Schizoid Personality Disorder (SPD)

Schizoid personality disorder (SPD), a Cluster A personality disorder (PD), causes a person to direct attention toward their inner life and away from the external world. Someone with SPD is detached, emotionally flat and indifferent to others, lacks desire for social connection or romantic/sexual relationships. They ignore social norms and conventions and are prone to introspection and fantasy. Despite this, they’re generally well-functioning and untroubled by being odd. They tend to be stable in their thinking and don’t experience cognitive or perceptual distortions, but can have odd beliefs, magical thinking (speaking of the devil can make him appear), suspiciousness, and obsessive ruminations. This may lead them to develop ideas of reference — beliefs or intuitions that events are somehow related to them. In contrast to those with schizotypal PD (avoid social interaction because they fear others), people with SPD avoid social interaction because they have no desire to interact or find interacting too difficult. A competing theory is they’re highly sensitive with a rich inner life. They long for intimacy but find initiating/maintaining close relationships too difficult or distressing — so retreat to their inner world instead. SPD has a higher-than-average probability of becoming schizophrenia. The condition used to be called latent schizophrenia.