CLUSTER A PERSONALITY DISORDERS

10 Signs You Might Have Schizotypal Personality Disorder

For those who ever wondered whether they have STPD

1. You have a fearful-avoidant attachment style

People with this attachment style fear abandonment and have a deep-seated fear of rejection, which means they worry that they will be hurt if they allow themselves to become too close to others. As a result, they can go to extreme measures to avoid real or imagined separation or rejection, such as by people-pleasing even at a cost to themselves or making suicide threats to guilt people into staying in relationships.

They are uncomfortable getting close to others, even though they want emotionally intimate relationships. They find it difficult to trust and depend on people. They may push people away despite their fear of abandonment because they feel ill at ease with emotional closeness. They view themselves as unworthy of responsiveness from their partners.

2. You have had mood lability from a young age

While it’s normal to have experiences with anxiety and depression throughout life, it is not normal if these are chronic and experienced most of the time.

People with STPD are emotionally dysregulated. Their emotions are all over the place, and these are often unexpected, eruptive, explosive, dysregulated, chaotic and disorganised. It can also be difficult for them to label these emotions.

They tend to suffer from emotional swings (day to day changes), social anxiety, pervasive shame (sense that you are flawed and defective as a human being), depression and poor self-esteem. They often have a “thin skin” and take things personally, feel like they are a burden to others and externalise blame whenever there’s a conflict.

3. You suffer from ideas of reference

These are false beliefs that random or irrelevant occurrences in the world directly relates to a person and are different from delusions and hallucinations. An example might be believing the lyrics of a song are specifically about them or perceiving objects or events as having been deliberately set up to convey a particular meaning to themselves.

Essentially, it’s making connections where there is none, which can cause people with the disorder to feel paranoid. An example can be someone with the disorder mistakenly getting arrested for possession of cocaine but testing negative; however, he concludes that he has been “set up” instead of dismissing what happened as bad luck. He might claim to know that the police officers are talking about him and are against him.

The more uncomfortable people with this disorder feel, the more vigilant they will become. As a result, they will be more likely to interpret events as revolving around them.

4. You have odd beliefs or magical thinking that influence your behaviour

This could be anything from a real commitment to the idea of paranormal activity to believing that one has a sixth sense or can communicate telepathically with others. The beliefs of people with the disorder would be unsupported by science and inconsistent with subcultural norms.

The behaviour resulting from these beliefs can be taking certain precautions not to anger ghosts, and it would have to interfere with functioning. The magical thinking may present as something like seeing a car turn right and believing that the driver turned that way because the person with the disorder was thinking of that. In other words, it’s the belief that one can “magically” influence other people.

5. You have odd thinking and speech patterns

People with STPD have unusual ways of thinking, perceiving and communicating. Their speech may be odd. It may be excessively abstract or concrete or contain odd phrases. The way they respond to questions by someone may feel as if they are not sharing the same consensual social reality. They may appear puzzled by basic questions and give disconnected and tangential responses.

The schizotypal individual has unusual thought patterns that disrupt their ability to communicate clearly with others. For example, they may emphasize trivial aspects of a situation at the expense of those that are important.

6. You experience high levels of paranoia and hypervigilance

Individuals with STPD feel that the world is hostile and unpredictable and, thus, best avoided. They have a hostile attribution bias and experience high levels of suspicion and mistrust. They may often suspect that others are planning to harm or deceive them without any evidence.

The suspiciousness and paranoid ideation in someone with STPD can be similar to patients with Paranoid Personality Disorder, such as being concerned about infidelity or believing they are being followed.

Individuals with STPD typically do not have psychotic features such as hallucinations. They are clearly in contact with reality (they have impaired reality testing, not no reality testing). However, they may experience brief psychotic episodes in response to stress.

7. You have inappropriate or constricted affect

People with STPD tend to appear emotionless, showing flat or constricted affect in interpersonal situations. Flat affect is considered a negative symptom of schizophrenia. It means diminished emotional expressions — in other words, your emotional expressions don’t show outwardly. For example, your voice may be dull and flat, and your face may not change a lot as you speak. You may also have trouble understanding the emotions of others.

Flat affect is different from shallow affect seen in Antisocial Personality Disorder (psychopathy), where the individual experiences lowered, superficial, and short-lived emotions.

8. Your behaviour or appearance is considered odd, eccentric, or peculiar

People with STPD often dress oddly or unkemptly, such as wearing ill-fitting or poorly matched clothes. They also have odd mannerisms. When engaged interpersonally, they may seem distracted or unable to focus or even ramble from subject to subject. Others perceive them as aberrant, behaving in an aloof, curious, or bizarre manner. People will often describe them as strange or eccentric.

9. You have excessive social anxiety that does not diminish with familiarity

For people with STPD, this tends to be associated with paranoid fears rather than negative judgements about themselves, like in the case of people who have Borderline, Narcissistic, and Avoidant Personality Disorders. In other words, people with STPD are paranoid that other people may harm or betray them, which intensifies the closer they get to the person.

This means they are prone to seeing people as potential enemies. They are hypervigilant and constantly question and doubt the motives of people around them. They may also spend a lot of time studying people around them due to their paranoia. They tend to be apprehensive and ill at ease during social encounters. They are anxiously watchful due to their distrust of others and suspicion of their motives. This persists even with people they have become familiar with over time.

10. You lack close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives

People with STPD often have trouble maintaining meaningful relationships. They lack trust in others and prefer privacy and isolation with few attachments and personal obligations. They may sometimes express sadness over their lack of relationships, but their behaviour suggests little desire for intimate connections. They often interact with people when they have to but prefer to keep to themselves.

References:

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596

Millon, T., Grossman, S., Millon, C., Meagher, S., & Ramnath, R. (2004). Personality disorders in modern life (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Berry, K., Band, R., Corcoran, R., Barrowclough, C., & Wearden, A. (2007). Attachment styles, earlier interpersonal relationships and schizotypy in a non-clinical sample. Psychology and psychotherapy, 80(Pt 4), 563–576. https://doi.org/10.1348/147608307X188368

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