On being schizoid

Scott Alexander writes:

"When I wrote about my experiences doing psychotherapy with people, one commenter wondered if I might be schizoid:

"There are a lot of schizoid people in the rationalist community from what I can tell. The basis of schizoid is not all the big bad symptoms you might read about. There are high functioning people with personality disorders all the time who are complex, polite and philosophical.

You will never see this description because mental health industries center entirely around people Failing At Life, aka “low-functioning”. As many radicals have noted, mental health tends to constitute itself mostly around “can’t hold a job” or “can’t hold a marriage”.

The only thing you need to be schizoid is to dislike contact with other egos, and to shave off the experience of those other egos ruthlessly before they can reach the fantasy world you retreat to.

It doesn’t mean you’re evil. It doesn’t mean you stalk people and plan to harm them. It doesn’t mean you’re over-reactive or even bizarrely delusional. You could call it a form of delusion, but really the basic descriptions of perception like top-down processing and culture could all be called delusional thinking if you want to be properly pointed about it. It’s schizoid. It’s often quite gentle. And I’ve noticed from interacting with various people in high IQ communities that if you have sufficiently high enough intelligence, despite the inherent defined tendency to retreat from reality, you can in fact become aware you have a personality disorder.

Anyway, my guess based on projection (I’ve never met you) is that people aren’t being emotional around you because you can’t be reached by them emotionally, and they know that on some level."

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Familiar commentator around the Internet gwern has this on his personal page:

"For those who enjoy playing the game of ad hominem via lay psychiatric diagnosis, may I suggest not accusing me of Asperger syndrome - which is so overdone - but something more novel & scary-sounding, like schizoid personality disorder?"

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And this highly-speculative correlation between MB types and personality disorders:

ENFJ - Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder
ESFJ - Masochistic Personality Disorder
INFJ - Avoidant Personality Disorder
ISFJ - Dependent Personality Disorder
ENFP - Paranoid Personality Disorder
ENTP - Compensatory Narcissistic Personality Disorder
INFP - Histrionic Personality Disorder
INTP - Schizoid Personality Disorder
ESFP - Borderline Personality Disorder
ESTP - Narcissistic Personality Disorder
ISFP - Cyclothymic Personality Disorder
ISTP - Antisocial Personality Disorder
ENTJ - Sadistic Personality Disorder
ESTJ - Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder
INTJ - Schizotypal Personality Disorder
ISTJ - Depressive Personality Disorder

Here's a paper about it.

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For the record, I don't think I have Schizoid Personality Disorder despite my INTP MB type and my scarily stratospheric score on the AQ test .. .