Schizotypal Personality Disorder

You may have noticed on the other pages of this website that I mentioned I was mentally ill.

I suffer from a disease called schizotypal personality disorder (StPD). It is not multiple personality disorder (MPD), an entirely different disease that occurs almost exclusively in sexually abused women.

StPD is just one of many syndromes called personality disorders, which are gross exaggerations of a patient's personality. They are between the neuroses and psychoses in severity. The presence of a personality disorder complicates the recovery of a patient from a psychosis or neurosis.

StPD is particularly noxious. It is like schizophrenia without the hallucinations. Here's a list of symptoms (taken from page 95 of Surviving Schizophrenia by E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., anything in quotes is taken directly from that book):

"Ideas of reference" (the patient constantly thinks that coincidences have special meaning for him, or that people are talking about him when they are not)

Magical thinking (such as superstitiousness, obsession with religion or the occult, belief in psychic powers, bizarre fantasies, etc)

"Unusual perceptual experiences" (such as having visual distortions or an M-shift)

"Odd thinking and speech" (preoccupation with detail, inability to focus one's attention, taking jokes literally, constant seriousness, compulsive actions based on obsessive thoughts, lack of enjoyment in anything (anhedonia), and very elaborate or vague speech)

Suspiciousness (so suspicious that you have a zone of personal space three feet wide, suspect your friends of betraying you, keep your blinds closed, have a preoccupation with ciphers, that kind of thing)

Inappropriate (laughing when you feel like killing yourself) or lack of emotional reactions (having a frown as your neutral facial expression)

"Behavior and appearance that is odd, eccentric, or peculiar"

"Lack of close friends other than first degree relatives"

"Excessive social anxiety that does not diminish with familiarity and tends to be associated with paranoid fears rather than negative judgments about self"

If you have any five of the above symptoms, then you may have StPD (go see a psychiatrist to be sure). I qualify for all of them myself.

What DSM IV does not mention is the depression caused by the anhedonia (lack of fulfillment and a lack of desire to fulfill it), the loneliness caused by the suspiciousness, the high risk for drug abuse, the anger caused by being shunned by 'normal' society, the befuddled parents who don't understand their mentally ill child, and the resulting high suicide rate.

When a person with StPD gets stressed out (from trying to manage all those bills when he doesn't know how to live on his own and misses living at home, for example), he can become psychotic and experience delusional behavior and auditory, visual, and somatic hallucinations. However, since a person with StPD is usually saner than a person with schizophrenia, he is in MORE danger of committing suicide than a schizophrenic because he can still think clearly enough to kill himself (though not enough to rationalize himself out of it).

I'm disclosing this to you because I know that there is a person out there reading this who has StPD, and I want him to know that he isn't alone.

I hate having StPD. Sure, there are times when my illness causes me to say something brilliant, but most of the time it destroys my willpower and prevents me from completing my artistic tasks. I envy those juvenile cancer patients with their bald heads and their dreams coming true. I wish people treated StPD and schizophrenia patients that well. I could be hanging out with Steve Irwin wrangling crocodiles, but NOOOO, crazy people just don't have the 'cute factor' that cancer kids do.

They totally forget that the mentally ill are the most at risk to be victims of violence and are significantly less dangerous than the general population.

The best thing you can do for victims of StPD is to give us our space, support us when we feel too sick to help ourselves, and to alert the rest of the world that we are not raving monsters or weaklings to be locked away or exterminated.

Love you. God Bless.

Molatar Seth Pyrargent.
Dragon, Evangelist, Ranger.

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