Narcissistic And Compulsive Personality Disorder example essay topic

Psychologists have been using Million Clinical Multi axial Inventory (MCMI- ) to diagnose patients with personality disorders, but it has been questioned on its accuracy and fairness when it comes to gender differences. MCMI- is mainly used for objective measuring of personality and psychopathology and it is stated that its works best on Axis II disorders. Empirical evidence does not support MCMI- with prevalence of personality disorders in men and women. MCMI- uses base rate in its scoring system and base rate is the frequency or dominance of a characteristic in a particular population therefore the accuracy of the assessment measure can be affected. Raw scores are transformed in to base rate score for each scale.

If raw score is 0 then the base rate is 0 however if the base rate is 60 then the raw score is at a median for that particular scale. Not only does the MCMI- evaluate Mental Health problems, more importantly, its strength is in determining underlying personality patterns that are essential to understanding and effectively treating clients. These personality patterns are also vital in identifying Thinking Errors that can be treated with a Cognitive Behavioral approach. However showing gender differences in mean test scores via the personality disorder scales are still hard to figure out compared to its predecessors. (Version 1&2) This is mainly due to the unrevised manuals that accompany it (the manual contains separate information for Male and female) In turn there has also been an indication that there does not appear to be a descriptive data for any clinical sample to compare male and female MCMI- scores or scale elevations. However unlike the negativity of the comparison in gender elevations there seems to be an abundance of data to the MCMI- in forensic evaluations.

Here we find that research done on the prevalence of histrionic personality disorder indicates that there is no significant difference between genders. However according to the scales we get to see a higher BR score for females than for males. Furthermore on both the Narcissistic and Compulsive personality Disorder scale the BR scores indicate that: 1. Narcissistic personality Disorder is more common in men than in women 2. Compulsive personality disorders are significantly more frequently male that female. With the Studies done in custody evaluations Daniel J. Hynan tells us that the elevated Histrionic, Narcissistic, and Compulsive BR scores for women in custody are not simply due to females responding in a more socially desirable manner than men, perhaps because of greater motivation to not loose custody of their children.

Even with this interesting analysis there are still many who believe that there is no reason for concern about the study of these scales as they are focused more about positive Psychological traits rather that Psychopathology. Again the use of the scale is in question by others as they feel that the adjusted BR score may not have "solid empirical conceptual bases", which is why a great deal of caution about using those scales should be initiated. In general the ethical value that psychologists treat their clients fairly comes into play as they cannot do a personality disorder evaluation on them knowing that there are going to be flaws in the scale or pattern of measurement, or as how Hynan puts it. "Just because a test has been published, there is no guarantee that it has adequate validity and reliability for each possible use". Thus the challenge of correctly identifying personality disorders are still going to be areas of study until the delivery of "valuable services to clients, who deserve as much accuracy and fairness" is given..