Personality and Character

In October of 2016, I posted a blog about mental health and stigma. A part of that blog dealt with Donald Trump and all the armchair psychoanalyzing that went with it. Here's a direct link to that blog:  Mental Health, Our Society and Stigma. I urge you to read it if you haven't, because I write about mental health in today's society and how those with mental illnesses are affected. It also has a lot of links that provides a great deal of information.

I'm not writing this to rehash if Donald Trump is or isn't mentally ill. I'm writing this to maybe shed some light on personality disorders, and how we, as laypeople, look at them through personality and character.

Persona is Greek for mask and character is French and Greek and means to engrave or furrow a distinctive mark. Thus personality is what a person presents to everyone and character represents our deep down beliefs.

It's easy to run to the DSM-IV to read about Narcissistic Disorder or something else in order to "diagnose" another person. But here's the thing: The DSM-IV was written for one thing. And that is to aid psychiatrists and other mental health professionals who are trained to diagnose mental illness. It is easy to look at a list of signs and think that a person has a particular disorder. But personality disorders are basically normal behaviors, actions, and feelings that are manifesting abnormally. 

Personality disorders are hard to diagnose even for the professionals because symptoms overlap with other personality disorders and/or mood disorders. For the same reason, it is also hard to diagnose a mood disorder, sometimes taking years, different doctors, and multiple medications to come to a correct determination. One personality disorder overlaps another and looking at all of them as a group can be confusing to a layperson because the same signs can be found in more than one personality disorder and the typical person hasn't had the extra training in psychiatry to know the nuances of each diagnosis.

It's important to realize that mental health professionals went to school to learn, not only about mental illnesses and personality disorders and how to treat them, they learned about human behavior.

So I delved into human behavior, specifically, the differences between personality and character traits, and the results I found were interesting.

Personality traits are what a person is born with. It's inborn, and it is believed that genetics plays a significant role in those traits. Furthermore, it is immutable. It does not change.

Some personality traits are being an extrovert or an introvert. Conscientiousness or spontaneous. There are people who have an agreeable nature, and ones that are "neurotic." Neuroticism was a class of functional and non-organic mental illnesses that involved stress and anxiety. However, modern psychiatry no longer uses neurotic/neuroticism in any current diagnosis.

A personality is easy to read. Within the first or second meeting, you can tell whether someone is outgoing, shy, energetic, lazy, positive, negative, optimistic, confident, overly serious, funny, or not too serious. It's a personality that brings about that all important "First Impression."

Character traits, on the other hand, are not so easy to read. Character is who a person is, their attitudes and beliefs toward life, work, family, and community. What a person believes in is very important because character is determined by beliefs, they can change. It's not easy to change, but it can be done.

Character traits are not as easy to detect. A person attracted to another by that person's personality may find out that soon after meeting that they actually lie regularly or treats people cruelly. When someone meets a person with a good personality, one that is outgoing, fun, confident, they are more likely to think that person is also honest, moral, and kind. However, personality traits and character traits do not track with each other. A person can be outgoing, fun, and confident and still lie their butts off, sleep around with their best friend's spouse and pelt pennies at the homeless. Unconsciously, we want to connect personality with character because we want to continue to like people we already like. And it is just easier to assess personality because to assess character is too time-consuming and too much work.

The best way to see what kind of character has is when the person is in a very stressful situation. Character beliefs like lying or honesty are present at all times but can remain dormant until they are triggered. And character traits rarely can be deliberately hidden away. 

So what does this mean in the spectrum of psychiatry? Well, first of all, personality disorders are highly controversial. There are a lot of traits that overlap with each other. In fact, Narcissistic Personality Disorder was almost left out of the DSM-IV. 

 According to Dr. George Simon, Ph.D., people with personality disorders have traits that are in a certain manner and intensity that makes it harder to function easily in society. They tend to interact with people influenced by their  own fears, insecurities, and the defenses they build up to protect themselves from emotional pain. 

Traditional psychiatry can explain these traits and can help the person deal with their emotional issues.

Character disorders, on the other hand, presents itself in such a way that causes a person to function in a socially irresponsible and uncontrollable manner for a great deal of the time. Traditional psychiatry is outdated when it comes to character disorders. They fail to explain how people with character disorders act the way that they do and how to help them. This is also the reason why they victimize others or become victimized. People with character disorders rarely seek help, no matter how much their loved ones urge them to get help. And if they do seek help, it doesn't last long and doesn't change them for the better. 

