If somebody you knew like a family member, partner or friend told you they had NPD would you still talk to them? Would it change how you feel about that person?
As someone with NPD I’m always worried about how having NPD would affect me socially. It’s so stigmatised and people are always talking about how dangerous people with cluster B personality disorders are. I’m dating this guy at the minute. I really love him but I’m worried about how he would feel if he found out about my NPD. Would he still want to see me after what you see online about NPD? Should I ever tell him? Should I just keep it secret?
As of now I’ve told nobody about my diagnosis other than a few people at job interviews. What I’m basically asking here is ‘How will NPD affect your social life?’.
I know and have some friends who are diagnosed with NPD. It doesn’t affect how I treat them. A diagnosis is just a piece of paper at the end of the day, and there’s no reason to treat someone differently based on whether or not they have a particular sheet of paper. I act according to people’s behaviour.
I wish more people were like you and your friends. Although I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s just words on a sheet of paper. That’s like saying that a sentence is just words out of a Judges mouth but still, a personality disorder is a disorder like one else. Like not being able to walk or having autism. Sure, it may effect how I interact with the world but it doesn’t define me and I can improve myself but most people wouldn’t believe that considering how much the media has demonized NPD.
If you hadn’t been diagnosed, would the behaviours the psychiatrist deemed “narcissistic” not exist in you? Behaviours don’t suddenly manifest upon diagnosis. Diagnoses are a way of pathologising and, ultimately, punishing differences, especially ones which are contrary to capitalist productivity. Diagnoses are definitely not objective assessments of dysfunction: see, for obvious examples, the hysteria diagnosis, the now nonexistent diagnosis of homosexuality/homophilia, or the entirely bullshit racist diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder (diagnosed as ADHD in white boys, of course). Even taken at their most benign and apolitical, diagnoses are still human-made categorisations of observed behaviour. The vast majority of psychiatric diagnoses describe a set of commonly co-occuring symptoms, not a root cause or a particular structural anomaly in the brain; they aren’t any more of a natural discrete category than creating a category of white people with blonde hair and blue eyes, since those symptoms tend to co-occur.
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