OurColony.net

Dimensions of Personality

Customer Rating:
From Front Jacket:

"'Personality' covers a vast and poorly delimited area, partly because everyone has a personality and everyone has quirks and peculiarities. In this brilliant treatise, Dr. Stone presents abnormalities of personality with a breadth not found in other texts, reaching from those individuals with mildly annoying traits to incurable psychopaths at the very edges of the concept of personality.

In Part I, 'Personality: What Is It?,' Dr. Stone grapples with questions about the origins of personality: how much is genetic and how much is learned? Using a dimensional, rather than category-based, approach, he looks at both diagnosis and prognosis of personality disorders. His huge compendia of negative and positive traits are integrated into a five-factor model, which will enable clinicians to make decisions about what cases are treatable and what changes can realistically be expected.

Part II, discusses diagnosis and treatment of 'The Personality Disorders of DSM.' These fall into Clusters A, the eccentric schizoid, schizotypal, and paranoid disorders; Cluster B, the dramatic borderline, narcissistic, antisocial, and histrionic disorders; and Cluster C, the anxious disorders - dependent, obsessive-compulsive, avoidant, and passive-aggressive. Throughout this section, clinical vignettes demonstrate not only treatment but also outcome.

The final part deals with 'Special Issues in Treatment and Beyond.' Here Dr. Stone discusses pain-dependent personality types, the impact of abuse on personality, and the personality of the therapist as a factor in treatment. Moving along a continuum from treatable to un-treatable, he illustrates traits that are amenable to psychotherapy and those that are barely amenable, if at all - for example, bitterness, jealousy, and callousness. Finally, he looks at those individuals who are beyond treatment -- psychopaths who murder, rape, and torture their victims."

A tour de force, 'Abnormalities of Personality' makes a strong statement about psychiatry's role in the diagnosis and treatment of personality abnormalities."

Crisp, cogent a pleasure to read

Customer Rating:
I am still sad that I finished this book and I miss it when I am stumbling through other books written by people who clearly just do not have the clarity of mind and the gift of expression that Michael Stone does.
The book is a fair, reasoned, elaborately thought out and articulated treatment of a subject that most people in mental health fail to understand, and fail to realize the scope and impact of.
In this day of name therapies (CBT, CBASP, DBT, ACT) Michael Stone cuts through the nonsense and delivers a balanced, empirically grounded, scientifically valid and deeply understood descrpition of personality disorders, personality traits and their impact on treatment, without faddishness or resorting to un-rigorous evangelism.

It would be a great read for anyone in the mental health treatment field, for it has an appreciation for something that the mental health field is sorely lacking in these days of cookbook therapies and "therapists" with less and less training; accurate diagnosis and nuanced approach.

A compendium of abnormalities

Customer Rating:
It is rare to find a scholarly textbook which contrasts orthodox points of view with heterodoxy. Stone seeks to debunk myths regarding the etiology of disorders and the omnipotence of treatment modalities. He also, mercifully, refocuses on the patient (client), his personality, and his presenting traits - rather than on the nebulous and abstract construct of "personality disorder". Though somewhat outdated clinically - it relies on the DSM-III-R published in 1987 - it is still a refreshing new look at the topic, a decade after its publication. Sam Vaknin, author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited".

This is a classic.

Customer Rating:
I'm writing this review because the only other customer review gave it a one star rating. Clearly, the book did not meet that reviewer's needs.

I do, however, want to alert graduate students and teachers and mental health professionals to Stone's book. Published in 1993, it is now far too old to be a primary text on personality disorders. And the fact that it uses DSM-III-R diagnostic criteria makes it even less palatable to students.

But I thought that the book was superb when it was published, and I still recommend it to graduate students in clinical psychology for its discussion of psychopathy and of personality traits that are difficult to treat.

Graduate students in clinical psychology should first learn about Robert Hare's work on psychopathy, but Stone's book is a great resource.

Mental disorder with personalities changes.

Customer Rating:
I have a friend that her daughter has MPD switiching into seven defferent people within their own mood changes, good and bad. Would like to know how commom is this disease?Would like to know more about the MPD. Whom to talk to, Doctors, hypnotherist, whomever that can give some insight on MPD Thank You John