. We may also see a decrease in emotional reactivity, so if someone is telling a sad story a depressing story and the individual does not react.
Behavior or appearance that's odd, peculiar, or eccentric: This takes on many different forms. An example could be if an individual wears all the same color all the time, for example, if they always wear black regardless of the context or wear heavy coat even though it's warm outside. Another example of this is wearing many layers of clothing particularly if the layers don't progress in a way that we would normally think as logical, for example wearing undergarments on the outside.
Lack of close friends: Individuals with schizotypal personality disorder typically don't have close friends. If they do have a close friend, oftentimes it's a first-degree relative.
Excessive social anxiety because of paranoid fears: With this symptom criterion someone is anxious in social situations and over time that anxiety doesn't diminish. When we think of social anxiety, we think the more that an individual is around other people the better they're going to feel, like the main focus of exposure therapy. The social anxiety with schizotypal personality disorder doesn't go away with exposure, rather it actually gets worse.

Видео Examples of Schizotypal Personality Disorder Symptom Criteria Manifestations канала Dr. Todd Grande