lowenz on 20/6/2020 at 09:49
Still a "Personality disorder" is
not a mental illness.
It's clearly a classic narcisistic "unsolved development" person by the book.
A malignant manchild with heavy histrionic features.
They're a clusterfuck of empty pride and complete incompetence (in every field, approval-searching apart). No illness, but no trust in those guys must be put by anyone.
lowenz on 20/6/2020 at 09:57
Quote Posted by demagogue
But the reason why I feel like I have a special understanding of him now is that now I've had a partner with Borderline Personality Disorder, which is the mirror image of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. To know one is to know the other pretty well. People think they understand it -- oh he's always thinking about himself and sure does say a lot of bullsiht -- but unless you've read like 8 books and 700 articles and Quora and blog posts on it, you really don't understand anything, just because it really is impossible to understand without researching it.
And don't forget the histrionic part with the related attention/approval seeking.
demagogue on 20/6/2020 at 11:27
I can't find the response article to that just now, but other psychologists have written that the person writing that article is not using evidence-based reasoning. There is 1000s of hours of video footage documenting Trump's profile and there's mountains of evidence around NPD as a profile.
NPD is more complicated than BPD as a diagnosis, but just saying he's self-obsessed and lies doesn't really capture some fundamental features. There are narcissist people, and then there are people who build a facade self and don't have their own personality or a self-identity underneath it, which is at an entirely different level of scale as a profile.
Anyway, if one doesn't want to call it a mental illness, I don't care all that much about the semantics of it. It's definitely a psychological profile. The best thing to do is read lots of clinical studies, and read around the posts on something like Welcome to Oz. There are so many textbook features that it's clearly not just "cunt behavior" that coincidentally looks alike. It's a profile. The gaslighting, the lovebombing and idealization-devaluation-discard cycle, the memory problems, the inability to understand criticism (not talking about rejecting it; they can't literally parse the sentences as criticism), NPD breakdown, the inability to conceive another perspective (not just lacking empathy, but again they can't parse sentences that require them to see other people's perspective)... Whether it's brain rewiring or its ossified patterns set in from childhood might be the big debate for the DSM people, but it isn't the major issue for managing it as a partner or employee or as a country. What matters is how the profile operates, and its structural nature. It's not something he can just "turn off" one day like somebody that's just randomly decides to be a jerk one day.
Like just to take one example, make a time plot of when he hires people and when he fires them, and the words he use in Tweets about certain staff as a function of time, and you'll see it fall into patterns time after time. That's not somebody being a jerk at random times, where you'd expect the rhetoric to be randomly plotted as a function of time; that speaks to structural issues.
lowenz on 20/6/2020 at 11:45
Quote Posted by demagogue
you'll see it fall into
patternsBeware, Sulphur alter! :D
Show us your degree in
patternology of GTFO/STFU!
demagogue on 20/6/2020 at 11:50
You don't have to call it patterns if you don't like the word.
I did get a degree in cognitive science.
Volitional behavior is a strange beast even in normal situations; but it's positively wild when it comes to personality disorders.
It confuses everybody, and NPD is the most confusing and controversial of them all.
So I'm fine with dropping any debate about what category of thing people should call it.
If you're dealing with a person that displays NPD features, you still need to know what lovebombing, flying monkey army, fleas, gaslighting, idealization cycles, etc, mean in their context because you're going to run into those things. Not a question of if but when. That's the hill I'd rather fight on, the things that you should bet on if you're going to be playing with them for money. To use perhaps a better analogy, many of the profile features in criminology aren't mental illnesses either, but they still tell you the motivations of the guy and where you can bet he'll strike next.
PigLick on 20/6/2020 at 11:51
Dont discount Tony's link this time, triple j is an australian radio station, and its current affairs program "the hack" has some pretty good journos working for it.
Gryzemuis on 20/6/2020 at 15:11
Quote Posted by demagogue
So I'm fine with dropping any debate about what category of thing people should call it.
Sorry, I didn't want to yank your chain. Or disagree just to disagree.
I have no clue about psychology.
For me, the problem with mental illness, or with personality disorders, is that they can be used as an excuse. "He cant' help himself, he's ill". "You can't blame him, it's his brain, his hormones that cause this". I don't accept those excuses when we talk about Trump. He's a grown man. He's had a full life to think over who he is, how he acts, what he has done. If we can't blame him for things in the past, because he was ill or had some syndrome, we should at least be allowed to blame him for not being sorry later. We should be allowed to blame him for not even trying to be a better human being.
PigLick on 20/6/2020 at 15:19
mental illness is real, but someone with a mental illness cant still be an asshole. And also what does the term "grown man" really mean? You've reached a certain age? Fired a gun in anger? Had sex? Written out your own tax return? Its a meaningless term.
Gryzemuis on 20/6/2020 at 15:26
"A grown man" is not a legal term. It's just my way of saying "someone who should be smart and wise enough to take responsibility for what he says and does". And Trump doesn't seem to do that. Still doesn't seem to do that, even now that he is President.
