This article problematizes the discussion of personality and personalitydisorder, considering how these phenomena are defined, and may manifest in contexts that are underrepresented in extant scholarship on personality and personality disorder. After providing a brief critical review of key findings and debates in the scholarship on normal personality, we discuss the need for combined emic-etic approaches to normal and non-normal personality in underrepresented and understudied contexts, and offer suggestions for programmes of research committed to these tasks.

The distribution and clinically significant patterns of the phenomenology of a naturalistic case-controlled private practice displayed symptoms of a ‘clinical triad’ of power management, dependency and psychosexual issues. This phenomenological approach has been called Shakatani - from the Swahili words shaka (problem) and tani (power), and is suggested to be an Axis I replacement for the four-cluster Axis II classification of the DSM-IV personality disorder.

The creation and validation of the 38-question Jamaica Personality Disorder Inventory (JPDI) screening questionnaire for the diagnosis of personality disorder piloted on patients from psychiatric and medical wards at the University Hospital of the West Indies is described.