| I should have included in my previous post that I'm not a mental health professional. I'm also just an interested individual looking to make the most of the hand I've been dealt, and I too have very large blindspots. I don't mean to provide you specific advice for your situation but simply offer something else to explore. To be perfectly honest, my own fascination with personality disorders has formed as a result of rumination, spending energy obsessing over perceived symptoms and the their implications to the detriment of taking action toward solving the problems. I think this is one of the dangers of trying to go about making sense of your mental wellbeing alone. If you're not already working with a mental health professional, and it is at all possible, I would very strongly recommend finding a therapist with a PsyD licensed in your jurisdiction. When you find a good one, they will have the depth to talk with you at a high level and the breadth and experience to help you consider possibilities you wouldn't have known about on your own. I understand if that's out of reach for you given your circumstances, but it can be a huge help. Ultimately you are right, personality disorders are not discrete, nor are they mutually exclusive categories. They're really just patterns of traits as observed by folks who spend their time studying this kind of thing, and none of them seem have as simple a pathology as something like Wilson's disease where a vast array of symptoms can all be caused simply by an inability to excrete enough copper. That aside, specifically to your request for more information, I can offer the following: I was recently introduced to the relation between identity disturbance and the schizophrenia spectrum via this paper[0]. I realized that I had a very narrow view of schizophrenia and started to learn about the concept of schizotypy, the difference between negative/positive schizophrenia symptoms, and how dissociation + depression can start to look a lot like it fits on the schizophrenia spectrum. Here's another paper[1] that goes a bit more into the ways that the two spectrums overlap and contrast. Finally, sometimes the personality disorder subreddits can be useful for both finding a community and exploring what folks are saying about their own diagnoses and experience there. [0]: https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/45/1/...
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5216848/ Feel free to reach out via the email on my website (in HN bio), if you have any other questions. |