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Patients with schizoid personality disorder are not particularly peculiar. They just prefer to be by themselves. They prefer to be alone. Characteristically schizoids have relatively low sexual drives so they are not into the dating game and so forth as vigorously as others. They often prefer the company of animals to people.
They are often good, hard workers. They are not at any increased risk for schizophrenia.
A lot of engineers are schizoid. They can spend the time by themselves in their cubicle drawing things on their drafting board and don’t want to be involved in a lot of interpersonal relationships. These people have the same co-morbidity’s. Of course they can become dysthymic, depressed. They may have some associated social phobias or agoraphobia. In general, while the schizotypal’s are the ones you would remember because they are so bizarre, the schizoids you forget. They are the ones, when you go to your high school reunion, you can’t remember that they were in your class, if they show up.
The paranoid personality, the third of this group, are people who are characteristically angry, they are suspicious, often litigious, secretive, they are unpleasant people. People you don’t like because they’ve always got some kind of grudge, some chip on their shoulder. They often engage in a variety of feuds at work or wherever. If you remember when you were a little kid there was always one house on the block.
These are generally men, but they don’t have to be. They are frequently married to women who are very passive, who just kind of put up with it and therefore their marriages may be stable, although not particularly happy. The co-morbidity for this group of people is that they are not infrequently alcoholic or have other substance abuse types of problems. Depression, panic disorder and obsessive/compulsive disorder are the kinds of problems that these often present.