Curriculum · Mental Health / Psychiatry
Personality disorder with perfectionism and rigidity
What it is
Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) is an Axis II, Cluster C diagnosis that represents a lifelong pattern of perfectionism and inflexibility, typically associated with over conscientiousness and constricted emotions. These patients are preoccupied with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency. It is an ego-syntonic disorder, and those afflicted resist assuming responsibility for their failings; instead, they blame others as the cause of their shortcomings.
How it presents
The five areas that cause the most anxiety for individuals with OCPD are time, personal and social relationships, cleanliness, tidiness, and money. This manifests in their lives as rigidity and stubbornness, and they are often moralistic about others and their work habits, especially when they are compared to their own. In spite of this obsession with organization and schedules, they frequently have trouble meeting deadlines and run into trouble at work or school. A secretary who loses her job because of perfectionism and excessive attention to trivial details, who could never finish an assignment on time, who writes innumerable lists of things to be done and follows rules scrupulously, and who annoys her friends and family members with her lack of flexibility and her pedantic remarks, carries the same pattern into her work.