Clinical Utility of the Alternative Model of Personality Disorders: A 10th Year Anniversary Review

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, (DSM-5) alternative model of personality disorders (AMPD) has now been available for researchers and clinicians for a decade. The present article aims to provide a narrative review of literature on the AMPD framework with particular emphasis on its clinical utility, inclusive of clinicians' and patients' acceptability, ease of use, diagnostic accuracy, continuity with clinically familiar constructs, and proposed utility for treatment planning, case-formulation, and clinical management. The review specifically covers the utility of Criterion A (i.e., Level of Personality Functioning Scale) and Criterion B (i.e., maladaptive personality traits) in relation to common disorders of personality. By drawing on empirical studies, surveys, clinical cases, and recommendations, the current review points to various aspects of clinical utility as well as areas for improvement. One way of increasing the AMPD's feasibility for clinicians is to omit the transitional personality disorder (PD) hybrid types while retaining a purer diagnostic classification of PD severity and traits that also align with the International Classification of Diseases, Eleventh Revision (ICD-11), PD classification. This would allow for a more efficient assessment for busy practitioners working in general psychiatry and primary care while retaining the possibility of a more fine-grained elaboration of the PD diagnosis in high-resource specialist settings. Such revision could possibly be introduced in DSM-5.1 or DSM-6. We also propose that future exploration of the AMPD's clinical utility may involve its potential value for allocation of clinical resources, communication between clinicians and their patients' relatives, and utility for informing different treatment modalities.