What exactly does it mean to say that someone is “passive-aggressive”? I hear this term used frequently, usually with reference to a coworker, child, parent, etc, who is being a pain in the ass. Surely there’s a more rigorous clinical definition than that. –Frank Caplice, Chicago
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The term “passive-aggressive” was introduced in a 1945 U.S. War Department technical bulletin, describing soldiers who weren’t openly insubordinate but shirked duty through procrastination, willful incompetence, and so on. If you’ve ever served in the military during wartime, though, or for that matter read Catch-22, you realize that what the brass calls a personality disorder a grunt might call a rational strategy to avoid getting killed.
You may say: I know a lot of people like that. Or even: I’m that way myself sometimes. Exactly the problem. From the outset skeptics argued that passive-aggressive behavior is an ordinary defensive maneuver and shouldn’t be considered symptomatic of a mental disorder. Reacting to such criticism, the authors of previous versions of the DSM had defined PAPD narrowly: in DSM-III (1980), they’d said PAPD shouldn’t be diagnosed in the presence of any other disorder (you can see how depression might contribute to procrastination or sulkiness, for example). The idea apparently was to curb careless use of the term–though shrinks weren’t likely to say somebody was mentally ill if he was just a PITA, if he had some other psychiatric problem, they’d throw in PAPD too. Sure enough, after DSM-III, diagnoses of PAPD declined sharply, to the point that some researchers felt the category should be abolished. Others, however, thought the exclusivity criterion was unnecessarily limiting and persuaded the editors of DSM-III-R to drop it. PAPD diagnoses shot back up. Conclusion: If we define PAPD rigorously, almost nobody has it; if we define it loosely, just about everybody does.
