Thread by @DrWinarick

THREAD 🧵

“Schizoidia Everywhere” by Dr. W

#Solitary individuals may experience a variety of different emotional experiences & internal conflicts that would not be readily observable from behavior because generally the #solitary look they same because they are #solitary.

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However, clinical experience & empirical research have shown that distinctions among #solitary types in connection to emotional functioning, social needs, and attachment-related dynamics vary considerably and have diagnostic implications.

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Some #solitary individuals desperately want to belong but fear rejection and embarrassment so strongly that they isolate. This is what is commonly known as #shyness from a normative view & social #anxiety through a pathology lens in children.

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Other #solitary children are rather unaware, if not indifferent to or aggravated by the social interpersonal world of feelings and communication. These children were once considered to have #schizoid personality disorder of childhood

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but have later been relabeled as #Aspergers and now, High Functioning #Autism. They are solitary and indifferent if not happy about this state of affairs. In adulthood, this #solitary style can be described by the diagnosis of
#schizoid personality disorder.

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w/or w/out ASD-schizoid PD comorbidity. Then, there are solitary folks who remain untouched by social relationships because they are suspicious, hostile, and mistrusting of others. Solitary hostility is best captured by the diagnosis of paranoid personality disorder.

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For many #solitary individuals who enjoy and prefer their alone time, interpersonal attitudes and affective experience is more complicated, nuanced, contradictory, and intense. For those folks, #solitude may be an escape from overwhelming affective-interpersonal experience.

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Their emotional experience may not be exactly fear of rejection or apathy but something more primal like a fear of enmeshment, of losing oneself, of being devoured by or devouring the other. They often crave intimacy but fear & loathe it at the same time.

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Now that several solitary styles have been elucidated in terms of interpersonal attitudes and affective experience, it’s time for the name game (when psychologists come up with acronyms and use alliteration to coin clever labels for constructs) so here go 9/

In thinking about solitary styles, several dimensions/categories emerge as categorically consequential. Known syndromes map nicely onto this solitary nosology as described below:

1. Anxious Solitude (AS): Social Phobia, Avoidant PD, Schizotypal PD

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2. Hostile Solitude (HS): Paranoid PD

3. Indifferent Solitude (IS: Post DSM-III Schizoid PD

4. Solitary Ambivalence (SA): Pre DSM-III/Psychodynamic Schizoid PD

5. Sad Solitude (SS): Depression; negative symptoms

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6. Positive Symptom Solitude (PSS): solitary loss of reality testing.

Any respectable psychometric measure of psychopathology should delineate scales to assess each of these dimensions. Perhaps, a 6 factor measure of solitude is too much but I think 3-4 is workable & overdue /12

Probably just should be 4: anxious, apathetic, ambivalent, and aggressive.

The measure will be called the 4ASSS (4-A Solitary Style Scale)

It will cost $7.20 and will be available in 6-12 months maybe.

Maybe never.

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