ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the large body of work that has assessed the personality traits and personality disorders of patients with functional somatic syndromes, attempt to determine their specificity and relationship with psychiatric morbidity. In patients with medically unexplained symptoms, the number of bodily complaints over an individual’s lifetime correlates linearly with neuroticism, functional impairment, coexisting anxiety and depressive disorders. The controlled investigation of personality in chronic fatigue syndrome was started by a group of investigators from the Otago Medical School, Dunedin, New Zealand. The global measurements based on the neuroticism scale indicated the same distribution of personality abnormalities, with the depressed control group having the highest proportion of abnormal results, followed by chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple sclerosis. The personality characteristics of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome were evaluated in a carefully controlled cross-sectional study performed by investigators from the New Jersey Medical School, Newark, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, West Orange, New Jersey.
