Ethical aspects of personality disorders.
OBJECTIVE
To review recent literature around the controversial diagnosis of personality disorder, and to assess the ethical aspects of its status as a medical disorder.


RESULTS
The diagnostic currency of personality disorder as a psychiatric/medical disorder has a longstanding history of ethical and social challenges through critiques of the medicalization of deviance. More recently controversies by reflexive physicians around the inclusion of the category in the forthcoming revisions of International Classification of Diseases and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifications reflect the problems of value-laden criteria, with the diagnostic category being severely challenged from within psychiatry as well as from without.


CONCLUSIONS
The clinical diagnostic criteria for extremely value-laden psychiatric conditions such as personality disorder need to be analyzed through the lens of values-based medicine, as well as through clinical evidence, as the propensity for political and sociolegal appropriation of the categories can render their clinical and diagnostic value meaningless.
Bendelow
Gillian
G
School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, East Sussex, UK. g.a.bendelow@sussex.ac.uk
D000987:Antisocial Personality Disorder / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology; D003617:Dangerous Behavior; D039721:Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; D006801:Humans; D010554:Personality Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology; D011570:Psychiatry / Q000941:ethics*; D016728:Self-Injurious Behavior / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology; D012945:Social Values