Description of Personality Disorders

The most common feature of personality disorders is their inflexibility and resistance to treatment. Patients who suffer from personality disorders experience a great deal of dysfunction in their personal relationships, due both to the disorder itself and to their and others' ignorance of the disorder's existence. The patients cannot correlate their relationship difficulties with their personality disorders, and those who care for patients with a personality disorder have difficulty understanding the rigid behaviors and maladaptive cognitive processes that characterize the disorder. …