I confess that I’m one of those personality test junkies. The Spark, Psych Central, Similar Minds, love em. Don’t know why, half the time the tests spit out blatanly false profiles. Still, it’s fun. And in the case of the more psych-oriented ones, sometimes scary.

For one thing, I routinely come up as extremely schizoid and schizotypal. While those characterizations are generally true, I fail to see how they necessarily reflect anything wrong with me.

At the most basic level, each of us is an individual. Each of us is our own person with our own hopes, dreams, preferences, and temperament. While schizoid and schizotypal tendencies could potentially signal personality disturbances, what they actually measure is how well you fit in. And if ‘not having the personality some shrink wants me to’ is now a disorder, I have a serious problem with that. There needs to be a little more theoretical and empirical justification than that.

As Tim Flynn, the guy who runs Similar Minds points out,

don’t think Schizoid personality is a valid disorder, some of the smartest people in history were schizoid because they occupied a remote end of the intelligence bell curve. Schizotypal personality can encompass highly original thinkers as well as totally insane people so I think it’s a flawed type. I think the remaining eight disorders are generally valid.

I would think much of my readership understands from personal experience exactly what he’s talking about right there. Lord knows I do. I’ve also found it pretty easy to deal with, though. Probably because I went to public school where smart kids would get the crap beaten out of them for not fitting in. And because you can be as creative as you want to be no matter how little creativity your friends and acquaintances display.

No, what I’ve really found boosts my schizoid and schizotypal tendencies into the stratosphere is the chronic nerve damage I’ve been living with for the past 9 years. You’d never know it to look at me that I suffer from a rather painful atrophic nerve condition. Which is part of the problem. I’ve coped too well. Which seems weird until you think about it for a bit.

As I said earlier, schizoid and schizotypal tendencies aren’t a reflection of anything internal, but rather how you interact with and compare to external society.

Tim defines schizoid personality disorder as where an “individual [is] generally detached from social relationships, and shows a narrow range of emotional expression in various social settings.” I’ve often heard it simplified as a lack of empathy or understanding for what’s going on in other individuals’ heads.

And the thing about empathy is that you have to–at least at some level–have a handle and an appreciation for what another is going through. ‘Normal’ people simply can’t understand my kind of pain at all. Imagine that you’re in so much pain that when you take the highest recommended dose of muscle relaxants you actually sleep less than eight hours because the sleep is that much more refreshing. Can’t do it, can you (those of you who aren’t royally screwed up)? Which means if we were looking at your personality using me as a reference point, you’d be the schizoid one.

Flipping it around, because I’ve built a pretty damn impressive pain tolerance up (to the point that much of it happens subconsciously), when people freak out about painful injuries/conditions, often enough I have to work very hard to bite back scorn and ridicule. Dredging up empathy? Yeah, right.

As an example, skinning your knuckles, stubbing your toe, scraping your knee, or getting a splinter are all things that suck.. When I think about it dispassionately, I’m able to admit that when such things happen to me, my brain is indeed filled with the frantic firing of C-fibers and my body does indeed tingle, burn, and throb. But in real day to day life, that kind of thing often flies so far under my radar I don’t realize I’ve hurt myself until I bleed all over something.

This can make things quite uncomfortable for me when something like that happens to someone else. As everyone else is rushing around screaming for bandaids and alcohol, I’m wondering what all the fuss is about. This apparently means I have a disorder.

Of course, a funny thing happens when we start talking about people who are really physically screwed up. I’ve found I’m considerably more affected at an emotional level by their plight than most are. Which has to do with the whole empathy being dependent on personal experience thing. When you see one of those stories or meet one of those people, you often think to yourself “I can’t imagine what that must be like.” Because of my peculiar position, I often can. Using someone who’s really crippled as a reference point, the ‘normal’ person becomes even more schizoid, whereas I start to approach normality.

My big cautionary tale here is that all ’schizoid’ means is ’statistical outlier’. Could there be a psychological problem there? Sure. But there doesn’t have to be. Sometimes the reason you can’t relate to other people is that they can’t relate to you. And if that is the case, what the mental health professional needs to worry about is considerably different. People are social creatures, and like all social mammals, we derive much of our psychological strength from others. My worry as a therapist would thus be making sure these people are able to cobble together an ad-hoc support structure given the fact that sociality won’t work as well for them as it does for others. This is one of the reasons I want to work with kids with chronic illness. No, I don’t know how much it sucks to be them, but I have a much bigger clue than most do, and I’m hoping I can use my own experience to give me a better window into their minds and thus better serve them. If we begin treating schizoid characteristics as the problem instead of just a signal of the problem, we risk making psychology as much a matter of conformity as it is about mental health. And that scares me.