Narcissistic Personality - A False Picture

A False Picture

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In the 1960's, what was often the subject of public service announcements suddenly became one of the best-kept secrets in the world = that mental illness is, by far, the number-one health risk, the most prevalent disease in the world, and of epidemic proportions, affecting from 20-to-40% of the population!

Look around you. That's 2–4 out of every 10 people in your world.

Overnight, the mental healthcare industry changed its mind. They revised the diagnostic criteria to reduce the amount of mental illness by about half.

Now, why doesn't the rest of the healthcare industry cure people by the millions like that?

Keeping this fact a secret paints a false picture. Because of it we assume that almost everyone we deal with is mentally healthy.

Okay, yet we observe a lot of craziness.

How do those two perceived facts add together?

We wrongly conclude then that this craziness is in mentally healthy people. So, we don't take it seriously; we regard it as normal. Nothing more than just, perhaps, a bit "offbeat."

As a result, much irrationality, delusion, and craziness passes for normal.

For example, we need no Doctor of Psychology to tell us something important we've known since we were toddlers:

Stage of Separation and Individuation (18-36 months)

During this stage, the "object splitting" comes to an end. The child relates to objects (people) as wholes. ...In addition, the child learns that objects do not cease to exist when not present ("object constancy").

— from Lecture 18: Abnormal Psychology: Personality Disorders: Controversies and Theory by Thomas A. Widiger Ph.D.

Yet intellectuals have flown in the face of that fact with this well-known assault on reality: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it make a sound?

Yes, of course it did, duh. But many people, to whom truth is a relative quantity instead of an absolute, prefer to think "on a higher plane" and will argue with you about that. After all, why not? Nobody will question their mental health for doing so.

So, they fear not to insist that the moon is made of green cheese "for you" if you choose to believe it is.

When thinking like that passes for normal we are in trouble.

Consequently, we have people going around seriously talking about "your reality" and "my reality," "your truth" and "my truth."

None seem to stop and think what they are doing to their minds by distorting their thinking and perceptions this way. Indeed, they seem to think they can sabotage the proper functioning of the mind to create a delusion they call "their truth" without any ill effects — without forcing logical errors in the processing of any related matter, without programming their minds with brain-fogging contradictions that stop thinking dead in its tracks on any related matter. No matter how remotely related it is. One wonders how they think they can abuse their mind with lies and not damage its ability to think straight.

Because of the general perception that mental illness is rare, people can think this way and be judged perfectly sane.

Consider the wing-nuts on either end of the political spectrum. True, many say they're crazy, but few mean that literally. Consider also the mobs of wild people all over the planet blasphemously crying out in God's name for the annihilation of all westerners and Jews over a few silly cartoons. Such people are crazy but are regarded as simply misguided.

The narcissists I have known all capitalized on this false picture that makes their prey blow off the warning signs as nothing to be concerned about.

For example:

If a man has but two children and can't tell you what their college majors are, should you regard him as normal?

If he laughs at something everybody else is shocked and sickened by, should you regard him as normal?

If he lives in the basement to avoid all contact with his family outside of mealtime, should you regard him as normal?

If he is a teacher the kids wouldn't dream of misbehaving on but has often said that teaching is really hard because a teacher is under a tremendous amount of pressure because kids just make you so mad that you really, really want to just pop off and whack them, should you regard him as normal?

If he never misses the daily accident reports and, just to disgust everybody, says, "Good enough for 'em" because those killed and injured deserved to be killed or injured for "driving like hell," should you blow it off and regard him as normal?

If he can't say "I love you" or "Thank you," should you regard him as normal?

If he surprises you by lashing out in anger at you for no reason you can discern, and then just gets more angry, instead of less angry, when you try to back down or appease him, should you blow that off and regard him as normal?

If he can't ever give you a reason for what he wants or does, should you regard him as normal?

If he uses irrationality as a debating tactic, should you regard him as normal?

If his behavior sometimes strikes you as so bizarre you have to pinch yourself, should you keep blowing it off and regarding him as normal?

No. He's mentally ill. (Stay away from people like that.)

So, all we can say about that official estimate of NPD is that it's definitely way below the mark. Not only do most narcissists manage to stay hired and out from behind bars, they never admit there's something wrong with them.

To arrive at a legitimate estimate, you must administer a test to a large representative sample of the population, chosen at random. Pollsters know how to do this so that the results are scientifically valid and reliable. But, as far as I know, there is no reliable test for NPD.

What's more, even the diagnoses that current estimates are based on are unreliable.

In addition, co-morbidity (with mental disorders like substance abuse and depression) muddies the picture of underlying personality disorder. And diagnostic statistics vary over time, as one disorder after another becomes the current fad in diagnosis. For example, diagnoses of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) dramatically increased in the 1970's, when it became popularized and even became the subject of a television miniseries.

And so, there is no reliable estimate of how prevalent NPD is in society

© 2004 � 2008, Kathleen Krajco � all rights reserved worldwide.
The URL of this page is: http://www.narcissism.operationdoubles.com/falsepicture.htm.
It was last updated on 3/6/2008.
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