Anxiety, depression, burn-out, all manifestations which affect mental health and which are often linked to personality disorders. What can reveal weaknesses, how can they be identified? New approaches have existed for several years now to define what these disorders are, and what character traits can signal them. And among them a test based on what we call the “Big Five”. Psychiatry professor Michel Lejoyeux interprets these 5 dimensions.
- Personality disorders can lead to anxiety, burnout or depression.
- They can be very disabling in personal, social and professional life.
- A test based on 5 criteria allows you to assess whether you are a personality at risk.
Having personality is recognized as a human quality. And yet, these traits that our way of being reveals can, when they become excessive, characterize what we call a personality disorder. It is estimated that around 10% of people suffer from these disorders which, when moderate, do not disrupt the existence of those who suffer from them, or can even lessen over time, but which can also be caused by the origin of very disabling psychological problems and disruptions to social life.
Character or “character”?
These disorders have been defined in detail by DSM 5, diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, reference work established by the American Psychiatric Association. But there are other methods to determine whether a person simply has character or is “temperamental.” And among these methods, the so-called “Big Five” method.
So, what does this famous test say and what are the criteria on which it is based? This is one of the ways to know whether or not you suffer from personality disorders, even if, as Professor Michel Lejoyeux, psychiatrist puts it into perspective, it is above all a tool. “which allows us not to characterize a person too quickly”.
The five dimensions of personality
1 – First criterion, first of these five dimensions of personality, extroversion. “It defines openness to others, the ability to have good social relationships, to know how to express one’s emotions”underlines Professor Lejoyeux. “Obviously, the disorder exists when we are in the presence of the opposite, introversion, that is to say when a person keeps everything to himself, cannot express himself or is distressed by the fact of ‘express”explains the psychiatrist.
2 – Another dimension, emotional stabilitythat which allows us to face the vagaries and challenges of life. “It’s really the one that makes the difference between those who, overall, are doing well, who are neither anxious nor depressed, and those who will be constantly in emotional ups and downs, going through phases of sadness, anxiety or depression”, specifies Professor Lejoyeux. Such states require, according to him, “a medical approach to see if this emotional instability is not an indicator of a serious illness”.
3 – The third criterion is openness to experience, “the ability to tolerate uncertainty”analyzes the psychiatrist who takes as an example what happened during the health crisis. “At that time we saw those who were totally paralyzed because things were not going as usual, for whom life was becoming complicated, and those who, on the contrary, were capable of being open to experiences news, which is a factor of protection, even resilience”specifies Professor Lejoyeux.
4 – Fourth dimension of this “Big Five”, consciousness, defined as a person’s tendency to be organized, reliable. “This dimension is what we call the feeling of coherence, the fact of finding that what we do is coherent in relation to our values, in relation to a person’s experience and there also has in this dimension the notion of meaning, the ability to give meaning to each of the actions we carry out, that is to say to integrate our daily life into our long-term objectives, which is particularly important in professional exercise – where the question of meaning is regularly questioned today – and when we do not have this awareness we are in difficulty”, explains Professor Lejoyeux. The consequences of a weak conscience? “The fact of being impulsive and also this feeling that we see in the beginning of burn-out, thinking that nothing is of no use, expressing a form of cynicism”replies the psychiatrist.
5 – Last of these five dimensions, agreeableness. “Pure barbarism, a word that does not exist in French!”for Professor Michel Lejoyeux. “But this dimension is important, it is both the ability to relate to others, to nurture social relationships, a bit like extroversion, but also it defines empathy, the ability to feel emotions of others; we must not believe that what makes us agreeable is what we say or express, what makes us agreeable is knowing how to listen to others, knowing how to agree with others; the other; agreeableness comes more from our understanding of the other rather than from a kind of show that we put on that would make us, or not, pleasant”he adds.
“We don’t get good or bad on this type of personality test”
So, based on these criteria, are we a “normal” person or do we suffer from personality disorders? “We don’t have good or bad, reassures Professor Lejoyeux, basically, when we administer this type of test, we are all a little in the middle, with tendencies”.
The opportunity for the psychiatrist to reaffirm the limits of such tools, or even of the classification made in the DSM 5: “It’s too easy to box a personality! Moreover, even the authors of the DSM point out that it is a research instrument, a statistical instrument but in no way a clinical guide! In fact, this DSM summarizes the keys to know whether or not you have a pathological personality in four questions: the first, am I capable of knowing who I am?, what really matters to me and which establishes my deep identity; the second, am I capable of self-determination, am I able to think constructively and cope; the third, do I have empathy skills?, knowing how to put oneself in the other’s place without changing place oneself; the fourth is do I tolerate intimacythere are people who are great seducers but as soon as someone comes into their life, they can’t stand it, it’s true in friendship, it’s true in work and we find a lot in pathological personalities this ability to be in show-off but not in privacy”.
