Since diagnostic definitions and criteria of schizoid personality disorder have changed over the years, it is difficult to determine population prevalence. In an effort to represent national prevalence rates in the general population Grant et al. took data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditionsand found that 3.13% met diagnostic criteria of the DSM-IV for schizoid personality disorder. The most common personality disorder was obsessive-compulsive personality disorder . Overall, approximately 15% of adult Americans met criteria for at least one personality disorder. The researchers concluded that personality disorders are prevalent in the general population and are highly associated with disability . Guntrip argues that individuals who develop schizoid tendencies have come to believe that wanting love is in itself potentially destructive, which is why they prefer staying aloof. A cluster A personality is therefore different from a cluster B, e.g., antisocial personality, in terms of the defenses employed against a negative object. An individual with schizoid tendencies disengages instead of becoming angry and appears to choose being emotionless instead of confronting an intolerable feeling of rejection from a negative object. Schizoid personalities can be characterized as splitting themselves from the world but without a loss of reality as found in the psychotic states of schizophrenia, for example . McWilliams argues that individuals with schizoid tendencies tend to feel overwhelmed by emotions and therefore choose disengagement as a defensive mechanism from this threatening state. Individuals with schizoid traits experience a fear that their need for love is destructive and exaggerated so that they “cancel object-relationships” .

Expressing love is considered dangerous and therefore replaced with indifference . Importantly,hydroponics system for cannabis the withdrawal into the internal world is a reaction to unmet needs or frustrations with the self object. Thus, individuals with schizoid traits secretly desire the object, whereas individuals with autism do not. There are significant overlaps of a depressive and a schizoid state because they both ascertain a sense of loss of hope and loneliness. Yet, schizoid tendencies are less concerned with a loss of object than with a loss of self . Guntrip views the schizoid problem to be the polarization of relatedness with rejection and identification of objects at either extreme, and at the expense of continuity of the ego and individuation. The desire for identification with the object is ultimately regressive because it reflects a state of complete dependence and merger with the object similar to the prenatal period in the womb. Benjamin conceptualizes individuals with schizoid personalities as having grown up in functioning families that socialized the child for taking on societal roles and jobs, yet that created a formal home life in which solitary activities were fostered and emotional interactions were scarce. From her perspective on personality, she states that, when growing up in such households, individuals who develop schizoid tendencies lack interest in social connections and are indifferent to praise or criticism from others . They present with emotional coldness and do not report sexual activity . Characteristic of schizoid personalities are introversion and withdrawal, narcissism, self-sufficiency, a sense of superiority, loss of affect, loneliness, depersonalization, and regression . Introversion is the result of emotionally detaching from the outer world and finding refuge in fantasy. The narcissism of schizoid personalities is based on a “disguised internalized object-relation” whereby the individual creates objects within himself that he becomes identified with. To an outsider, a person with a schizoid personality may appear therefore completely self-sufficient and primarily concerned with himself.

The preoccupation with one’s internal life serves to veil painful feelings of emptiness and loss of self. This is similar to narcissistic personality types who develop defenses that serve to hide a grandiose, infantile self as a means to fill an inner emptiness. Narcissism is a symptom that has significant overlaps across personality clusters since it is prevalent in antisocial and borderline personalities as well. Hence, excessive narcissism is a core construct for the development of maladaptation. The schizoid personality communicates self-sufficiency because interactions with the external world are limited and are carried out intrapsychically instead. According to Guntrip this is a defense against the anxiety of interactions with others. The paradoxical effect of individuals with schizoid traits is that they display self-sufficiency and a sense of superiority albeit feeling entirely dependent and psychologically incorporated by others. Guntrip calls this “overcompensation” because it is an attempt to lower feelings of inferiority and weakness resulting from feeling dependent on others. This is accompanied by a flat affect presentation whereby those individuals show little concern for others and their feelings, which makes them appear callous. Emotional callousness is a character trait observed in antisocial personality as well and a commonly reported characteristic of youths engaging in criminal behaviors. Another characteristic of schizoid personality is loneliness. Individuals who report feeling separated from others and the social world around them describe an affective split that is typical for schizoid personalities. Finally, depersonalization and regression are probably the two most debilitating traits of a schizoid personality. The former creates sensations of un-reality and loss of self, and the latter evokes infantile urges of merger and dependency. Individuals with schizoid traits are prone to avoid human closeness because of their emotional fragility and the fear of regression into primitive states of self . They often display “devitalization” and a lack of enthusiasm about goals for their own lives. They tend to not feel passionate about their interests and are unable to give their lives direction .

