Personality Disorders : A case study

JEFFERY DAHMER –The mass murderer  (a case study)

There are over 16 million people all over the world who indefinitely suffer some form of personality disorder or another. In some cases, they are easily diagnosed, but other times they are not. There are a variety of personality disorders, each having a broad spectrum of symptoms for each that are mentioned in the DSM-5.

A man named Jeffery Dahmer is a very important and rare specimen who was under the lens of the Psychology Department for decades for his unique and complicated condition. It was difficult to even diagnose this man with a psychological condition in spite of the vast research done on personality disorders and the like. Broadly, he suffered a mixture of antisocial, schizotypal personality disorders as well as psychotic disorder. He clearly suffered symptoms for all three disorders to an extreme which caused him to perform gruesome acts that harmed the society around him. In this blog post, I would like to mention and discuss these symptoms and how they occur in a man’s life from an a very early age and hamper their overall development and adjustment to society.

First, I would like o give an overview of personality disorders. Personality disorders are ways of thinking, behaving  and feeling that deviate from the expecations of culture, causes distress and problems in functioning and lasts over a period of time. These personality disorders, especially the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph, are extremely difficult to cope with for different reasons. I’ll go over these three disorders to get a better understanding of what the person may be suffering.

The antisocial personality disorder is charazterized by longstanding pattern of disregarding other people’s rights, often crossing the line and violating those rights. Jeffery Dahmer shows an extreme version of this personality disorder.  Schizotypal personality disorder is characterized by severe social anxiety, thought disorder, paranoid ideation, derealization, transient psychosis and often unconventional beliefs. Psychotic disorder is a mental disorder that is characterized by a disconnection from society. A mixture of these disorders would certainly create a complicated, ruthless, isolated individual who would create havoc in society.

Jeffery Dahmer experienced a hernia surgery which caused changes in his body, a shift from Wisconsin to Ohio at the age of 8 years and his parents divorce at the age of 17 years which altogether, he did not take very well. Signs of antisocial personality disorder can be seen at around this time in Dahmer’s behaviour. He began taking animals and beating their carcasses. His lack of self confidence as a teenager was also one of the dominant features of antisocial personality disorder. He became extremely tensed and friendless during his years of growing up. Dahmer’s alcohol issue throughout his life compounded his personality disorder and skewed his sense of right and wrong.

When Jeffery Dahmer became a mass murderer in Milwaukee, his murders would really stand out. He targetted mainly young african-american homosexuals from gay bars (being a homosexual himself, this was likely) and lured them to his house with the promise of sex or money. He gave them alcohol which knocked them out and then would strangle them to death. Dahmer performed sex acts on these corpses and when he was done, he would keep the skulls, genitals of some of his victims in order to relive the experience. He even took polaroids of some of his victims. His murders weren’t personal, but simply an obsession or a fix that he had to get frequently.

It is not difficult to tell that Dahmer suffered some form of personality disorder. But most of the lawyers and psychologists in question to this case, agreed that Dahmer knew right from wrong. He also said that, ‘ I carried it too far, that’s for sure’ indicating to some extent, that he knew what he was doing. It is difficult to tell what a person is suffering when they constantly slip in and out of sanity. Although, Dahmer showed more maladjusted behaviour than otherwise, he does show signs of insanity every now and then which leads us to believe that he may have been able to stop these acts and everything may not have necessarily been out of his contol. Dahmer pled guilty by virtue of insanity, but the court ruled that he was guilty and sane on all counts. He was ruled to 15 consecutive life terms in prison and 16^th one to be tracked in may before he was murdered in prison.