# How Mental Illnesses Mess With MBTI and How People Compensate



## randomshoes (Dec 11, 2013)

This is an interesting question. I think mental disorders contribute more to mistyping than anything else. Your personality can clash or not clash with your mental disorder, but I don't think it changes it. For example, I have a friend with Aspergers who would almost certainly mistype as thinking--maybe even ST--in a lot of contexts, but I'm really positive he's an ENFJ. Fe, naturally, is not happy about the deficiencies his Aspergers causes. He has a lot of conflicts with people due to misunderstandings. It's a big issue for him. I think Aspergers, Autism, and similar disorders can impair interpersonal skills in feeling people, leading them to feel more frustrated with their inabilities than someone who was naturally thinking. What's worse is in this situation you don't get any thinking ability to make up for these lacks, so thinking inferior people can have a pretty rough time. The same thing happens with intuition and sensing, only those disorders tend to come with unusual abilities that resemble sensing, so there's more of a swap.

I have an anxiety disorder, which for me has simply meant I use a disproportionate and pretty unhealthy amount of Te in a fruitless attempt to compensate and organize myself out of ever doing anything wrong. Fi gets pushed to the background often because it can get me into situations where the possibility of anxiety provoking stimuli is high. In other words, I tend towards a dominant-tertiary loop. It sucks. Essentially mental disorders can affect where, when, and how much you use the functions you already have.

As a side note: my girlfriend's mother is an ISTJ. She has (no joke) schizophrenia. It's confusing. However, it did trigger some intense and weird use of her tertiary Fi, making her appear to suddenly turn into a feeling dom and then, after her break, go straight back to being Si. This involved, among other things, a heroic attempt to rescue some non-existent children. Before this she was a fairly career-oriented database administrator.


----------

