What is Histrionic Personality Disorder?

hello this is dr. grande today the question is what is histrionic Personality Disorder now history on person I disorder is characterized by excessive emotionality and attention seeking behavior and when we look at the symptom criteria we see a number of elements related to this so an individual with this disorder oftentimes wants to be the center of attention and they feel uncomfortable if they're not the center of attention we see sexually seductive behavior or provocative behavior that is out of context so in occupational settings or social settings where we would not normally expect to see that behavior we see rapidly shifting and shallow emotions so we see happening here with the rapidly shifting emotions is when other people are observing somebody who has this symptom of history personality disorder the individual who has the symptom appears to be inauthentic they don't appear to be genuine because they have these really strong emotional reactions but they change very quickly we also see an effort to gain attention through physical appearance now a lot of times this is expressed in apparel selection so individuals with this disorder tend to select clothing and clothing combinations that really attract attention the speech content and the speech pattern for somebody with histrionic Personality Disorder oftentimes is impressionistic and lacks detail so somebody with this disorder with this symptom will have this style of speech this highly impressionistic style of speech but they won't be able to back up any claims they make or anything else they're saying with details so it seems again without a lot of thought it seems shallow consistent with the attention-seeking components of this disorder somebody with history personality disorder is oftentimes self dramatizing theatrical and they have exaggerated emotional expressions they're also easily influenced so this speaks back to this idea of the rapidly shifting emotions also with some of this disorder they have rapidly shifting opinions and they can seem to adopt really strong convictions about an issue very quickly so somebody may mention a strong feeling do they have a conviction of value and somebody with this disorder may adopt that really quickly without really thinking it through and again it seems kind of you know authentic it doesn't seem genuine that they could have developed such a strong conviction so quickly and with such little information another symptom criteria for histrionic Personality Disorder is that they believe relationships are more intimate than they really are they move relationships down that road to intimacy in terms of how they believe the relationship is much more quickly than people are comfortable with or than is actually real so they may meet somebody may know them just for a few days and consider them a best friend a great friend or even a strong romantic interest when you take these symptom criteria together and you look at the different behaviors it shouldn't be surprising that individuals that thus assort or struggle with relationships and have typically a number of failed relationships a lot of times when some of the histrionic Personality Disorder seeks treatment it's because of depressive symptoms from losing what they believed was a close relationship now interestingly with histrionic Personality Disorder if we look at the other personality disorders it is not associated with a lot of low level functioning or a lot of problems with career it does come with of course consequences the relation chips I mentioned and other social settings can become uncomfortable and strenuous for somebody with this disorder but a lot of individuals with histrionic Personality Disorder do work and have relatively successful careers we find that they tend to do a little better in careers that require a lot of creativity and imagination and they don't tend to do as well in careers that demand a lot of logical thinking and analysis now from going over the symptom criteria it's clear that histrionic Personality Disorder shares a lot of symptom criteria or has similar symptom of criteria with other personality disorders and for this reason and other reasons this disorder is difficult to differentiate particularly from other personality disorders on top of that it's highly comorbid with four specific personality disorders and those are the personality disorders of course that it's most easily confused with those would be borderline dependent personality disorder antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders so those four personality disorders are highly comorbid with histrionic Personality Disorder and of course share a lot of similar symptom criteria in terms of mental health disorders that aren't precise orders that are comorbid with this track personality disorder we see depressive disorders particularly major depressive disorder that's highly comorbid with histrionic Personality Disorder also somatic symptom disorder and conversion disorder are comorbid with his job personally sorter so when we think about how to diagnose histrionic Personality Disorder and looking at the assessment and taking a thorough history and then looking at the different criteria and of course taking into account a lot of factors we can see that it would be challenging to differentiate this disorder from the other personality disorders where there are a lot of similar features if we look at borderline personality disorder and we thing about how borderline personality disorder may be different with borderline personality disorder the area