The Categorical Distinction Between Personality and Affective Disorders

This paper critiques the categorical diagnosis of personality disorders, particularly the categorical distinction between personality and affective disorders. The distinction is often useful and meaningful, but at times it can be arbitrary and illusory. Efforts to provide a differential diagnosis and to identify and explain comorbidity of personality and affective disorders can then be misleading. A set of singly necessary and jointly sufficient features (e.g., biogenetic covariates, differential treatment response, pervasive phenomenology, and chronic course) cannot provide an infallible distinction between the two constructs. The concept of a characterologic affective disorder is proposed.