Character disorder is different from personality disorder in every way possible and imaginable. Obviously, there needs to be a whole new perspective developed in order to effectively treat them.

In terms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, according to the American Psychiatric Association, only 1%-6% suffer from it. In fact, "Narcissist" is a term that is commonly thrown around as an all-purpose insult to people who act obnoxiously or pretentious. No one stops to realize that there are actually 3 types of narcissism - a characteristic that in the right amount, is a part of a perfectly healthy ego; a troublesome kind that is often too much to deal with; and a pathological state that overwhelms and swallows a personality. 

Now here are some logical assumptions regarding President Trump I made while reading about this.

~While his traits might point to a personality disorder, it is his beliefs that we use to judge if he has Narcissistic Personality Disorder are actually all character traits. His views on Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Native Americans, Jews, women, the wall, immigration, torture, ISIS, war crimes, Middle East, nuclear weapons, healthcare, changing Social Security, Medicare, the VA, and welfare, jobs, conflicts of interests, the LGTB community, abortion, minimum wage, veterans, Russia, Hillary Clinton, etc. are all beliefs and those are character traits.

It makes him an asshole, but NPD?

I have another thing for you to consider.

What determines what is abnormal and normal as far as personality and character disorders? Everybody lives by their own moral standards. Just because you or society doesn't agree with them, doesn't mean that they are immoral. Homosexuality was once considered a mental illness.  As long as they aren't breaking the law, who are we to judge a person that has a mental illness or personality disorder? Morality, integrity, who makes a "good person" are all subjective.

Everyone has an image that they portray in public and one that they have at home with people they trust and where they feel safe. They act differently around strangers than they do their friends. 

To look specifically at Donald Trump, look at his background when it comes to considering things. I call it the Entitlement of the Wealthy. Yes, Trump is way to easily offended, acts childlike, has a temper, and does things that are unbelievable that leaves people flummoxed jaws on the floor. I know for me I often ask myself what world he is living in. He lives in the world of the wealthy...and he always has. He lives in a world that is insular and has no consequences where he never had to really grow up or take care of himself. Despite his bankruptcies, he always had money and knows he can get away with bombastic behavior. And he did as a child. Accounts say he got away with everything, and into schools on his daddy's coattails. He took over his dad's business, with the help of a "small" loan (one million dollars) from his father. He thinks he can get away with everything because he always has gotten away with everything. He's always broken laws or been sued...for whatever good that was. He's wealthy, he owns all these buildings, his penthouse is gold. Is it any surprise that he puts himself in a high enough position that no one can criticize him. The man isn't accountable for anything because he has never been held accountable. For him, he doesn't need to repent all of his sins to God or ask for forgiveness because he believes he did nothing wrong, and everything in his life reinforced that. These things aren't genetic, they're learned behaviors, and that goes against the definition that mental illness is a physical disease.

I'm not saying that Donald Trump doesn't have a personality disorder, I'm saying that I don't know. And neither does anyone else. It is wrong and extremely unethical to diagnose someone without a diagnosis or examination from mental health professionals. For laypeople, it is a judgment against a person without any true knowledge of that person, and that is wrong, in my opinion. If that person is a celebrity, then it's even worse. It's foolish to believe the image that is being portrayed as that person's private persona. After all, they are paying something to PR firms that quantify their image. 

Another reason it is wrong? There is no other disease that I know of where a person can look at another and say that they have a disease. It is not automatic to look at an overweight person and say they have diabetes based on their weight - or to look at a very thin person and say they have anorexia. However, it is extremely common to look at someone else and declare them mentally ill. And that is wrong. An organic illness can only be diagnosed by a qualified doctor, and mental illness is an organic disease. Not only is it doing a disservice to the one you claim to be mentally ill, it hurts people who have been diagnosed mentally ill, and those that need to seek psychiatric help. 

There is a horrible stigma that comes with mental illness. In the media, it is never dealt with in a way that shows people can function with mental illness, it is always seen as a negative. They want the scoop on the celebrities that had a "break down" and is in an institution. Or those that have committed suicide. Really, it's disgusting.

And where do we draw the line? Is the executive office only for those that don't have a mental illness? Is someone really incapable of having mental illness and the ability to run the country?

Trump's problem isn't with possibly having a mental illness. It's the learned behaviors like hate that proves to be the most dangerous to me. Hate leads to wars.