A Review of Stressors as Inducer for Personality Disorders and Anxiety Disorders

Abstract

Personality disorders (PDs) and anxiety disorders (ADs) are common mental disorders. PDs are often more or less related to anxiety and ADs are affected by personality functioning. To clarify the pathology of both ADs and PDs, along with their similarities and differences, the literature review by paired keywords search on NCBI PubMed and subsequent analysis are used. The findings support that abnormal stressors can damage the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis time by time throughout life through the epigenetic pathway, lowing down the ability of the stress system to deal with stressors. Biological basis, like the genetic issue, for PDs, is important but after-born experience also matters a lot. Adjoint stressful long-term memory may largely affect normal personality formation, contributing to some kinds of PDs. It seems that early exposure to these stressors influences PDs more, compared to ADs. More researches are needed to explore the effect on ADs from later life stress. This study partially explained the process of ADs and PDs, linked them by abnormal stressors and emphasized the importance of focusing on the effect of stressful long-term memory formation, which is psychological, and the HPA axis disability, which is biological, on patients having these diseases, reminds psychiatrist to treat disease at the source, to low down the potential risk of getting PDs in patients who are diagnosed with ADs, to prevent arouse of ADs in patients who are diagnosed with PDs and to combine biological treatment with psychological therapies.