I never bothered to go to anyone for a professional diagnosis, since I’ve been to a therapist earlier in my life and it left a bad impression so I have no desire to go to another one. In the course of researching on wikipedia various psychological things that had been bothering me (probably due to an existential crisis, or a loss of sense of self, or something to that effect), I came across the article on schizoid personality, and like any other disorder read on the internet, I took it with heavy skepticism knowing that it’s easy for anyone to slip into hypochondria and start checking boxes on a list of symptoms and conclude “omg, that’s so me”. I’m not looking for a psychological diagnosis to wear on my chest like these histrionic / bipolar types, or like the autists / spergs as an excuse for their odd behavior, I just want to better understand how I’m different from the rest of the normal world. If I can understand what makes me different from a normal persons perspective, then through the inverse I might understand what makes normal people different from my perspective. I kept finding my self coming back to the wikipedia page for it, so I looked into it a bit more.
So what I finally stumbled upon was a treatment handbook for schizoids, which combines and analyzes information about schizoid personality from many different psychologists, as early as Carl Jung, regarding diagnostic criteria (including differential diagnosis, which is important for distinguishing between schizoid, schizotypal, schizophrenia, autism, etc.), and treatment strategies (good to read, but don’t expect to be able to actually treat yourself with it).
This was what took me from “hmmm, well maybe that’s me, maybe not” while reading the wikipedia article to “oh fuck, that’s dead on”. Too much matched up with me, and some parts read like an autobiography, so I can’t deny it.
The title is “Treatment of schizoid personality - An analytic psychotherapy handbook”, in case the pdf doesn’t upload.
www. proquest
.com/openview/10cb591b9eb8147e5881ffc5bb279e66/