Rant on diagnosing others

[Dana1010]

What is your definition of a narc?

I don't know if I have the authority to define the disorder. I admit I need to do more research.

My mother went wholly out of her way to be at the center of a group of victim-losers. When she was cut off, her response resembled cold turkey drug withdrawal. When I exhibited any competency in school or whatever, she would grimace and then try to deny it or downplay it. When I dared to raise myself up, by say, getting into college, she lashed out with angry, bizarre, out-of-the-blue attacks. Looking back, it seems that she made a lot of very strange choices in how we were reared just so that she could keep us down.

This seems to fit the profile of a narc, from what I've read. But I own that I'm in need of further education.

These people are extremely dangerous. I don't think laypeople should be discouraged from trying to learn as much as they can about them.

 

[Freida]

I have mixed feelings on this, on one hand abused folks are notorious for underestimating their abusive situation so perhaps using a harsh term is a bit of a wake up call? It was for me. I was minimizing his strange behaviors and when the docs started using the term it terrified me but it also motivated me.

The OP has expressed dismay (and I agree with her) that we all need to be really careful with labeling and particularly using formal diagnostic mental health conditions as descriptors.

I think this is a really good conversation about the concept of "labeling" and the affect it has on the person who was abused -- even when there is no confirmation the label fits the perp. And I think sometimes it's necessary to make that reach. For example - my t tried for YEARS to get me to accept the term "sadist" because the definition of what a sadist does matched what he did to me. Did that mean he was a diagnosed by the mental health world as sadist? Nope. It meant I had a definition that I could use to try to make sense of things
and stop minimizing what had happened to me. When I was able to look at the DSM and at the police definitions of the the actions attached to the word "sadist" things finally made sense

So now I refer to him as a sadist. But that label is for my benefit as a kind of touchstone to help me to accept a lot of what I did to survive by helping me understand exactly what I was up against and why I couldn't win.

Is it fair that I stick that label on him without knowing if it truly applies?
Who the hell cares. It works for me.
And right now that's what is important

 

[Kubash16]

No. He was schizo-affective. That was the culprit for his abnormal, abusive behavior. It's far more accurate than "sick."
You need to try to put your emotions aside. Your mind is really your brain. You don't have a mind that thinks independently of your brain. Brains are physical organs. No two are identical. Some of them -- like the brains of narcs and paths -- plain suck.

So then, following your vehemence on the issue, what do you propose should happen?

Say you have a child who you later realized displayed those characteristics. Are you just going to shove him out of your life cause oops there’s a bad seed, or are you going to have empathy, patience, and understanding to do what you can to meet him where he’s at and teach him how to interact with the world in a healthier way?

 

[Ronin]

Is it fair that I stick that label on him without knowing if it truly applies?

You see, but you have a label that fits those concrete behaviors the best...
I do not think it is the same with labels where other labels (as abusive, or just a jerk, etc) would suit just as well, or better, than the ones that are being used.

And I also do not think it works to go with any label will do, for any given behaviors.
It is a different thing if you have one that works best, for the actions, than to be applying labels after a quick skim of a few google lists.

 

[Dana1010]

Say you have a child who you later realized displayed those characteristics. Are you just going to shove him out of your life cause oops there’s a bad seed, or are you going to have empathy, patience, and understanding to do what you can to meet him where he’s at and teach him how to interact with the world in a healthier way?

The psychopaths I've known? I don't really consider them human -- and some of them are related to me. If I knew someone was a psychopath, yes, I would get them out of my life even if they were related to me. Trust me, they don't care.

 

[ILoveLife]

I think that if a thing perpetuates our suffering, if it puts us in the position of perpetuating abuse towards ourselves, being in the form of suffering, that's just harmful for us, regardless if it's good for them or not.

I mean, it's ok both ways if it eases our suffering too. I think that's what Freida and Whirlwind meant, but we've got to be mindful about not perpetuating our own cycles of suffering too. They caused enough of it.

 

[Anarchy]

I was on another PTSD site, and amazingly, almost every one of the posters had a narcissist in their life. What gives? Are there that many people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder

Eve has already touched on what I'm wanting to say.

There is often a sloppiness in the use of language. Some names and words have very specific and narrow meanings, but very similar word can imply a much looser meaning.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder, is fairly specific.

I had long discussions with my t about the meaning of "personality disorder". My t's day job is working with people who have personality disorders, including NPD.

The names "narcissist", "narcissistic", "psychopathic", "hystrionic" etc

Have far looser meanings, and they don't necessarily imply the level of dysfunction and disorder that a "personality disorder" would describe.

How much dysfunction is required for a diagnosis of "personality disorder" is set out in check lists

For example, someone earlier questioned the credentials of Robert Hare;

The "Hare Psychopathy checklist (revised)" is probably the most used scoring system for diagnosing psychopaths for mental health and legal purposes.

