Importance of Social Work Practice in Personality Disorder
Discuss About The Social Anxiety Disorders In Clinical Practice.
It estimated that 6.5 % of Australians adults have personality disorder. Personality is an important part of human beings and determines how they behave alone or interact with other human beings and the environment. Personality disorder refers to a mental health problem where an individual personality causes distress either to themselves or other human beings (Beck, Davis, & Freeman, 2015). Personality disorder include the way an individual feels, thinks and behaves that is different from expectations of culture and cause problems to one’s life and lasts for a prolonged time. Social work practice has an important role in diagnosing and treating personality disorders in the society. The following write-up reviews personality disorder literature and its issues in mental health practice. This will involve discussing the importance of understanding personality disorder for social work practice in mental health care and reviewing six research articles on the topic.
Personality disorder is an important area for social work practice in delivering mental health wellbeing. Social work practice has a responsibility of maintaining and improving people’s wellbeing. Personality disorder lead as a mental illness deteriorates a person’s wellbeing (Bateman, Gunderson, & Mulder, 2015). A person with personality disorder is vulnerable to self sabotage, dangerous to others and contemplation of suicide. Patient with personality disorders suffer from mood swings, have social isolation, have poor impulse control, have stormy relationship, and are likely to abuse alcohol and drug substance (Lanier et al., 2013). The social work practice needs to understand the symptoms of personality disorders in order to diagnose and offer treatment to parents. This will help and support a person, their family, and groups. Social work practice is then able to engage with an individual at different levels and solve a problem. The social work practice also needs to understand personality disorder to control the environmental factors that are likely to affect an individual personality (Lampe, 2015). Personality disorder is influenced by an individual person’s environment and social work practice can advocate for favorable policies to help disadvantaged persons’ in the community. Therefore, personality disorder is an important issue in social work practice and help social workers to assist and improve human wellbeing by identifying and addressing the mental illness.
Personality disorder has been widely researched in the past. Academicians have strived to explore and explain personality disorder as a mental illness and how knowledge and improved skills can enhance quality of care. There are different types of personality disorders that have been researched with an objective of improving patients’ wellbeing. The following section contains literature review of personality’s disorders as a mental illness and it importance to social work practice.
Literature Review
Van der Kolk (2017), defined personality disorder as a mental disorders that has enduring maladaptive behavior and cognitive patterns that deviate from the accepted individual or community culture. He stated that the patterns develop early and are inflexible causing significant disability or distress. Personality disorders cause social, personal, and occupational disruption from the normal human life. Cook et al., (2017) on the side defined personality disorder as an exaggeration or variation of an individual personality attributes. They stated that personality disorders often display antisocial behaviors which can reduce diagnostic and treatment effectiveness.
Bailey & Barton ( 2014) study on narcissism and social work response analyzed and discussed the relationship that exist in social work practice knowledge when handling a narcissism oriented patient. The study found that patients with narcissistic personalities have internal claims that are associated to self rational expectation. The study states that it is important for social workers to have great knowledge of narcissism dynamics. The study encourages social workers to critically reflect and develop deeper and social specific understanding of how personalities differ and how to handle different patients for greater practice effectiveness in delivering human wellness. The study concluded that there is a challenge of social work practice has to understand narcissism personalities when treating personality disorders mental disorders.
According to Fonagy, Luyten, & Allison (2015), personality disorders are frustrating to an individual, family and care givers. They found that personality disorders are reflections of deep rooted and long standing problems of an individual. They also found that there is lack of awareness among individual and communities on the mental illness. This made most of individuals suffering from personality disorder to go undiagnosed. Patients were branded as difficult to deal with and treat. Costa et al., (2016) in another study found that patients with personality disorders were receiving inappropriate treatment which repeatedly did not yield results. This situation leads to clients and social workers frustrations. This research outlined the diagnostic issues that affect personality disorders patients. They concluded that social work practice should address the issue of personality disorder awareness to communities diagnostic of the mental illness. Awareness will increase the number of people seeking and accepting help from social workers to treat their personality. Awareness will also help the society to stop stigmatization on individuals suffering from personality disorders.
According to Tyrer, Reed, & Crawford (2015), personality disorders impose a heavy burden to patients. Personality disorders lead to human suffering, stigmatization, and social exclusion to the patient. The patient and the family incur financial cost to manage the illness. They found that personality ill patients were denied equal opportunities economically, socially and for human development. They are excluded from decision making and both civil and political rights are not observed. The patients are not able to work and use their saving to manage the disorder. The personality disorder also leads to disability. Lack of patient early diagnosis and treatment can lead to advanced disease conditions and disability (Kealy, & Ogrodniczuk, 2018). Personality disorders therefore progressively lead to human burdens to a patient. The patient becomes vulnerable to poverty. This lowers the individual quality of life. The wellbeing of the patient replaced with human burdens that range from diseases and finances. Gibson (2015), states that social work practice should focus on prevention strategies to avoid mental disorder advancement. The social workers should detect mental disorder early enough to introduce an intervention that can stop the advancement of the personality disorder. This will avoid the patient from experiencing social isolation or mental illness advancing to disability. The social work practice therefore should focus on mental health wellness campaign as a strategy to prevent personality disorders from happening in a community.
