April 29, 2022 – Amid the entire attention this month to actor Johnny Depp’s $50 million lawsuit against ex-wife Amber Heard, a psychological term has entered the final public’s lexicon: histrionic personality disorder.
Depp says that an op-ed Heard wrote in 2018 hurt his profession, and he’s suing for defamation.
The term changed into once venerable in courtroom in some unspecified time in the future of the testimony of Shannon Curry, PsyD, a clinical and forensic psychologist in California and Hawaii, who applied a psychological assessment of Heard and acknowledged that she met with Heard for 12 hours.
Curry testified that Heard has both borderline personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder. Heard has acknowledged she has posttraumatic stress disorder.
Due to the her situation, Heard is highly inquisitive about image, inclined to cruelty and blaming others, and unable to admit responsibility for doing one thing corrupt, Curry testified, as reported in Newsweek.
So what exactly is histrionic personality disorder, and the procedure in which does it differ from the numerous, better-known personality problems, equivalent to paranoid, narcissistic, or obsessive-compulsive?
Histrionic personality disorder – histrionic manner overly theatrical or melodramatic – tends to be more traditional in females, can even be realized or inherited, and comes with “intense, unstable emotions and distorted self-photos,” according to the Cleveland Health center.
And these with the disorder are inclined to behave dramatically, depend upon numerous of us’s approval to bolster their vainness, and hang an “overwhelming desire to be noticed.”
Histrionic personality disorder is far much less continuously recognized than narcissistic or borderline personality disorder, says Jessica January Behr, PsyD, a certified psychologist in Modern York Metropolis.
“The criteria for the disorder is susceptible to be procedure more continuously viewed than recognized,” she says. “To diagnose somebody with histrionic personality disorder, a particular person has to meet 5 out of 9 very explicit criteria.”
These 9 criteria encompass being wretched unless you’re the focus, your emotions shifting impulsively, acting very dramatically – as though performing earlier than an target audience – with exaggerated emotions and expressions but acting to lack sincerity, and continuously seeking reassurance or approval, according to the Cleveland Health center.
In a roundabout procedure, this disorder is a vital one, and the ticket shouldn’t be venerable unless a mental neatly being knowledgeable who has evaluated you and accomplished distinct diagnostic tests confirms it.
For treatment, of us with the disorder will in overall safe out about counseling to hiss the motivations and fears associated with their suggestions and behavior, and the counselor can support the particular person learn to reveal to others in a more obvious manner.
A neatly being care reputable also can prescribe treatment to address the despair and dismay that typically come with this disorder, according to the Cleveland Health center.
“It’s factual that folks are learning about this psychological term, but it absolutely’s major to preserve faraway from making an armchair diagnosis,” Behr says. “We are in a position to also also peaceable watch out now to not conflate ‘dramatic’ and ‘histrionic.’ To hang histrionic personality disorder requires distinct criteria to be met, and this isn’t a term to be venerable lightly.”
