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Understanding Personality Disorders Essay

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The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.; DSM-5, American Psychiatric Association, 2013) defines personality disorders as a pattern of internal experience and behavior that greatly differs from what is normally expected in the person’s culture. They are also considered omnipresent and inflexible that is stable and causes both distress and impairment. Antisocial personality disorder is a severe disorder of personality. It is a disorder that helps compromise the dramatic, emotional, or erratic disorders, also known as the Cluster B disorders. The Cluster B disorders are also composed of borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, and histrionic personality disorder. The …show more content…

From information contained in the patient’s social services, medical, and legal records, the clinician is able to piece together Mr. Y’s history.
Mr. Y’s mother was a prostitute and a drug addict, and he never knew his father. He had a history of very serious conduct problems from a young age. He began getting into fights with other children almost from the day he began school and was caught torturing animals on a number of occasions when he was in elementary school. When he was 9 years old, Mr. Y threw his baby brother out of the window of their first floor apartment, causing multiple fractures. During his childhood, Mr. Y spent several years in a group home and stayed many in many foster homes, but these placements were never successful. He would occasionally stay with his maternal grandmother, who was taking care of up to eight other grandchildren at the same time. Mr. Y began using drugs at age 10. In early adolescence, Mr. Y joined a gang where he became involved in selling drugs and running numbers. He fathered his first child at the age of 13. Before he was 17, he was arrested on a variety of charges that included theft, possession of illegal drugs, and assault, but, because of his age, he received a series of suspended sentences. He was constantly truant from school and dropped out permanently at age 15. At the time, he began living on the street with other friends from his gang who

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