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Avoidant personality disorder causes individuals to avoid uncomfortable social situations, leading to isolation and potential misdiagnosis as depression. Psychotherapy and medication are common treatments, but patients may be reluctant to seek help due to their avoidance tendencies.
Avoidant personality disorder is a mental illness that causes shy people to change their lives so they never have to face uncomfortable social situations. People with this condition tend to work alone and often live very isolated lives. Many people suffer from various anxiety disorders, but what separates these individuals from avoidant personality disorder sufferers is how they react to their anxious feelings. The exact cause of avoidant personality disorder isn’t known, but many doctors think it could be a mix of hereditary factors and life experiences. Treatment is possible, but success is generally very uncertain, in part because patients are often reluctant to address their problems.
Individuals with avoidant personality disorder may have friends, but they usually have a relatively small number and may not even be able to spend time with them. Some of them even have trouble spending time with their families and may find ways to avoid this type of contact as well. This lack of intimate contact can lead to depression and sometimes the condition can be misdiagnosed as clinical depression.
People generally develop the initial symptoms of this disorder in childhood and they often get worse over time. Some experts think it begins as simple shyness, and other people’s reaction to that shyness causes the individual to withdraw from any social contact until it finally becomes crippling. As patients age, they become more skilled and specialized in their avoidance methods. In many cases, they change their lives so much that they hardly ever experience any social anxiety because they never encounter situations where it can occur.
The most common approach to treatment is to focus on psychotherapy. The doctor will often try to find any limiting beliefs in the patients mind and help them change the way they think. Sometimes medications can be used in conjunction with therapy to help things and make the patient more comfortable with daily social gatherings. Caution is often needed on the part of the therapist, because these people can sometimes react very badly to extremely intense therapy sessions. Therapy, from their point of view, is often seen as a kind of social contact and if it doesn’t go well, they are very likely to withdraw from it.
The usual tendency of these individuals to avoid any social situation is one of the main things that can make treatment difficult. It can be difficult to get people with avoidant personality disorder to seek therapy. They often realize they have a problem, but many of them would rather continue to suffer than go through the social contact needed to heal. When patients pursue therapy, they can often improve, at least to some extent.
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