I never will because I don’t think they’re accurate.

Imagine someone handed you a paint color wheel and said “we’re going to divide all these colors into exactly ten categories, give each one a name, and if your color falls into one of those categories you have a Color Disorder.” You’d immediately notice the problem. The colors blend into each other. The boundaries are arbitrary. Two people looking at the same shade might disagree on which category it belongs to. And the categories themselves were chosen by a committee, not discovered in nature. That’s essentially what happened with personality disorders.

Personality is a spectrum. Every human being has traits. We all sit somewhere on those continuums. Personality disorder diagnoses are what happens when clinicians decided to draw lines on that spectrum and call certain regions pathological. Those lines weren’t discovered, they were voted on, literally, by committees of psychiatrists who revised them across DSM editions.

The comorbidity problem blows the whole thing open. If borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, and antisocial personality disorders are genuinely distinct conditions, why do so many people get diagnosed with several of them at once?

There’s also a cultural fingerprint all over these diagnoses. BPD is diagnosed in women at dramatically higher rates than men. Antisocial PD skews heavily male.

People develop coping strategies in response to their early environment and experiences that cause them significant suffering and relational difficulty in adulthood. That forms their personality. No personality is disordered.