An Introvert Illness? "Don't make a scene."

Another thing that has taken my attention away from my beloved blog is my sabbatical project. I thought reading and writing from home, in true introvert mode, would have me writing blog posts much more often, even though the topic of my research is not introversion.

My project is on fiction (for young adults) and narrative nonfiction (memoirs and such) of mental illness. (If you're interested, my proposal is available here, via my district's website.) Overwhelmed by reading and thinking about that reading, I haven't had as many writing or blogging urges. I guess you could say my brain has been in input mode rather than output mode. Perhaps this in itself is introverted; I can think about ideas easily and with endless revision and no need to check and re-check for type-o's, etc.

But, anyway, as with most of my scholarly interests, there is some crossover. As part of my research, I've been learning about mental illnesses such as borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, in which people are given to acting out boldly, and I began to wonder: is it possible that there are introvert mental illnesses and extrovert mental illnesses?

Let me back up. Growing up in our family, a family of introverts and Italian Catholics very much interested in upholding honor and avoiding shame, one of the adults' favorite admonishments to a misbehaving kid was, "Don't make a scene." One of the only saving graces of my OCD is that most of it consisted of the "O" part and could be hidden. My discomfort and shame, distressing as it was, could at least be private most of the time. Of course, this prevented my diagnosis and prolonged my suffering for years, but that's another matter.

I've recently begun to wonder how I would've felt if I had something like bipolar or borderline and could not hide my illness. Of course, everyone, regardless of temperament, feels shame after the excesses of, say, a manic episode, but would my shame have been greater as an introvert, as someone who grew up trying to "not make a scene"? Then, I wondered, would it be possible for me or my biological relatives to get such an illness? Or do some of the same chemicals that make me an introvert predispose me to an internally tormenting, invisible psychological problem like the obsessions in OCD?