Personality Disorders and Responsibility: Learning from Peay

摘要

People with personality disorders should be treated fairly. Potential crime victims should be protected. That much is uncontro-versial. The hard questions ask what is fair, when is protection adequate, and how should we achieve fairness and protection together. Peay outlines five main hurdles that the law must jump to reach these goals. All five raise serious challenges. To begin to address these challenges, we must first clarify what a personality disorder is. The notion of a personality disorder is defined very broadly in DSM-IV-TR as any inflexible, pervasive, enduring, stable, and early-onset pattern of experience and behavior that deviates markedly from cultural expectations, leads to clinically significant distress or impairment, and is not an effect of a substance or another mental disorder or medical condition. This general definition includes many specific personality disorders, including paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, conduct, antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent, and obsessive-compulsive. These disorders vary widely in their associated mental states and behaviors.