Quote:
Originally Posted by deafdyke
jillo, on the other hand..........personality disorders like anti social personality disorder and bpd almost make the person not human. With sceizo and bipolar and the other ones, the people with it are still pretty much human. But APD removes the empathy from the species. From my psych reading, psychologists define "humanity" as pretty much empathy.
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Empathic understanding most definately is one of the features missing in some of the personality disorders. It isn't so much that empathy has been removed, but that the developmental tasks were so incomplete or distorted that it simply never developed. Emapthy is learned through completion of developmental tasks of chicldhood. We are not inherently empathic. And various people have differing abilities to both experience and express empathy.
While an ability to experience empathy is most certainly a quality of humanity, it is not the only quality that makes one human.
Re: schizoid disorders and depressive disorders: I have seen some severely affected individuals who were incapable of experiencing emapthy. With the psychotic disorders, thinking is often so disturbed and unrealistic that the idividual cannot experience emapthy for others. Likewise, many of the dpressive disorders result in an individual being so ego centric and lacking in affect that they are incapable of experiencing empathy as well. They may have an intellectual understanding of the concept, but be unable to experience the emotion.