Mazer, Cleare, Young, & Juruena, (2018), established that personality disorders are caused by either environmental factor or genetic factor or both of them combined. Environmental factors that influence personality disorders are the conditions that an individual personality develops in. A surrounding that an individual is brought up in can make them vulnerable to personality disorders. The research found that children that experience traumatic experiences are more likely to have personality disorders compare to other children. Children that have poor care were also found to have a high risk of suffering from personality disorders. Van der Kolk, (2017), found that personality disorders can be passed from parents to children. Parent’s personality’s traits get passed to kids who then become vulnerable to personalities disorders. Zachar, Krueger, & Kendler, (2016), concluded that social work practice should focus on areas where children experience traumatic situations and provide counseling to mold their personality to avoid personality disorders. The social workers can project the likely areas and children to have high personality disorders. This entails that social work practice should be intense in vulnerable areas in terms of trauma or poor care to continuously improve people wellbeing.
Conclusion
From the write up, personality disorder is a prolonged behavior or cognitive disruption of an individual. Personality disorder causes distress and can lead to disability. Personality ill patients behave against the expectations of the society. Though each individual has a unique personality, patients behavior go behold the accepted expectation of their culture. Social work practice objective is to improve people wellbeing. Social work practice is important for counseling, advocating, diagnosing, and treating personality disorders. The literature review show that different authors have different definition of personality disorder but have almost the same meaning. Personality disorders cause frustrations and health burdens. Personality disorders are determined by environmental and genetic factors of an individual. Social workers can predict children or areas likely to have high prevalence of personality disorders. Therefore, social worker practice should focus on deepening knowledge and skills to understand personality disorders and prevent it impact to the society for improved wellbeing.
References
Bailey, I., & Barton, H. (2014). Narcissism and the Social Work Response. Australian Social Work, 67(4), 582-592.
Bateman, A. W., Gunderson, J., & Mulder, R. (2015). Treatment of personality disorder. The Lancet, 385(9969), 735-743.
Beck, A. T., Davis, D. D., & Freeman, A. (Eds.). (2015). Cognitive therapy of personality disorders. Guilford Publications.
Cook, A., Spinazzola, J., Ford, J., Lanktree, C., Blaustein, M., Cloitre, M., … & Mallah, K. (2017). Complex trauma in children and adolescents. Psychiatric annals, 35(5), 390-398.
Costa, J., Marôco, J., Pinto?Gouveia, J., Ferreira, C., & Castilho, P. (2016). Validation of the psychometric properties of the Self?Compassion Scale. Testing the factorial validity and factorial invariance of the measure among borderline personality disorder, anxiety disorder, eating disorder and general populations. Clinical psychology & psychotherapy, 23(5), 460-468.
Fonagy, P., Luyten, P., & Allison, E. (2015). Epistemic petrification and the restoration of epistemic trust: A new conceptualization of borderline personality disorder and its psychosocial treatment. Journal of Personality Disorders, 29(5), 575-609.
Gibson, M. (2015). Shame and guilt in child protection social work: new interpretations and opportunities for practice. Child & Family Social Work, 20(3), 333-343.
Kealy, D., & Ogrodniczuk, J. S. (2018). Mechanisms of change in treatments of personality disorders: Commentary on the special section. Journal of personality disorders, 32(Supplement), 134-142.
Lanier, Paul, Bollinger, Sarah, & Krueger, Robert F. (2013). Advances in the Conceptualization of Personality Disorders: Issues Affecting Social Work Practice and Research.(Report). Clinical Social Work Journal, 41(2), 155-162.
Lampe, L. (2015). Social anxiety disorders in clinical practice: Differentiating social phobia from avoidant personality disorder. Australasian Psychiatry, 23(4), 343-346.
Mazer, A. K., Cleare, A. J., Young, A. H., & Juruena, M. F. (2018). Bipolar affective disorder and borderline personality disorder: Differentiation based on the history of early life stress and psychoneuroendocrine measures. Behavioural Brain Research.
Tyrer, P., Reed, G. M., & Crawford, M. J. (2015). Classification, assessment, prevalence, and effect of personality disorder. The Lancet, 385(9969), 717-726.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2017). Developmental Trauma Disorder: Toward a rational diagnosis for children with complex trauma histories. Psychiatric annals, 35(5), 401-408.
Zachar, P., Krueger, R. F., & Kendler, K. S. (2016). Personality disorder in DSM-5: An oral history. Psychological medicine, 46(1), 1-10.
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