Publication Date

2022

Document Type

Research Project

Abstract

Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is often associated with high costs and burden to the rest of society; however, it remains a disorder with no evidence of effective traditional psychological interventions. This theoretical study aimed to analyze the phenomenon of power and how it may influence the conceptualization of ASPD. Data was collected through a comprehensive and systematic review of the current ASPD literature. Findings suggested ASPD as severely conceptually flawed, highly imbalanced in terms of power dynamics between professionals and people diagnosed with ASPD, absent of participants’ voices, absent of any effective traditional psychotherapy interventions, disproportionately focused on deficit-oriented strategies of inquiry, and lacking focus on nontraditional interventions. These findings may lead to future research methods that incorporate a social justice approach to studying people diagnosed with ASPD. These findings indicated the need for professionals to reconsider diagnosing people with ASPD. The impact of findings may change the direction of the existing body of knowledge by encouraging non-deficit, non-biomedical, and non-expert oriented research studies that may reconceptualize ASPD as an actual mental disorder rather than a moral- laden, value-based label with detrimental effects for people diagnosed with the disorder.

Comments

Doctoral Project Presented to the Faculty School of Behavioral Sciences California Southern University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PSYCHOLOGY

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Department

Psychology

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