This is the best overview of personality disorder currently available as understanding the distilled rules of human behaviour allows us to analyse the patterns in the world around us with a clarity some may find challenging but most find liberating. We look at the current diagnostic systems and what they try and do and their shortfalls.

Simply put most living organisms with self awareness are tribal because nature worked out millions of years ago that living in a tribe conferred a survival advantage to wondering the planes as a nomad.

The most fundamental behaviour we all exhibit is that we are hard wired to reduce our internal anxiety -our baseline arousal. This is our primitive survival mechanism. If we see a tiger we instantly run. There is no conscious thought . The quickest way of survival is to bypass the cortex -the amygdala hijack- so we are hard wired for reflex anxiety reduction.

Since we are tribal and the coexistence of any number of reflex anxiety reducers will instantly lead to chaos then were have a secondary hard wiring to reduce our anxiety by relating to and taking on the opinion of the majority around us -the mass narrative- to respond to authority, structure hierarchy, leadership.

This tribal consistent reflex anxiety reduction exists on a spectra with the majority of us lying around the mean so we are pretty good at it. However everything in nature exhibits variability and this is no exception. There are individuals who lie further from the mean of tribal consistent reflex anxiety reduction until you get to the extreme outliers where their tribal consistent reflex anxiety reduction has in fact inverted 180 degrees to be entirely self serving. The mechanism by which they reflexly reduce their anxiety by self serving defines the type of personality disorder.

It is globally accepted that personality disorder has to be present from birth or at least start in childhood following which it persists life long. As it is anti-tribe it leads to erratic destructive behaviour for the individual concerned and or more frequently for those around them which is why they are usually sooner or later rejected by the tribe.

Forensic psychiatry has been caricatured as using one of two diagnoses: Mad or bad but unfortunately this is not nuanced enough and can lead to miscategorising of individuals in either group.

The first things to say is that these people are therefore hazardous by their nature and not due to mental illness.

Unfortunately political correctness that gives centre stage to the outliers of society by insisting on equal outcome for everyone without considering whether this is appropriate or even healthy gives these individuals the power of the full force of the law -indeed positively discriminated for by political correctness. A basic understanding of their psychology shows how disastrous this can be.

A common mistake made by the police is how can this lady make these claims if they are not true?

The answer is that there is no logic involved. In order to reflexively achieve even a small degree of internal peace the personality disorder won’t think what they do to achieve this or the consequences there of. If the law allows them to utter a few simple words which lifts them out of the drudgery of normal existence into one of cossetted abrogation of responsibility then this will be their reflex action.

Similarly for mass murderers or serial killers. SInce everything for personality disorders is self referential rather than for the good of society then when they are inevitably rejected they will view themselves as hard done by victims and depending on other parts of their nature they will respond vindictively of which the outliers are the extreme actions, but plenty of personality disordered spurned spouses show remarkable and consistent degrees if vindictiveness.

Indeed the basic tenet of forensic psychology is that the main predictor of crime is opportunity. In other words if you let something happen it will. Almost anyone is capable of almost any atrocity given the wrong environment. We are products of our environment and our behaviour is bounded by structure hierarchy and leadership and within this ethics , morals, cultural norms, religion , law.  GIven the presence of this then break through velocity comes with different degrees of personality disorder which is why 50% of the prison population has personality disorder . Unfortunately our modern materialist society has also resulted in psychopaths being 20x more common amongst CEOs than in the general population. In other words modern society is being led off a cliff by self-serving outliers of the population who are predators and yet are worshipped as role models.

We look at some ways to deal with personality disorders in the likely event that one will cross your path.