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.

The correlates of the phenomenology of conflict, power and authority management in the Jamaican population of 1506 adult individuals were sampled from 2150 households using the 12 questions of the Jamaica Personality Disorder Inventory (JPDI). Nearly one third of the sample population studied reported problems with conflict, abnormal power and authority management, impulse control and serious aggressive and transgressive behaviour.

The correlates of psychosexual phenomenology in the Jamaican population using the seven questions of the Jamaica Personality Disorder Inventory (JPDI) are presented. More than one-fifth of the sample reported some degree of heterosexual and homosexual dysfunction. Significant levels of multiple sexual partnerships and feelings of infidelity in a swathe of Jamaican people reveal underlying psychosexual anxiety and guilt, poor impulse control and difficulties with partner intimacy.

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.

Jamaican attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help were compared with other samples that utilized the same measure of attitudes. Although Jamaicans seem to hold negative opinions about mental illness, helpseeking attitudes were comparable and in some cases, more favourable.

A two-year trawl of contemporary Jamaican news media articles linking the medical diagnosis of personality disorder to published public scholarship articles on the epidemiology of that condition was conducted. Results suggest that public scholarship reports of this condition prompted a popular media response which in turn generated a health promotion outcome linking contemporary social events to the contemporary medical search on personality disorder.

The prevalence of personality disorder assessed by the Jamaica Personality Disorder Inventory (JPDI) and the consultant Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fourth edition-text revision (DSM IV-TR) instruments in Jamaica is comparable to the prevalence rate of studies in other countries in a similar population.

Type D personality was investigated in persons with selfreported cardiovascular disease in a Trinidadian cardiac population. Forty-two per cent of participants were identified as Type D as compared to 26% of participants who did not report having a cardiovascular illness.