When people talk about mental health issues that cause low mood, hopelessness, apathy, etc, they always say things like "Don't worry, you won't feel like this forever! With the right treatment all your positive emotions will come back and you will feel so satisfied and happy!"
And it makes sense, because they're approaching it from the understanding of depression. But as someone with schizoid personality disorder, I kind of hate how this kind of attitude is seen as the "correct" way of addressing MH issues, and if you disagree you're just "anti-recovery" or "pessimistic". You're treated as if you just haven't seen the light yet.
But the thing is, there is no real treatment for SzPD. No medications are known to be effective, and there aren't any cohesively developed therapies for it either. If you look hard enough into clinical databases, you can find outlines for potential future therapies that could be developed with further research, but nothing concrete.
Therapists don't know how to treat us because cluster A personality disorders don't receive a lot of coverage in psych courses, and of course there's the aforementioned lack of developed treatments. If you have a good therapist, they can try tweaking schizophrenia or ASPD therapies for you, but again, none of this is designed for us and it's really just trial and error.
SzPD is also just...not depression. There's no chemical imbalance in my brain that can be corrected with an SSRI, this is the way my literal personality has developed. I didn't lose interest in things I used to care about, I've never cared about anything. I didn't stop feeling connection to people, I never felt it in the first place. I don't feel like a burden or like I'm worthless, I have no concept of what my "self" is even supposed to be. And so on.
I can't even feel upset that I'm supposedly going to be like this forever. It's not like I'm crying myself to sleep every night over this. I just don't feel satisfaction from anything, never have and probably never will. I literally don't have the emotional range to have an existential crisis over this, even though it sounds like the plot of a psychological horror story.
You try to explain this to non-schizoids and they go "Oh, you're just depressed :) have you tried meds?" but no, it's a completely different issue on every single level. An issue that has no known treatments that most MH professionals barely know exists.
It's funny that some psychiatrists will say that the SzPD diagnosis should be removed because "they never seek treatment anyway". What treatment? Meds I don't need and therapies that are designed for completely different disorders? Your little issue of "low clinical utility" seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
