Short Description or Definition
Personality disorders in autism refer to comorbidity (co-occurring psychiatric disorders). In medicine, comorbidity is relatively straightforward because it mostly concerns well-defined disease entities with known causes (e.g., a fractured leg co-occurring with diabetes). In psychiatry, however, disorders are defined as clusters of signs and symptoms (syndromes), with complicated and uncertain causal pathways. As a consequence, psychiatric disorders show a considerable overlap. This makes it difficult to decide whether symptoms have to be ascribed to either disorder A or disorder B (differential diagnostics) or to both A and B (comorbidity). This issue is important for achieving diagnostic clarity and for managing treatment.
This chapter deals with the dilemma posed when signs and symptoms point to a personality disorders (PD) as well as to an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
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Sizoo, B., Horwitz, E. (2018). Personality Disorders. In: Volkmar, F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6435-8_1548-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6435-8_1548-3
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