Meeting-The-Challenge-Making-a-Difference-Practitioner-Guide

LEARNING POINTS FROM CHAPTER 1
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Personality difficulties or personality disorder mean that
people have difficulties in lots of different areas of their life;
you are likely to see this reflected in the range of problems
that a person needs help with and in the ways that you and
your organisation feel about and respond to them.
We need people who are extreme and unusual as well as
people who are more ‘ordinary’ to function well as a society.
It is usually helpful to focus on personality characteristics that
cause problems, rather than those we might consider unusual.
For someone’s personality difficulties to be considered a
disorder, they must be pervasive, persistent and problematic.
Criteria exist to determine whether someone has a personality
disorder; unless you have been trained to make diagnoses,
it is usually more helpful to arrive at a personalized formulation
about how someone’s problems seem to have come about,
what triggers and perpetuates them, and also what might
enable them to change.
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