Who's to Blame: The Parents, the Children or the Health Professionals?

Personality Disorders are becoming increasingly common amongst people, some say it’s a society change, we are becoming more selfish, more arrogant and self-centred and then that there is the problem. Of course this view point is one which is completely credible, but is there something more complex than that?

Personality Disorders, according to Psychiatry and Psychology statistics are some of the rarer issues affecting the world today. More prevalent than forms of Psychosis (Schizophrenia) and Psychopathy, yet less common (and often co-morbid with) both mood disorders (Bi-Polar) and Anxiety Disorders (OCD). Yet it seems to be suggested that these disorders, especially those falling under Cluster B (Anti-Social Personality Disorder, Histrionic Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder and Dependent Narcissistic Personality Disorder) are increasing in their prevalence.

Despite my uncertainty that this is even true, and that these disorders are indeed displaying a higher prevalence, and not simply that we are becoming more proactive toward our approach to Mental Health and realising when we are having problems and so we are seeing more diagnoses being done, I will discuss the ledged reasons why the 'problem' is even arising.

This requires a brief introduction I believe, shall we take consideration that Cluster B (the one on apparent noticeable increase) is the cluster which offers most dramatic-emotional responses and reactions, these are often over anything. It's also the cluster that all parents out there are blamed for. Yes, that’s right, not society, not the person themselves, not the doctors treating them, but the parents and siblings of the individual.

If we were to sum up the Aetiology and causes of such disorders we'd see something like this: "If as a parent you beat your child, show violence, aggression or allow them to watch movies with violence, your child will develop Anti-Social Personality Disorder, yet beat them or allow them to be beaten or abused in any form, they'll develop Borderline Personality Disorder and grow dependent and unstable, they may even kill themselves. Allow them too much credit, praise or approval, they'll become self-cantered, self-loving and unable to contact reality thus will develop Narcissistic Personality Disorder, yet ignore them even slightly and they will need a crisis to gain attention, their appearance will be important and they always appear ill, thus they will have Histrionic Personality Disorder."

And yes, that’s just cluster B. So with that in consideration and two more clusters to be put into the picture, I pray you to tell me what a parent or even a singular human being can do to prevent this seemingly disastrous effect from occurring? Nothing.

Of course then we can jump on the opportunity to say it is the media and the influence it has on us. We could argue that 500, 300, 100 even 30 years ago, the media didn’t influence us as much and that Personality Disorders were completely, or almost completely unheard of. But, this is far from conclusive as the other reason was that even thirty years ago the medical world, let alone psychiatric world was far from what it is now and less and less things were diagnosed. So we can now focus our attentions on the Medical industries.

For this I would say ‘blame’ is not the right word to throw at medical professionals. Instead ‘advancement’ might be more fitting. The fact that we have new criteria (DSM-V will be released later this year) are being released and becoming more popular when we look toward Mental Illnesses. Yet perhaps blame is the more appropriate word for the world of Psychiatry and the DSM-V in particular. Though I have not yet had the opportunity to read it, or even have a glimpse of the new DSM, the DSM-IV-TR had many guidelines with loose ends which could have fairly been called ‘Subjective to the Doctors opinion and the patients choice and use lexemes.’ Yet from what I have been told, the DSM-V will have everybody categorised with at least one mental illness, what is to stop them having more people diagnosed with existing ones?

Of course, I am a lover of blaming the world’s problems on medical professionals, on society and on the human race as a whole. Yet in this case, that would make me foolish. As for this I do not think blame is the right word at all, instead I would prefer to use thank. Furthermore, advancing my point I would thank the improvement of education, the higher options, even the introduction of the internet, of social media and of eBooks for the increased prevalence of mental illness as it makes information easily accessible for all people, making them more aware of their health conditions, forcing them to seek help and increasing the diagnostic rate of such conditions, it could be the same thing thanked for the increase of Hypochondriasis (Hypochondria) as people learn more and more about things they need not always know.