We’ve written before about how psychiatry tends to name disorders after how they affect other people, rather than how they affect the bearer, and this is most exemplified when it comes to personality disorders. For example:

“You have a deep insecurity about never being good enough, and you constantly mess up in your attempt to overcompensate? You may have Evil Bastard Disorder!”

“You have a crippling fear of abandonment and that you are fundamentally unloveable, so you do all you can to try to keep people close? You must have Manipulative Bitch Disorder!”

See also: Miss Diagnosis: Anxiety, ADHD, & Women

Antisocial Diagnoses

These days, it is easy to find on YouTube countless videos of how to spot a narcissist, with a list of key traits that all mysteriously describe exactly the exes of everyone in the comments.

And these days it is mostly “narcissist”, because “psychopath” and “sociopath” have fallen out of popular favor a bit:

• perhaps for coming across as overly sensationalized, and thus lacking credibility
• perhaps because “Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD)” exists in the DSM-5 (the US’s latest “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders”), while psychopathy and sociopathy are not mentioned as existing.

You may be wondering: what do “psychopathy” and “sociopathy” mean?

And the answer is: they mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean. Their definitions and differences/similarities have been vigorously debated by clinicians and lay enthusiasts alike for long enough that the scientific world has pretty much given up on them and moved on.

Stigma vs pathology

Because of the popular media (and social media) representation of NPD, it is easy to armchair diagnose one’s relative/ex/neighbor/in-law/boss/etc as being a narcissist, because the focus is on “narcissists do these bad things that are mean to people”.

If the focus were instead on “narcissists have cripplingly low self-esteem, and are desperate to not show weakness in a world they have learned is harsh and predatory”, then there may not be so many armchair diagnoses—or at the very least, the labels may be attached with a little more compassion, the same way we might with other mental health issues such as depression.

Not that those with depression get an easy time of it socially either—society’s response is generally some manner of “aren’t you better yet, stop being lazy”—but at the very least, depressed people are not typically viewed with hatred.

A quick aside: if you or someone you know is struggling with depression, here are some things that actually help:

The Mental Health First-Aid You’ll Hopefully Never Need

The disorder is not the problem

Maybe your relative, ex, neighbor, etc really is clinically diagnosable as a narcissist. There are still two important things to bear in mind:

• After centuries of diagnosing people with mental health maladies that we now know don’t exist per se (madness, hysteria, etc), and in recent decades countless revisions to the DSM and similar tomes, thank goodness we now have the final and perfect set of definitions that surely won’t be re-written in the next few years or so ← _{^{this is irony; it will absolutely be re-written numerous times yet because of course it’s still not a magically perfect descriptor of the broad spectrum of human nature}}
• The disorder is not the problem; the way they treat (or have treated) you is the problem.

For example, let’s take a key thing generally attributed to narcissists: a lack of empathy

Now, empathy can be divided into:

• affective empathy: the ability to feel what other people are feeling
• cognitive empathy: the ability to intellectually understand what other people are feeling (akin to sympathy, which is the same but with the requisite of having experienced the thing in question oneself)

A narcissist (as well as various other people without NPD) will typically have negligible affective empathy, and their cognitive empathy may be a little sluggish too.

Sluggish = it may take them a beat longer than most people, to realize what an external signifier of emotions means, or correctly guess how something will be felt by others. This can result in gravely misspeaking (or inappropriately emoting), after failing to adequately quickly “read the room” in terms of what would be a socially appropriate response. To save face, they may then either deny/minimize the thing they just said/did, or double-down on it and go on [what for them feels like] the counterattack.

As to why this shutting off of empathy happens: they have learned that the world is painful, and that people are sources of pain, and so—to avoid further pain—have closed themselves off to that, often at a very early age. This will also apply to themselves; narcissists typically have negligible self-empathy too, which is why they will commonly make self-destructive decisions, even while trying to put themselves first.

Important note on how this impacts other people: the “Golden Rule” of “treat others as you would wish to be treated” becomes intangible, as they have no more knowledge of their own emotional needs than they do of anyone else’s, so cannot make that comparison.

Consider: if instead of being blind to empathy, they were colorblind… You would probably not berate them for buying green apples when you asked for red. They were simply incapable of seeing that, and consequently made a mistake. So it is when it’s a part of the brain that’s not working normally.

So… Since the behavior does adversely affect other people, what can be done about it? Even if “hate them for it and call for their eradication from the face of the Earth” is not a reasonable (or compassionate) option, what is?

Take the bull by the horns

Above all, and despite all appearances, a narcissist’s deepest desire is simply to be accepted as good enough. If you throw them a life-ring in that regard, they will generally take it.

So, communicate (gently, because a perceived attack will trigger defensiveness instead, and possibly a counterattack, neither of which are useful to anyone) what behavior is causing a problem and why, and ask them to do an alternative thing instead.

And, this is important, the alternative thing has to be something they are capable of doing. Not merely something that you feel they should be capable of doing, but that they are actually capable of doing.

• So not: “be a bit more sensitive!” because that is like asking the colorblind person to “be a bit more observant about colors”; they are simply not capable of it and it is folly to expect it of them, because no matter how hard they try, they can’t.
• But rather: “it upsets me when you joke about xyz; I know that probably doesn’t make sense to you and that’s ok, it doesn’t have to. I am asking, however, if you will please simply refrain from joking about xyz. Would you do that for me?”

Presented with such, it’s much more likely that the narcissist will drop their previous attempt to be good enough (by joking, because everyone loves someone with a sense of humor, right?) for a new, different attempt to be good enough (by showing “behold, look, I am a good person and doing the thing you asked, of which I am capable”).

That’s just one example, but the same methodology can be applied to most things.

For tricks pertaining to how to communicate such things without causing undue resistance, see:

Seriously Useful Communication Skills

Take care!