So sorry you went through that. It sounds so familiar. It’s a cookie cutter disorder, that’s for sure. A great book on the subject is “Psychopath Free.” I know. It sounds so…self-help. But it was the best one of the 20 I read.
Good luck and thanks for sharing your experience. I did not know about this whole NPD thing until it came into my life. My co-author saved my life by spotting it. And yeah, hard to do “No Contact” with the president!
For a deeper, historicized understanding of how narcissism is by no means an isolated phenomenon of bad people we don’t like, and how people who post to this very blog may suffer from it personally while pointing fingers at others for it, look no further than the following link, which takes longer to read and isn’t just confirmation-bias-click-bait:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/09/30/the-narcissist-society/
Aw, I was gonna look further.
It looks to me like Trump rings all 3 bells of the dark triad - a flat out psychopath. Reading about psychopathy has been hobby of mine for years and this guy is a classic.
If you read “The Psychopath Test” by Jon Ronson, which is quite a hoot, you’ll find a somewhat awkward and scary interview with ‘Chainsaw’ Al Dunlap, the corporate raider. He is not at all unlike our dear leader to be.
My favourite part of the Chainsaw Al interview is Ronson discussing all the sculptures of predatory animals that adorn his palatial home.
The classic tropes of “it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” coupled with the tried and true “if it walks like a duck…” seem to cover the diagnosis pretty well. Perhaps now the field of mental health treatment will finally get some appreciation though too late to help us now. We are dealing with a defective human being that never should have been elevated to such a position.
Please.
Even just the premise of this post to medium is a sad reversal of the problem with platforms like webmd: listing relatively vague generalized psychological symptoms often makes people suspect that they have what’s being described. It’s not too different from crank crackpot psychics work. But this is worse.
Here supposedly it’s not you who has the disease, it’s clearly someone else who has it, someone you’re not in any position to address directly, who doesn’t address you directly and with whom you have no personal relationship. And your relating the (often shamelessly inadequate) mediatized coverage of an individual politician’s personal acts on a broad, dispersed and abstracted national body like the citizens of the usa and others to a narcissist in an abusive relationship with another individual is invidious.
It’s not the same and it uses the deeply sad personal experiences of people who’ve been manipulated and abused to prop the theory up. I don’t know if the president elect can be clinically called a narcissist or not, but psychoanalytic pathology without the use of an actual analyst session with the patient is laughably un-scientific except that there’s nothing about now to laugh about and I’m tired of watching comfortable pathologies spread. This is effectively fake news.
What’s worse, now that you’ve named it, our political reality is easier to ignore. You. Are. Stopping. People. From. Thinking. Clearly. About. Where. We. Are. And. How. To. Change. It.
It doesn’t make poor diagnostic methods more valid.
The article is wrong.[quote=“chgoliz, post:17, topic:90323”]
Access to video and computer algorithms means off-site medical diagnosis is becoming more common, even for physical ailments;
[/quote]
And the day that you can diagnose a mass by video, you might have a point.
I don’t see where it says that, but diagnosis of a person from their literal performances, because that’s what speeches and appearances are, is extremely suspect with a disorder that is traditionally difficult to diagnose in ideal circumstances. It’s also important to note that psychiatry and psychology are geared to the treatment of disease, not predicting future human behavior. That’s not what the DSM is for. Yet, that’s how it’s being used. Forewarned is forearmed, but this is dubious warning even if true.
What about trump’s behavior makes you think he isn’t narcissistic? Are you yourself trained to use the DSM 5?
Mine died.
I’m not interested in proving a negative, not my burden. And being narcissistic and having a defined personality disorder aren’t equivalent. [quote=“iquitos46, post:30, topic:90323”]
Are you yourself trained to use the DSM 5?
[/quote]
Irrelevant. I don’t need an MD to know that someone offering a miracle cure or diagnosis over the Internet is a quack.
It’s not like the authors of the article are trained professionals in any case, so if the point is that I also am not a trained professional, it’s not the best point to be making. This whole article smacks of Dunning-Kruger effect.
And I took care of her until she did.
Sorry to hear that. Loyalty and filial piety are never appreciated by these vampires, who simply take it as their due. I hope you’re able to move forward without her haunting you too much.
Yes. The arms-length NPD diagnosis might even be correct, but so what? A glib pop-psych “diagnosis” solves nothing. It just lets a few cognoscenti calm their nerves by giggling together in… well not private, is it?
The question of interest is: How would you choose to react to the incoming Trump administration? How would you advise others to do so? Dealing with a capricious, far away demagogue is worth some thought. And strategy.
Charles - Bingo! We had a whole section on The Dark Triad and Bannon. It was too much to fit in the piece and we felt it was going to be enough to swallow to accept that our new president may make decisions based on a disorder. Thanks for your input–it helps.
I was simply curious…no value judgement meant. Trumps vey public behaviors might well be enough to suspect he has issues that go beyond the norm
Three very respectable outlets wanted to publish it, some feared reprisal, some feared legal issues. Medium was a way to get the info to the public, which was our goal. I have a book deal with MacMillan and did not just pull this out of my ass. We’ve been working on this for a year. Just want to be clear that Medium was chosen for legal reasons. I write for Boing Boing regularly.
It is sadly telling that criticism of the leader of this country is tainted by fear before he is officially in office. Many past presidents have been subjected to all manner of abuse and accusations but fear of reprisal didn’t stop anything. GDB and Obama both have been targeted yet it seems few individual citizens were afraid to express their opinions. Will that be the case with the president elect?
Judging from the fear around this story, it is very, very different as a journalist now.
