Schizoid

Soooo.... I met with my psychiatrist today.  He and my therapist, Dr. Collins, think that I have schizoid personality disorder.  I went over the DSM criteria today with him and there's pretty much nothing else that describes me better.  It is disconcerting and a bit shocking.  If anyone is reading this they probably know me pretty well and I bet they'll agree with what the wiki describes.  I'll post some excerpts that I found striking.

"Schizoid personality disorder (SPD) is a personality disorder characterized by a lack of interest in social relationships, a tendency towards a solitary lifestyle, secretiveness, and emotional coldness."

Yep.

"...when the patient’s personal space is violated, they feel suffocated and feel the need to free themselves and be independent. Those people who have SPD are happiest when they are in a relationship in which the partner places few emotional or intimate demands on them, as it is not people as such that they want to avoid, but both negative and positive emotions, emotional intimacy, and self disclosure." 

Yikes.  Still on track exactly.

"schizoid individuals "prefer to make relationships on their own terms and not in terms of the impulses of other people," and that if they cannot do so, they prefer isolation."

Very yes, again.

"People with SPD are sometimes sexually apathetic, though they do not normally suffer from anorgasmia. Many schizoids have a normal sex drive but some prefer to masturbate rather than deal with the social aspects of finding a sexual partner. Therefore, their need for sex may appear less than for those who do not have SPD, as the individuals with SPD prefer remaining alone and detached. When having sex, individuals with SPD often feel that their personal space is being violated, and they commonly feel that masturbation or sexual abstinence is preferable to the emotional closeness they must tolerate when having sex."

Ugh.  I have struggled with this a lot in past relationships.  It has always been a problem.

"Descriptions of the schizoid personality as hidden behind an outward appearance of emotional engagement have long been recognized, beginning with Fairbairn's (1940) description of 'schizoid exhibitionism' in which he remarked that the schizoid individual is able to express quite a lot of feeling and to make what appear to be impressive social contacts but in reality giving nothing and losing nothing, because since he is only playing a part his own personality is not involved. According to Fairbairn, the person "...disowns the part which he is playing and thus the schizoid individual seeks to preserve his own personality intact and immune from compromise."

It's as if they are describing ME, and not a disorder.  When I read this earlier today I got kinda teary.

Also, this is what the DSM says that my psychiatrist read to me today:

A. A pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings, beginning by early adulthood (age eighteen or older) and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by four (or more) of the following:

1. neither desires nor enjoys close relationships, including being part of a family
2. almost always chooses solitary activities
3. has little, if any, interest in having sexual experiences with another person
4. takes pleasure in few, if any, activities
5. lacks close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives
6. appears indifferent to the praise or criticism of others
7. shows emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened affect

How about, all of the above?

"Many fundamentally schizoid people present with an engaging, interactive personality style. Such a person can appear to be available, interested, engaged, and involved in interacting with others; however, in reality, he or she is emotionally withdrawn and sequestered in a safe place in an internal world."

Very yes.

"This introverted narcissistic self-sufficiency, which does without real external relationships while all emotional relations are carried on in the internal world, is a safeguard against anxiety breaking out in dealing with actual people." The more that schizoids can rely on themselves, the less they have to rely on other people and expose themselves to the potential dangers and anxieties associated with that reliance or, even worse, dependence. The vast majority of schizoid individuals show an enormous capacity for self-sufficiency, for the ability to operate alone, independently and autonomously, in managing their worlds."

I have felt an intense desire to be independent for a long, long time.

"The patient appears to have no awareness of how his or her comments or actions affect and hurt other people. More frequently, the loss of affect is manifest within the patient as genuine confusion, a sense of something missing in his or her emotional life."

This is one of the reasons that I talked to my psychiatrist about not feeling connections to people back in February.  I have a huge lack of something and it makes me feel fake.

"Loneliness is an inescapable result of schizoid introversion and abolition of external relationships. It reveals itself in the intense longing for friendship and love which repeatedly break through. Loneliness in the midst of a crowd is the experience of the schizoid cut off from affective rapport." This is a central experience of the schizoid that is often lost to the observer. Contrary to the familiar caricature of the schizoid as uncaring and cold, the vast majority of schizoid persons who become patients express at some point in their treatment their longing for friendship and love. This is not the schizoid patient as described in the DSMs."

And now we come to what makes me feel the most unsettled and eventually led to my admission to the mental hospital.  I started to realize what I was and it was too much.

"Depression: While people who have SPD can also suffer from clinical depression, this is certainly not always the case. Unlike depressed people, persons with SPD generally do not consider themselves inferior to others, although they will probably recognise that they are different."

Well, I definitely had depression and have had it off an on (or probably always on) for the past 6 years or so. It was always hard to diagnose because I never hated myself or wanted to die until the last 3 months.

"Working through abandonment depression is a complicated, lengthy, and conflicted process which can be an enormously painful experience in terms of what is remembered and what must be felt. It involves a mourning, a grieving, for the loss of the illusion that the patient had adequate support for the emergence of the real self. Also, it is a mourning for the loss of an identity, the false self, which the person constructed and with which he or she has negotiated much of his or her life. The dismantling of the false "

This is in the long-term treatment section.   It was the most impacting section for me.  I was very teary eyed reading this because I think what I went through in the past 4 months was the grieving and mourning involved in the crushing guilt I felt about Allie.  I realized only recently that I had support to be my true self in the relationship, but I didn't have the ability.  It's like winning the lottery, losing the ticket, and only years later learning that you had the winning ticket.  It's crushing.  It was definitely the most pain I have ever felt.  If this is what I have to do again to get better... shit.  It's going to be worse than I thought.