Schizoid Personality Disorder in ‘Lars and the Real Girl’. In the movie ‘Lars and the Real Girl’ and its main character, there are symptoms of various mental illnesses such as autism spectrum disorder, schizoid personality disorder, and delusional disorder, as is shown in the film. This essay will focus on the symptomology, etiology and treatment of schizoid personality disorder as Lars seems to have, and compare it to a Youtube video of a person talking about their experience with the disorder in real life. Symptoms It is clear that Lars has some sort of a Cluster A personality disorder, which is defined by the person’s inability to form close, interpersonal relationships and traits of being cold and distant, as talked about in the lecture …show more content…
She shares the same symptoms as Lars, which include not enjoying socializing, choosing solitary activities, being asexual, having no close friends outside family, not caring about what society thinks of her (indifference to praise and criticism), and being seen as emotionally flat and detached. More symptoms she talks about that are not specifically in the DSM criteria are having anhedonia, which is the inability to feel pleasure, living excessively inside her head with too much introspection but a rich ‘fantasy’ world, consistent thoughts of suicide with no attempts on acting on them, and characteristics of dissociation. She also talked about the difference between overt and covert SPD, with covert seeming to participate in interactions and socialize like the average person, as a form of ‘masking’ their symptoms, while overt being the opposite. She has a covert SPD, meaning she is able to socialize and be active in conversations by hiding her discomfort. This is also connected to the concepts ‘false self’ and ‘true self’, which are the different ‘selves’ or identities the individual manifests, and she talks about how she managed to adopt multiple personas for different situations like work or Youtube with more confidence, hence her more advanced ‘false self’. Finally, she also mentions that like people with SPD, she prefers and enjoys socializing with animals as opposed to humans, which in her terms comes from a general sense of misanthropy but also the idea that they are unlike humans in which they are not going to abandon