anankastic personality disorder

n. The anankastic personality disorder is a synonym for the obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), and one of the 10 personality disorders described on Axis-II of the DSM-IV-TR, published by the American Psychiatric Association as their official diagnostic and descriptive nomenclature of mental disorders. The anankastic personality disorder or OCPD is a pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, and mental and interpersonal control starting by early adulthood and manifested in a variety of contexts affecting and impairing the person’s familial, social, and/or professional functioning. Central to the notion of personality disorders (in general) is that they are inflexible, maladaptive, and persisting and cause significant functional impairment or subjective distress.
Symptoms (DSM-IV-TR) are (a) a preoccupation with rules, procedures, and schedules; (b) a drive for extreme perfectionism inhibiting progress and task completion; (c) an excessive preoccupation with work and productivity at the expense of leisure time without an obvious necessity to do so, as individuals always have the feeling that they have to work; (d) an inflexible moral and value system; (e) an inability to discard worthless objects without sentimental value; (f) an inability to delegate work because of fear that others will not do it exactly as it has to be done; (e) a miserly or stingy spending style, hoarding money and resources; and (f) a rigid thinking style. Individuals have to meet four or more of these symptoms in order to be diagnosed as anankastic or having OCPD.
The prevalence rate for anankastic personality disorder is estimated to be around 1% in community samples, and about 3% to 10% in individuals consulting mental health services. OCPD is diagnosed twice as often in males as in females. - FDF