Antisocial Personality Disorder VS Conduct Disorder

Antisocial Personality Disorder – Child version

Conduct disorder is a severe children and adolescence mental and behavioral problems. It is more severe than oppositional divine disorder.  Simply put into words, most of the people view conduct disorder as delinquency behavior rather than a mental illness.

In Hong Kong, there are about around 6% of prevalence in conduct disorder among children aged below 18.  Antisocial behavior is one of the contexts in conduct disorder. The behaviors include stealing, lying, disobeying, destroying properties, which are reported common by 50% of parents. Boys are more common in childhood, but relatively equal by adolescence.

The main difference between antisocial personality disorder and conduct disorder lies on the age of 18, one of the criteria of antisocial personality disorder. Below 18, children and adolescence would only met the criteria of conduct disorder.

Antisocial behaviors externalized by adolescence – a mix of impulsive, overactive, aggressive and delinquent acts, has independent sub-dimensions

Delinquent (rule violations)	Aggressive (Fighting)
Overt (Visible acts – fighting)	Covet (Hidden acts – Lying)
Destructive (Cruelty to animals)	Nondestructive (Arguing)

As we are quite familiar with antisocial personality disorder (If not, please refer to my earlier blog entry), there are some profile information of Conduct Disorder.

Children suffering from CD display at least one symptom before age 10, boys are more likely to be suffering CD. Also, those children do not display empathy, and concern of others; rather plain affect. About 40% of CD children develop into Antisocial Personality Disorder, a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of the rights of others, as well as involvement in multiple illegal acts.

Moreover, they tend to have verbal impairments, which contribute to the lack of development of self-control, emotion, and social cognition.

To conclude, additionally, the success of failure in treating antisocial behavior depends on the type and severity of child’s conduct problem. SES (Socio-economic status) is one of the factor of treatment as well.