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Schizotypal personality disorder

Schizotypal personality disorder. These are people who are weird. They look a little different. They are the ones that dress funny. You know, with the beanies with propellers or whatever it may be. They talk funny. They often have peculiar mannerisms, peculiar ways of thought, they maybe get lost in fantasies. They don’t relate well to other people.

They kind of stick out as sore thumbs and at times are humiliated because of this awkwardness and these peculiarities. They have poor relationships with other people because it’s hard to get along with someone like that. Now our current thinking about schizotypal personality is that these people have very poor perceptual cognitive skills.

They are very prone to break down into a variety of psychotic-type of reactions. They may be brief paranoid, brief disorganizational types of psychoses that then reconstitute, or unfortunately these are the people who often then de-compensate into full-blown schizophrenia and at that point then that diagnosis is more appropriate. They may have, in terms of co-morbidity of course, depression, anxiety disorders.

Now the second one here is schizoid. We need to keep these two separate despite their similarities of how they found. Schizoid people 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.

They often prefer the company of animals to people. They are often good, hard workers. They are not at any increased risk for schizophrenia. They are people who make wonderful lighthouse keepers, engineers. 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.

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 - which they probably.