PERSONALITY WRITE-UP: DWIGHT K. SCHRUTE
Emma Barnett and Claire Page
4-21–17
The Office is an American television comedy series that aired on NBC from March 24,
2005, to May 16, 2013. The series depicts the everyday lives of office employees in the
Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. Dwight K.
Schrute is a character in the series whose position at Dunder Mifflin is Assistant to the Regional
Manager. We have diagnosed Dwight with both Schizotypal Personality Disorder and Paranoid
Personality Disorder.
Dwight is a beet farmer and is always worried about the wellbeing of his beets. He is
also obsessed with harvesting dead things. This makes him extremely uncomfortable to be
around.
In one episode, Dwight and his fellow employees were instructed to sit in on a CPR
class. The group was instructed to help keep the “victim” (a dummy) alive by performing CPR to
the beats in the song Stayin’ Alive. As usual in the show, the group got off task and distracted.
The class instructor pronounced the victim dead when the group’s attempts to perform CPR
stopped. Upon hearing this assertion, Dwight quickly stepped in and demanded to know if the
victim was an organ donor. Someone yelled “He is!” Dwight quickly pulled out a knife, which he
had in a scabbard strapped around his ankle, and cut open the dummy for the harvesting of the
organs. He then skinned its face and put it on top of his own. This made his coworkers
extremely disgusted and uncomfortable, eliciting screams and groans from the crowd.
Dwight has a relationship with a woman in the office, but no one knows about it. Dwight
shows little-to-no emotion for the woman throughout the entire running of The Office. He made
her sign a contract regarding his child and how it was to be raised (see pg. 2 below).
These things lead us to believe that Dwight has Schizotypal Personality Disorder. Those
with this disorder typically have few close relationships and are often described as odd or
eccentric by those who know them. As is demonstrated by Dwight, those with Schizotypal
