NPD, Part 1

Get this:

Signs and symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and the severity of symptoms vary. People with the disorder can: 

·        Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance
·       Have a sense of entitlement and require constant, excessive admiration
·       Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
·       Exaggerate achievements and talents
·       Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate
·       Believe they are superior and can only associate with equally special people
·       Monopolize conversations and belittle or look down on people they perceive as inferior
·       Expect special favors and unquestioning compliance with their expectations
·       Take advantage of others to get what they want
·       Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others
·       Be envious of others and believe others envy them
·       Behave in an arrogant, haughty manner, coming across as conceited, boastful and pretentious
·       Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office

Remind you of anyone you know with his finger on the nuclear button?
That breakdown of NPD symptoms is from the Mayo Clinic online where you can go to find symptoms for the flu, scabies, or irritable bowel syndrome, so there’s nothing particularly clinical or proprietary about it. Two of the three most popular posts in the near 10-year history of The Nobby Works have been those when I wrote about narcissism here and here. At the time, I chose as our two most notable public narcissists Bill O’ Reilly and Ted Cruz, with Breaking Bad’s Walter White serving as the perfect fictional model of narcissism in extremis known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder. An awful lot has happened in the five years since those posts…with the emphasis on awful. O’Reilly and Cruz have been eclipsed in their public displays of narcissism by the dark star that is Donald Trump. There has never has been an NPD sufferer quite like him and never has the entire world been so vulnerable to the impulses of such a dangerous mind (and, yes, I’m aware of the rogue’s gallery of madmen history has presented us with, but none of them have had such far-reaching power over both innocent others and a cult following of ominous proportions). 
What’s frustrating to a frightening degree is that the media, which is clearly aware of Trump’s unstable mental condition, continues to tiptoe around it. About a year ago some outlets dared to broach the subject but were scared off when decorum fetishists who abound in politics and media questioned whether it was right or fair to discuss the psychological state of a public figure if a) one were not a professional psychoanalyst and b) if you were in fact a pro but had never examined the patient personally. That pretty much closed the discussion. Now we’re faced with the increasingly exasperating and essentially useless political reporting that continues to assess Trump’s behavior as if he were of sound mind: Why does he repeat these words over and over again? What’s behind this rally? Who is he secretly signaling this time? Where’s his red line on tariffs? On Mueller? On government shutdown? On taxes? On the courts? On immigration? 
In March 2015 Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz seized control of a passenger plane with 144 passengers on board and crashed it into the French Alps, killing all on board. One can discuss all one wants about the weather, the pilot’s training, the possibility of a terrorist attack, a flock of seagulls. But it all becomes meaningless once it is revealed that Lubitz had suicidal tendencies and was declared unfit for his job by his doctor. That is the factor that overrides all others when discussing that crash. Trump’s mental state trumps all other factors when discussing his conduct as president. To assess his performance in terms of ideology, politics, strategy…even race and economics…overlooks the most salient fact that his wholly (ho-ho) nonpartisan mental condition causes him to act the way he does. Any useful reporting on Trump should not begin with him as a Republican or a rich man’s son or even a racist. It must begin with the fact that he has the most acute case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder ever witnessed in an American public figure, certainly any president. 
In a recent, typically earnest yet willfully clueless discussion, an MSNBC panel tried to decipher meaning in this quote from an interview Trump did with the Washington Post:

One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including — just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.

The panel, with a few nervous laughs, noted how nearly incoherent and simpleminded the statement was, and then averred to how scary it was to have so much power invested in a sub-literate human being. But illiteracy is the least of the problems. It’s a good bet that most of the panel read Dr. James Hamblin’s exasperating article in The Atlantic, Is there Something Neurologically Wrong with Donald Trump? In it Hamblin carefully tracks Trump’s speech pattern over the years and shows that he didn’t always speak in such a jumble. He used to be considerably coherent, on point and far less juvenile in his elocution. Though the decline in speech facility speaks to a mental condition other than NPD, Hamblin concludes his otherwise thoughtful piece by reinforcing media timidity in discussing the real Donald Trump: 

Indeed, thousands of mental-health professionals have mobilized and signed petitions attesting to Trump’s unfitness to hold office. Some believe Trump should carry a label of narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, or both. The largest such petition has more than 68,000 signatures—though there is no vetting of the signatories’ credentials. Its author, the psychologist John Gartner, told me last year that in his 35 years of practicing and teaching, “this is absolutely the worst case of malignant narcissism I’ve ever seen.” 

Many other mental-health professionals are insistent that Trump not be diagnosed from afar by anyone, ever—that the goal of mental-health care is to help people who are suffering themselves from disabling and debilitating illnesses. A personality disorder is “only a disorder when it causes extreme distress, suffering, and impairment,” argues Allen Frances, the Duke University psychiatrist who was a leading author of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which was the first to include personality disorders. 

(snip) 

After more than a year of considering Trump’s behavior through the lens of the cognitive sciences, I don’t think that labeling him with a mental illness from afar is wise. A diagnosis like narcissistic personality disorder is too easily played off as a value judgment by an administration that is pushing the narrative that scientists are enemies of the state. Labeling is also counterproductive to the field in that it presents risks to all the people who deal with the stigma of psychiatric diagnoses. To attribute Trump’s behavior to mental illness risks devaluing mental illness. 

Judiciousness in public statements is only more necessary as the Trump administration plays up the idea of partisan bias in its campaign against “the media.” The consistent message is that if someone is saying something about the president that depicts or reflects upon him unfavorably, the statement must be motivated by an allegiance to a party. It must be, in a word, “fake”—coming from a place of spite, or vengeance, or allegiance to some team, creed, or party.

The big bloody irony in that reasonable, measured conclusion by the good doctor is that it underscores in bright red why NPD is such a damnable personality disorder. Inevitably the one with the disorder succeeds in convincing those who are normal that the problem is with them. It is a why some analysts will only treat NPD in teams of two to defend against the patient’s highly developed skills in manipulation. By playing into the NPD victim’s vision of the world, you cede the vision to him. Of course he’ll dismiss you as fake…of course it’ll demean your profession…of course it’ll cost the victims of other mental illnesses...of course it’ll be seen as a value judgment and partisan bias. By the time you’ve disarmed yourself by seeing yourself as the NPD sufferer sees you, he’s won; you’ve lost. That’s why it’s the most diabolical personality disorder under a darkened sun, and we as citizens and especially our media have to start treating it as such...not avoiding it. 

Next week NPD Part 2, wherein The Nob looks at the worshippers of this darkened sun.