Personality and its Importance for Treatment in Psychiatry

Personality is defined as an individual integration of mental and somatic properties, which is manifested in social interactions and its structure consists of temperament, character and intelligence. It is also responsible for the human’s adaptation capability, behavior, emotional processing, feeling and experiencing well-being and illness. This is also the reason why personality type is an important factor in the pathogenesis of various mental disorders. The unique conceptual framework of personality based on a neurobiological ground is the Cloninger’s theory of personality. According to the theory temperament is a „hereditary“ and „biological“ core of personality with relative resistance to the environmental stimuli. By contrast, character accrues especially from social learning. Both, temperament and character consist of dimensions. The theory describes the relationships between the biogenetic structure of personality and psychiatric disorders and mutual interactions of all temperament and character dimensions may influence vulnerability to psychiatric disorder. Several studies showed some dimensions of temperament are related to the development of depression and anxiety and have also possible predictive potential for antidepressant treatment outcome. On the other hand, character dimensions could react during the psychotherapy. Changes in character and temperament dimensions could reflect positive treatment effect and also support synergy of antidepressant treatment and psychotherapy in depressed patients. Future neuroscientific research of personality could lead to more complex and effective treatment in psychiatry.