A transient personality disorder induced by football matches

Personality disorders are a class of mental diseases characterized by inflexible and maladaptive patterns of behavior, cognition, and inner experience, involving several areas of functioning, such as affectivity, impulse control, ways of perceiving and thinking and reaction to stress factors. In the literature, personality disorders have always been described as stable patterns of long duration, and their onset can be found during adolescence or early adulthood. These patterns are associated with significant distress or impairment in a patient's life in which a main element affects every aspect of living, and in which no biological or other pathologies exist to assist in its identification. Therefore, they often lead to comorbidities such as dysfunctional anxiety, drug abuse, major depression and suicide.

We present a case of a 37-year-old man, who came to the outpatient department needing support to quit smoking. During the follow up, he described some transitory changes in his personality while watching football (soccer) games. These episodes were characterized by inappropriate anger crises, rapid and dramatic shifts in emotional tone, dysphoria and superstitious and magical beliefs with paranoid elements; connecting himself, his family and friends to players in the match and to the unfolding of the game. Every manifestation was induced by the football match, and there were no signs of difficulty in handling impulses and in managing relationships, or any superstitious beliefs, outside of it.

The combination of all the symptoms led us to think about a diagnosis of the borderline personality disorder. There was a lack of managing impulsivity, intense uncontrollable emotional reactions, and episodes of psychotic decompensation with unreal and paranoid connections made between the patient's entourage and the results of the match.

With this case, we propose to consider the personality disorder, not just as a stable and inflexible pattern, but also as a transitory dysfunction induced by stress factors, as in this case, a football match, introducing therefore a new entity: transient personality disorder.