I have already searched for the question on this sub but ironically, I did not understand the answers.
I would like to know how a person with a mood disorder behaves/thinks/feels day-to-day as opposed to a person with a personality disorder. Please don’t respond with the key differences between Bipolar disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder because that is not what I am looking for. Thank you in advance 🙂
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Well, our perceptions and definitions of mental illness definitely change and morph over time as we learn new things, so a lot of this stuff isn’t exact, but in general:
The official understanding of mood disorders is what it says: A disorder of moods. It’s generally about “abnormal” emotional reactions, like having major, life-altering mood swings, going back and forth between horrid, soul-crushing depressive episodes and ecstatic, manic highs. Or in situations where something negative happens, and a “normal” person might feel bummed for a while, or get a little stressed and then it’s over, whereas a person with a mood disorder might just come completely unglued and fall into a suicidal depression, or get overcome with mindless rage.
A personality disorder is more all-encompassing, it’s the person’s entire personality, and how it deviates from what we consider “normal”. This covers a whole range of things, like how they see, value, and treat other people, how they form relationships with others, how they perceive themselves. People with personality disorders are often seen as difficult, confusing, extreme, etc, because their behaviors are so different from what we consider normal and appropriate. Symptoms of personality disorders can include things like being generally paranoid and seeing other people’s behaviors as some sort of deliberate secret plot. Sometimes the person’s life is ruled by fears that the rest of us would consider weird, like being obsessively fearful of germs, contamination, diseases.
While some personality disorders can cause mood swings (like in mood disorders), this is only one of many symptoms that a person with PD has, whereas the mood disorders are generally about mood and emotional responses only.
Current thinking is that mood disorders have a biological origin, like there’s something going wrong with the brain chemistry, whereas personality disorders are thought to be a response to severe trauma in childhood. But again, we’re learning new things all the time, and this is an inexact science, so we may well find out that there are completely different causes at some point in the future, or that the causes are far more varied and complex than we thought.
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