The New Face of Personality Disorders: Dimensional Diagnosis, Practical Tools, and Treatment Implications

Course overview

As a practicing clinician, you may not treat patients with a Personality Disorder, but every patient you treat has a personality. Knowing something about their personality can provide a useful context for better understanding the nature of their presenting problems and guiding potential approaches to treatment. This workshop compares and contrasts different approaches to understanding the Personality Disorders, emphasizing the recent divergence between the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The DSM has a long history of supporting a categorical approach to diagnosing personality disorders which was challenged with the DSM-5's introduction of a hybrid model that was part dimensional and part categorical. The ICD-11, by comparison, eliminates the categorical approach and replaces it with a fully dimensional approach. In this presentation, Dr. Greg Neimeyer discusses these differences and their clinical implications. Case illustrations highlight the advantages and disadvantages of categorical and dimensional approaches, and clinically useful diagnostic tools, such as the PID-5, are provided. This workshop is designed for the practicing clinician interested in understanding the role of personality and personality disorders in psychodiagnosis and psychotherapy.