Most places, a score of 30 or above is taken to indicate psychopathic personality disorder. Regular people will score about 3.

But, it is still subjective; for example in Scotland where it's not unusual for people to be obnoxious with drink, foul mouthed, lead parasitic lifestyles (only approximately 1% of the population are net tax contributors), the effective HPCL (R) score for diagnosing someone as a psychopath is about 26 or 27!

There's also the small matter of repeatability between practitioners. This is one of the reasons for the relatively frequent updates of the DSMs, there is great difficulty in achieving repeatability even with specially trained practitioners diagnosing hand picked samples of people in the clinical trials for the DSM!

Ok, just for the sake of simplicity. I'll assume that the diagnostic tools are foolproof and that all of the people out there who qualify for an actual diagnosis of narc personality disorder psychopathic personality disorder etc, have actually been diagnosed

And I'll assume that the figures for each is about 1% of the population.

Those 1%s aren't Island isolated from the main population

They're the extreme tails of some sort of statistical distributions (normal, binomial, log, something of that sort)

Whatever the shape of the distribution, there will still be another group containing several times the number that the group of actual personality disordered people contains,

Who have significantly more traits of the problem personality than the mainstream population do.

They're not clinically personality disordered narcs, psychopaths, histrionics, borderlines, schizoids or whatever

But they have significantly narcissistic, psychopathic, histrionic... personalities

In the case of significantly (but sub clinically) narcissistic or psychopathic people

They're not going to be safe people to be around, and it doesn't need ten years of jumping through medieval guild professional hoops to realise the gist of where the person is coming from.

I don't know whether the people on the other ptsd site were using the term narc in the strict sense of diagnosed NPD, or the looser sense of narcissistic personality traits.

Language is often used in a sloppy and non precise way.

 

[Chris-duck]

But, it is still subjective; for example in Scotland where it's not unusual for people to be obnoxious with drink, foul mouthed, lead parasitic lifestyles (only approximately 1% of the population are net tax contributors), the effective HPCL (R) score for diagnosing someone as a psychopath is about 26 or 27!

Separate issue. But ehhh. I can't argue the foul mouthed thing. But I wouldn't say people in Scotland meet psychopath criteria more than people in other countries. There's cultural things like swearing casually, and maybe even the drinking a lot thing. I wouldn't say we are particularly obnoxious while drunk, or lead particularly parasitic lifestyles in comparison to the rest of the UK where we can all live easily without working although I work and pay tax so I guess I'm 1%? (although I have no idea on stats so if you can provide some id reconsider taking into consideration that I'm pretty sure that half the remote areas are full of retired folks. And we have more sheep than people really :P )

 

[Ronin]

They're not going to be safe people to be around

Just getting this back to abuse and violence for simplicity:
Neurotypical people would be, on average, far more unsafe to be around by default than people with personality disorders. Just going by the amount of actual actions.

But people are not going all Hey, random Joe, you are so dangerous, on people.
But neurodiverse Jane gets the hate just as existing.

I wouldn't say people in Scotland meet psychopath criteria more than people in other countries.

And this.
Like xenophobic approaches helped anyone, ever.
(Not even starting on how divisiveness and promoting anxiety about groups of people at large contributes to hurtful acts, instead of easing them out. So I figure not doing the thing would actually be protective.)
.

 

[Anarchy]

But I wouldn't say people in Scotland meet psychopath criteria more than people in other countries.

I don't think that the Scottish population do

(border reiving has been over for a year or two now ;-) it's said that at one time, there were only women buried in one church yard, every male from that village ended up dying while out reiving or later on the gallows in Carlisle, and that village was on the English side of the line on the map).

The example was to show the subjectivity and cultural basis in the diagnostic criteria

Neurotypical people would be, on average, far more unsafe to be around by default than people with personality disorders. Just going by the amount of actual actions.

Only if you are dealing with the whole population;

For example, the group scoring over 30 on the Hare Psychopathy checklist, is something like 1% of the population, and about another 5% are sub clinical, but with significant traits.

I'm about twenty times more likely to randomly encounter a person outside of that group

But I'm not safer with a person who scores highly on narcissistic or psychopathic traits.

 

[Sideways]

I'm sorry, but you didn't know this person long enough to make any final statements about him.

Pretty sure I did. And I met the important people in his life and got to know them.

Assuming I don’t know what I’m talking about simply because I don’t agree with you? Pfft, yeah.

 

[Ronin]

But I'm not safer with a person who scores highly on narcissistic or psychopathic traits.

People say the same things about PTSD.

We are all deranged and likely to act out everything that was done to us on others, just give it enough time.
And what the hell things like isolating, that is a cuckoo preparing another terrorist attack in solitude.
... Who even knows what people did to deserve that back to them, nobody got a full story.

.... Etc etc. I could continue.
Same kind of stigmatizing nonsense, based on a few traits.

A few traits are not a full picture / are not determining the future acts of anyone.