The History of npsp25.com

By John M Oldham MD

I was recently asked to record a brief video about the origins and background of this website. Some of this information is available on the website itself, but on this video I describe some early work in my career, when I was on the psychiatry faculty at Cornell in New York. A group of us developed the Personality Disorders Examination (PDE), a semi-structured clinical interview to aid in the diagnosis of personality disorders, an international version of which (the IPDE) is still being used. The original PDE was derived from the then-new criteria-based definitions of the personality disorders, which had generated a great deal of interest. As the years went by, I recognized how uneasy people were if anyone thought there was anything “wrong” with their personality. I had the good fortune to meet Lois Morris at a convention of the American Psychiatric Association, and we teamed up to write an educational book about personality styles, for the general public. Based on the “bones” of the PDE, we developed a 107 question self-assessment test, crafted to identify non-pathological personality styles. The initial version of the self-portrait test was a “paper and pencil” version in the book, The Personality Self-Portrait, followed by an updated version in the second edition of the book, The New Personality Self-Portrait. The current version of the test is the online version on this website, now computer-scored and accompanied by an extensive interpretation guide. On this video I describe the book and its origins in more detail, along with developments that led to the online version of the test, and then to the current website. It’s about a 10 minute video, for your interest! Here is the link: https://www.vumedi.com/video/personality-styles-versus-personality-disorders/.

John M. Oldham, M.D., & Lois B. Morris

Blog