Good afternoon, everyone. It's Dr. Niagara again. Our next episode of psychology unplugged. As always, thank you to all of our followers here in the United States and abroad. It's a fun opportunity to interact with so many people. I try my best to get back to everyone. If I haven't gotten back to you, continue to reach out. I will do my best uh but a heartfelt thank you for

all of your support and suggestions and please continue to um you know let me know what you

guys want us to talk about um so today's topic um i'm going to revisit uh the personality disorders because that's an area of interest of mine

and just looking at and from a lot of the correspondence from people and is really the

I think a lot of people are really interested in the personal disorders and of themselves

because it's it's

invariably it's our that's our psychological constitution whether it's disordered or not

pathological or not a personality is who we are and if you remember personality in love itself

is crystallized between five and eight years of age and that's an

important factor to keep in mind and it's not like it can't be altered a little bit before a little

bit after but it pretty much is crystallized in that in that time frame of five to eight years old

and personality is my belief about myself my belief about other people my belief about other people, my belief about the world in general, and the conclusions and the therefores that I draw from those early experiences growing up.

So I've done an episode on this with borderline personality.

And in the DSM-5 text revision, which is the newest version of the diagnostic manual for both psychology

and psychiatry, is the alternative model. Again, I did this for borderline, and today I'm going to do

this for avoidant personality, which is pretty common. It has a lot of overlap in terms of it could look like social anxiety,

it could look like autism, it could look like depression. And this is why diagnosis is so

important because of the symptom overlap between so many different disorders.

Like I think I talked about the week before with, you know, bipolar depression versus unipolar depression,

why getting testing is so crucial because it's able to give those answers with certainty and specificity specific to a particular individual.

But if we just take avoidance as just the term avoidance is not necessarily pathological.

We generally, for the most part, there's always exceptions.

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