Mixed Personality Disorder: Symptoms, Causes & Treatment

I am sure you must have read about personality disorders before. A personality disorder can be described as a disorder of thoughts, you have inflexible thought and behavior patterns that are away from what is normally expected out of people.

Personality disorders are said to disturb almost all aspects of your life. They weaken your coping mechanism, and your decision-making and have a huge impact on your resilience as well. Personality disorders also play a huge role in the way you manage your relationships.

Most personality disorders fit into a type and have an expected series of symptoms. This makes it easy to manage the disorder. However, there is one type of personality disorder, mixed personality disorder, which has mixed symptoms from more than one personality disorder.

Want to know more about mixed personality disorder? Well, it is the most commonly diagnosed personality disorder, I’m sure you’d want to know more about that…

All About The Mixed Personality Disorder

A mixed personality disorder is a weird type of personality disorder that has no boundaries. When an individual develops a mixed personality disorder, they can have symptoms from any of the 10 recognized personality disorders that we have.

This means an individual with a mixed personality disorder will display a range of symptoms that do not fall into one type of personality disorder. They can have one symptom of narcissistic personality disorder and another from a dependent personality disorder.

There have been speculations regarding the authenticity of a mixed personality disorder. However, researchers and experts claim that it is quite possible for an individual to develop symptoms from more than one personality disorder simultaneously.

Mixed Personality Disorder: Symptoms

Having a mixed personality disorder means that your symptoms will never belong to one type of personality disorder. You can have symptoms randomly from any of the personality disorders. Therefore, it’s difficult to identify some specific symptoms of mixed personality disorder.

However, there are a few common symptoms of having an individual diagnosed with a personality disorder. Let’s have a look at them;

• Problematic thoughts and behavior patterns that disturb their daily life
• These Problematic thoughts & behaviors are experienced in all aspects of life
• Problematic thoughts & behaviors are long-lasting, and usually begin in childhood
• The problematic thoughts are not because of some medication or substance use

If an individual experiences problematic thoughts and behaviors so much so that it has started impacting their daily life and affects people around them as well, they need professional help. Other than these common symptoms, an individual with mixed personality disorder shows poor discrimination of facial expressions which is not present in other personality disorders. Along with that they also have a poor emotional regulation level.

Mixed Personality Disorder: Causes

Unfortunately, we haven’t found any cause of any type of personality disorder yet. There is no one thing that you can say for certain that causes someone to develop a mixed personality disorder.

However, experts have identified a few triggers that can have an influence on the thoughts and behaviors of a person. Let’s have a Look at them;

• Genetic factors: some mental health conditions can be passed down through genes, and personality disorders have a chance of being hereditary
• Environment and social circumstances: when a person grows up in a dysfunctional family or suffers from poverty or experiences a traumatic event
• Early life experiences: experience abuse, neglect, loss of a parent, and other traumatic events can lead to the development of mixed personality disorder

Mixed Personality Disorder: Treatment

When it comes to the treatment of mixed personality disorder, there are a lot of treatment options available. Once you have been diagnosed with mixed personality disorder, you can sit with your therapist and talk about all the symptoms that you have been experiencing.

Based on the different symptoms that have been causing you trouble, your treatment plan can be chosen. There are a lot of therapies that can work for mixed personality disorder. Let’s have a loot at some therapies that can help in the treatment of a mixed personality disorder;

• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
• Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT)
• Cognitive analytical therapy (CAT)
• Mentalization-based therapy (MBT)
• Psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy

That’s All Folks!

I hope you found this blog about mixed personality disorder helpful, informative and interesting. Do share this blog with your friends and family. A mixed personality disorder is the most commonly diagnosed personality disorder, it’s important to know what it is.

Thanks for reading.

Take care and stay safe.