that is most striking that's different would be the anger particularly the constant anger that we see with a lot of worldline / status or presentations we wouldn't typically see that with historic person I'd sorter also there's a self-destructive nature to borderline personality that we don't typically see with histrionic and the idealization devaluation cycle that we see with borderline personality expressed in the same way with history on ik there's a tendency to idealize with histrionic but there isn't the devaluation cycle piece the same way we see with borderline now with dependent personality disorder this disorder I think is probably the easiest disorder to confuse with histrionic Personality it's quite similar but with dependent personality disorder we don't see the exaggerated emotions the way we do with histrionic although as I mentioned these two personalized sores are fairly close together with antisocial personality disorder I think the area that becomes confusing is the manipulation piece so we see with both antisocial and with histrionic Personality Disorder x' there is a manipulation piece with antisocial the manipulation piece is for profit or for power or some sort of material game with histrionic Personality Disorder that manipulation is there to make some of the center of attention to attract attention so there are some similarities there but of course some differences as well and then with narcissistic personality disorder with this disorder with histrionic the similarity would be the attention-seeking piece somebody with narcissistic personality disorder wants to be given attention as well but it's about superiority they seek attention so others will recognize their superiority some of histrionic Personality Disorder is necessarily seeking attention because of some type of feeling of superiority people with histrionic Personality Disorder are willing to seek attention even if they appear fragile and delicate and troubled so they're not looking to be thought of as great and superior and better than other people they're okay with appearing troubled and fragile some of narcissistic personality disorder would usually not be okay with that type of attention so both have attention-seeking pieces to them but the reasoning is different for those two disorders now in terms of diagnosing and treating histrionic Personality Disorder there's not a lot of research behind histrionic Personality and I believe in community mental health settings that this disorder tends to get passed over so there's presentations where this disorder should be diagnosed and instead other similar personality disorders are diagnosed instead now the prevalence for this track personally sort and general population is less than 2% so it would seem that we would see more presentations of this disorder than we do and I think a large part of that is misdiagnosis borderline and narcissistic personality and antisocial personality disorder czar common in community mental health and histrionic is not so I think that when somebody comes in with histrionic symptoms a lot of times they're given a diagnosis of borderline or narcissistic personality order or antisocial personality disorder misdiagnosing is never something that mental health clinicians want to do and in some cases of course misdiagnosis can have more severe consequences than other cases I think with personality disorders the general view is that the treatment protocols are fairly similar for borderline and for Cystic as they are for histrionic so if there is a diagnosis that's a little bit off and somebody is diagnosed with borderline instead of history on ik I think some of the thinking there is that well if the treatment is similar that it may not be a big deal but miss diagnosing is really always dangerous to some extent and the treatments and the focus of treatment would be different for histrionic Personality Disorder than we would see for borderline antisocial or narcissistic and as some extent even different for dependent person I disorder so it is important to take a careful look at these criteria into a thorough history and try to be as accurate as possible in diagnosing personality disorders histrionic Personality with certain risks there's an increased risk of self-harm including suicide so even though it's considered less severe in many ways than borderline or antisocial there are still dangerous elements to it the treatment focus for histrionic Personality as I mentioned before a lot of times we see depressive symptoms because the relationship has failed and that's what brings somebody in to treat minissha Lee and that's the initial focus of treatment later on there can be a discussion about boundaries and insight which would be very similar to a lot of person I disorder working on boundaries and insight would be areas that we'd want to look at for treatment if the client was agreeable to that I hope you found this description of histrionic Personality Disorder to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 124,673

Keywords: What is Histrionic Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, histrionic, personality disorder, center of attention, sexually seductive, rapidly shifting, shallow emotions, gain attention, attention, physical appearance, impressionistic speech, shallow, disingenuousness, inauthentic, self-dramatizing, exaggerated emotional expressions, theatrical, easily influenced, intimacy, etiology, dsm, disorder, comorbid, counselor, borderline, dependent, narcissistic, antisocial

Id: QoeLfkw4TOw

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 14 2017