Personality Psychology Assignment 1 – Case Study

About this Assignment
This assignment will result in a culmination of all that you have learned throughout the duration of this course. You will be asked to make several decisions based on what you have studied thus far. There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers, but it is VERY important that you can back up your decisions with information from both your lessons and the current literature.

Case Study Prompt
Read the following case study on a patient who was diagnosed with a personality disorder:

Jodie is a 31-year old woman who comes to you for treatment. She states that the reason she is there is to get her anger under control, and that in her last several relationships with men, she has been guilty of hitting her boyfriends and/or throwing things at them. She states that she doesn’t know why she does this because she ‘really loved all of them.’ During the course of your conversation, you discover that she has been married and divorced three times, and in the last year, has had 4 ‘serious’ relationships. Also, she tells you that she has had two past suicide attempts (pill overdoses) in response to ‘bad breakups’ with various boyfriends and husbands. Jodie is also both a compulsive shopper and compulsive eater. She has been known to max out her credit cards on shopping binges, and she has a habit of binging and purging. She states that she mostly engages in these kinds of behavior when her relationships are ‘getting bad.’ She tells you that when she is in a relationship, it’s very intense and that her whole world looks brighter, yet when the relationship begins to crumble, she goes through periods of intense depression and suicidal thoughts and has even resorted, more than once, to falsely telling her husband/boyfriend that she was pregnant in order to try to salvage the relationship. She states that she has two goals in therapy: to get a handle on her anger issues and to try to resolve these feelings of intense emptiness she has.

Jodie is exhibiting classic symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder and meets most of the criteria outlined in the DSM 5 (she easily meets 6 of the 9 criteria).

Think about what your next steps are to treat Jodie.

After having read the case study, compose 2,000 word paper that thoroughly answers the following questions:

1. Which psychological tests, if any, would you administer to this patient, and why? Be sure to use research and what you have learned to back up your answers.

2. If given the choice, would you apply Freud’s, Erikson’s, Adler’s, or Jung’s theory of personality to describe this patient? Why? Which theory do you feel fits best? Again, be sure to back up your answers with research.

3. In terms of biological traits, which ones might fit best with this patient? Why?

4. What about sexual identity traits?

5. Would you choose to treat this patient behaviorally, cognitively, or humanistically? Why?

6. Which prominent personality traits does this patient appear to exhibit?

7. Provide a summary of your findings and a rudimentary treatment plan for this patient. Be sure to explain your intent.

Your paper should have a title page and a page listing all references and should be formatted in the APA style. In addition, it should include an introduction and conclusion.

Using Sources
You may refer to the course material for supporting evidence, but you must also use at least three credible, outside sources and cite them using APA format. Please include a mix of both primary and secondary sources, with at least one source from a scholarly peer-reviewed journal. If you use any Study.com lessons as sources, please also cite them in APA (including the lesson title and instructor’s name).

Primary sources are first-hand accounts such as interviews, advertisements, speeches, company documents, statements, and press releases.
Secondary sources come from peer-reviewed scholarly journals. You may use like JSTOR, Google Scholar, and Social Science Research Network to find articles from these journals. Secondary sources may also come from reputable websites with .gov, .edu, or .org in the domain. (Wikipedia is not a reputable source, though the sources listed in Wikipedia articles may be acceptable.)