Personality Disorders
This cluster of personality disorders is characterized by odd or eccentric behavior and includes paranoid, schizoid, and schizotypal personality disorders.
What is Cluster A?
This duration is required for a major depressive episode.
What is two weeks?
This diagnosis requires exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence, either directly, indirectly, or through repeated exposure.
What is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?
This disorder involves excessive worry across multiple domains for at least six months.
What is Generalized Anxiety Disorder?
These are recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or images that are experienced as intrusive and unwanted and cause distress.
What are obsessions?
This developmental history must be present before age 15 in order to diagnose Antisocial Personality Disorder in adulthood.
What is evidence of Conduct Disorder?
This episode involves elevated or irritable mood with increased energy lasting at least one week or requiring hospitalization.
What is mania?
This diagnosis applies when trauma-related symptoms occur between 3 days and 1 month after exposure.
What is Acute Stress Disorder?
This experience involves a sudden surge of intense fear that peaks within minutes.
What is a panic attack?
These are repetitive behaviors or mental acts that a person feels driven to perform in response to anxiety or intrusive thoughts.
What are compulsions?
A client presents with grandiosity, a need for admiration, and limited empathy, but becomes defensive and withdrawn when criticized. This pattern helps differentiate between this disorder and antisocial traits.
What is Narcissistic Personality Disorder?
This diagnosis describes chronic depression lasting at least two years, sometimes with superimposed major depressive episodes.
What is Persistent Depressive Disorder?
This diagnosis is appropriate when a client experiences distress after a significant life stressor, but the event does not meet trauma exposure criteria.
What is Adjustment Disorder?
This diagnosis involves fear of social situations due to possible scrutiny or negative evaluation.
What is Social Anxiety Disorder?
This treatment approach is effective because it reduces anxiety over time by preventing the person from engaging in behaviors that temporarily relieve distress, allowing habituation to occur.
What is Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)?
A client avoids social situations due to fear of rejection and feelings of inadequacy, but this pattern has been present since early adulthood, occurs across most relationships, and reflects a stable sense of self rather than situational anxiety. This distinction helps differentiate between these two diagnoses.
What is Avoidant Personality Disorder vs Social Anxiety Disorder?
This disorder includes hypomanic episodes and major depressive episodes, but no history of full manic episodes.
What is Bipolar II Disorder?
This tool from the DSM-5-TR helps clinicians understand how culture influences a client’s experience of distress when symptoms are expressed through somatic, spiritual explanations, or other cultural concepts.
What is the Cultural Formulation Interview?
This is a first-line psychological treatment that targets maladaptive thoughts and avoidance behaviors in anxiety disorders.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)?
A client repeatedly checks locks and seeks reassurance to reduce anxiety after intrusive thoughts about harm. Another client constantly scans their environment for danger after a traumatic event. This distinction explains why the first pattern is maintained by ritualized behavior, while the second is driven by perceived threat.
What is compulsions versus hypervigilance (OCD vs trauma-related response)?
A client presents with mood instability, impulsivity, and interpersonal conflict. Symptoms are triggered by relationship stressors and have been present consistently over time rather than occurring in distinct episodes. This pattern helps differentiate between these two diagnoses and supports this treatment approach.
What is Borderline Personality Disorder vs Bipolar Disorder, and treatment with Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)?
This is the major treatment risk when a client with bipolar disorder is treated with only an antidepressant medication and no mood stabilizer.
What is triggering mania or making mood swings worse?
This evidence-based treatment for trauma involves gradual, repeated exposure to trauma-related memories and avoided situations to reduce distress over time.
What is Prolonged Exposure or Trauma-Focused CBT?
A client frequently checks their body for signs of illness, seeks reassurance from doctors, and reports anxiety about health, but also mentions occasional worry about work and social interactions. The most central diagnosis focuses on the primary preoccupation.
What is Illness Anxiety Disorder?
A client spends hours organizing their schedule and workspace, insists tasks be done in a very specific way, and becomes frustrated when others do not follow their standards. They report feeling that their approach is correct and necessary, rather than distressing or unwanted.This presentation helps distinguish between these two disorders.
What is Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder vs Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?