OK, so any forum member wishing to go deep in this topic (and it was one of my obsessions for a long period) needs to understand that there are thousands of professionals who now think the entire project of psychiatry and the DSM is flawed in terms of diagnostic criteria.
I have a similar history to many on the forum in that I've seen family behaviours passed down which are clearly "atypical" and have observed personalities with those behaviours. Interestingly, I met an autism specialist while I returned from London for my PhD on these issues; they agreed that very few people discuss the psychological impact on autistic children of controlling behaviours from parents who likely manifest autistic traits: eg, if a child is controlling to manage anxiety and a parent is controlling to manage anxiety, the parent will often win as they are in the position of power. "Winning", in this sense, can result in trauma like CPTSD (complex PTSD) in children, which has been implicated in cluster B personality types.
What we know from research is there is a huge amount of confirmation bias in psychiatry. You are much more likely to be given a particular label based on the gender you walk into the room with. Alternatively, if the relationship between cluster B and CPTSD is to be believed, then there are also reasons why a female patient, historically, will present with one type of cluster B and male patients present with another subset, due to the handing down of male and female relationship dynamics. One interesting avenue is the likelihood of borderline or histrionic behaviour in a patient as a result of being subjected to chronic control and emotional abuse from an NPD partner.
I believe in genetic inheritance but I also believe in the question the pyschologist Professor John Read routinely asks at conferences on genetic research: "what is the brain for?". The brain, even in aspien folk, is designed to change in response to the environment. That is the most universal, hardwired inheritance we have!
25 Feb 2018, 4:54 pm
