MCMI-III Personality Disorders, Traits, and Profiles in Adult ADHD Outpatients

Abstract

High prevalence of PDs among adult ADHD patients was confirmed. The personality profiles seemed to reflect the persistence of ADHD and related childhood comorbidities in adulthood.

Prevalence of Personality Disorders in Adults With Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

“…Despite these methodological differences, most of the extant data indicate that the prevalence of PDs is high in ADHD, for example, Matthies and Philipsen (2016) in their review reported prevalence between 10% and 75% and definitely higher than in the general population (Bernardi et al, 2012; Tyrer et al, 2015; Volkert et al, 2018 reported a rate of 62.79%; and Salavera et al (2014) a rate of 100%. Contrary to other studies mentioned, a study by Oliva et al (2020) in Italy using similar methodology (ADHD clinical outpatient population of 70 participants, using MCMI-III) reported a lower prevalence of PDs (57.1%) compared to the present study in adults with ADHD. This study also found no patient had borderline PD raising the possibility of sample bias.…”

“…Borderline PD (BPD) was the most frequent Severe Personality Pathology in the present study. Apart from an absence of any BPD reported by Oliva et al (2020), previous research has shown results similar to ours (Ferrer et al, 2010; Jacob et al, 2007; Matthies et al, 2011; O’Malley et al, 2016, and Ditrich et al, 2021) with estimates of BPD ranging from 18% to 27% (O’Malley et al, 2016) to 30% to 60% (Ditrich et al, 2021). Furthermore, a number of papers have suggested that there is a link between childhood ADHD symptoms and borderline PD in adulthood (Miller et al, 2008; Smith & Samuel, 2017; Tiger et al, 2022).…”

“…Given that some people with ADHD have variable cognitive difficulties since early childhood, low self-esteem and dependency may be conceptualized as psychologically understandable. Previous studies have shown a higher prevalence of dependent personality in adult ADHD compared to the present study (59.1%, in Spanish homeless people, Salavera et al, 2014), but lower in psychiatric inpatients (18.4%, Miesch & Deister, 2019) and psychiatric outpatients (27%, Oliva et al, 2020).…”

“…(Davis & Patterson, 2005). As above, a number of studies also reported similar rates of depressive PD in ADHD participants (e.g., Hamzeloo et al, 2016;Oliva et al, 2020). Similarly, a higher prevalence of depressive PD was reported in females compared to males (Cumyn et al, 2009).…”

Diagnostic delay in ADHD: Duration of untreated illness and its socio‐demographic and clinical predictors in a sample of adult outpatients

“…ADHD patients are more likely to develop mood, sleep, somatic, anxiety and cluster B/C personality disorders (Fayyad et al, 2017;Franke et al, 2018;Katzman, Bilkey, Chokka, Fallu, & Klassen, 2017;Oliva, Mangiapane, Nibbio, Portigliatti Pomeri, & Maina, 2018), thus worsening their clinical burden (Katzman et al, 2017).…”