Treatment efforts that are heavily reliant on group-based interventions may not be effective with this group. Similarly, skills-based interventions that foster clients’ motivations for pursuing their interests and legal hobbies may not resonate with schizoid individuals based on the preceding description. Since schizoid symptoms are the outcome of parental emotional unresponsiveness and neglect, therapeutic interventions targeting a corrective experience of the early, central object relationship are important for recovery . Seinfeld argues that borderline personalities are the outcome of abuse, whereas schizoid personality types are the result of neglect. Schizoid features are a form of regression where the individual considers any attempts to relate to others and the world as futile . When children come to believe that they are a burden to their parents they internalize that they are worthless and not loved; moreover, they may come to think that their need for love is overwhelming to their environment . This can be particularly relevant for children from homes where a parent struggles with mental illness, such as depression, and is emotionally unavailable to the child. In order to help those clients psychoanalytic case studies point to the role of empathic attunement and confrontation of the client’s self-destructiveness . By establishing a symbolic child-parent relationship the therapist can come to represent a caring, attuned parent fostering the integration of self in the client. In conclusion, personality types are integral for understanding adaptation as well as maladaptation. Schizoid personality traits have a significant overlap with the impulsive and antisocial personality type, and both types depend on immature defenses. Moreover, schizoid personalities share intrapsychic experiences of “…falseness, split experiences, difficulty with affect tolerance, and internalization of toxic others” with dissociative, narcissistic,indoor hydroponics cannabis and borderline disorders . The schizoid self is diagnostically differentiated from other disorders by the symptoms of eccentricity and lack of concern with others’ approval . Traditionally, personality-based explanations of delinquency considered an overactive id, the part of the self that is demanding, primitive, and “prerational” , and a weak superego, also described as instance of self-evaluation and morality, as predictors of delinquency . Applying a similar model to the schizoid type may indicate that a split ego explains some of the person’s self-destructive behaviors, such as substance abuse, that occur in the context of disintegration of personality functions and a loss of reality.The resilience literature has pointed to the role of personality for the development of risky and antisocial behaviors in children and adolescents. Personal attributes are incremental to resilience because they can increase an individual’s proneness to “sensation seeking, emotion regulation deficits, and novelty seeking” , all of which have been related to maladaptive, antisocial behavior. A longitudinal study by Oshri et al. assessed the effects of ego control and ego resiliency on externalizing behaviors along mediation models for children at three time points: between the ages of 7 to 9, 10 to 12, and 13 to 15. The authors were interested in how personality characteristics affected the relationship between childhood maltreatment and cannabis abuse. They implemented the California Child Q-Set Instrument developed by Block and Block in 1969, which contains 100 items referring to the children’s personality, cognitive and social characteristics . They found that the severity of early childhood abuse was related to more ego undercontrol and less ego resiliency. Ego undercontrol indicates impulsive behavior that for low levels of ego resiliency tends to occur in socially inappropriate ways and contexts. The two maladaptive personality attributes preceded externalizing problems in preadolescents and cannabis abuse symptoms in adolescence . Findings from a study in 2005 indicated that for physically, emotionally, or sexually abused Latino children higher ego resiliency and moderate ego overcontrol were related to resilience .

Furthermore, having an outside, positive source of social support, i.e., a camp counselor, was beneficial for both maltreated and nonmaltreated children. Future research is needed to study the effects of protective factors in the face of abuse. Related resilience research looking at the role of ego strengths was conducted by Cicchetti and Rogosch comparing maltreated and nonmaltreated children’s functioning over three years. This longitudinal study measured functioning by self-report and caretaker-report on social competence, school performance, internalizing and externalizing behaviors . Results showed that for nonmaltreated children positive and close relationships to the mother and other caretakers mattered, whereas for abused children and adolescents it was personality characteristics and levels of self-control that yielded adaptive outcomes . Specifically, maltreated children benefited more from ego overcontrol, ego resilience, and self-esteem.In certain contexts a more inhibited personality style may be beneficial because high levels of emotionality may interfere with functioning. This study points to the usefulness of ego strengths for maltreated children whereby having a trauma history may result in greater difficulty with forming meaningful interpersonal connections with adults, so that building up intrapersonal strengths of self-control and adaptability may compensate for trauma-related vulnerabilities. In summary, ego strength is an important factor for well being and psychological adaptation. The development of ego strength is threatened by abuse and inadequate parenting, which can lead to behavioral problems. Mental health problems as the result of trauma or genetic predispositions are another internal risk factor. Two-thirds of male youths in the juvenile justice system are estimated to have one or more psychiatric disorders . Male detainees report most frequently three types of trauma: witnessing violence, having been threatened with a weapon, and thinking that someone close to them was going to be badly hurt or die . A lot of research has been dedicated to examining the subsequent development of post traumatic stress disorder that is often comorbid with other psychiatric disorders . A study by Abram and colleagues found that in a sample of youth detainees from a Chicago-based detention center 11% of the males and 15% of the females endorsed PTSD. Critics have questioned the universality of the construct of PTSD. They suggest conceptualizing PTSD along a dimensionality of behavioral propensities and personality types. That is, among individuals with a trauma history, the antisocial personality type is more likely to externalize distress, whereas an anxious personality is turning inward. Research on the veteran population identified personality-based differences on how traumatized individuals express their distress . Hyer, Davis, Albrecht, Boudewyns, and Woods found that there are subtypes of PTSD that fall on the two extremes of behavioral reactions to distress: internalization and externalization. Individuals who fell in the anxious and inhibited personality type cluster had lower levels of substance abuse and narcissism than individuals in the impulsive and antisocial cluster . Another study employing the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire on 221 male combat veterans found that there are three distinct clusters of post traumatic responses, which were low pathology, internalizing, and externalizing behaviors . Externalizing propensities were associated with substance abuse and internalizing ones with depression .