Narcissistic Personality Disorder is one of the four types of personality disorders clinically defined in the DSMV. People with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (or NPD for short) are typically referred to in psychiatric and self-help social circles as Narcissists.
Individuals who meet diagnostic criteria for being considered NPD tend to score high in multiple areas of narcissistic behavior when and if they are scored on the diagnostic criteria rubric.
While people can behave in narcissistic ways at any given time without meeting the criteria for the diagnosis, it’s important to make a clear mental and logical academic distinction between a person who has displayed a lifetime of narcissistic traits, habits, thought patterns, and psychological traits that reflect NPD and a person who make poor social choices or personal decisions on a random, occasional, or rare situational circumstance.
Narcissists, by definition, are vertical thinkers.
They are the ultimate social competitors, reflecting pack mentality and displaying aggression as both individuals and when they unite in mobs, gangs, cliques, or narcissistic and exclusionary-minded social groups.
Truly believing the world as they know it revolves around them, they tend to symptomatically behave in ways that are compulsively self-promoting, grandiose, illogical, irrational, egocentric, and grandiose.
Every social interaction is seen as a competition of sorts, with the Narcissist behaving as if their distorted, self-deluded version of any fact, story, or reality is somehow rooted in divine truth (rather than being recognized as a symptom of psychiatric dysfunction and outright gaslighting tales and lies).
The condition — a personality TYPE classification, rather than an actual diagnosis of illness (per se) — tends to be rooted in cultural nurturing, for the most part.
However, medical issues like Autism, Dementia, or Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) can cause a human being to behave in narcissistic ways by nature without anyone or anything causing them to behave in ways that reflect a lack of empathy and tunnel-visioned psychology that lacks emotional depth, contextual appropriateness, or civic-mindedness.
For that reason, be mindful when engaging in any armchair diagnosis of a person or person’s behavior. There is a world of difference between nurturing or enabling individual or cultural Narcissism and making lifestyle choices by habit that are pervasively narcissistic.
When a person is so self-focused on their own unjust sense of accomplishment, entitlement, and grandiosity, they fail to display prized human evolutionary traits related to civic virtue or collaborative states.
Narcissistic people have a tough time communicating because they fail to prize social interaction in and of itself (for the most part) in any way.
Where neurotypical people, Empaths, and horizontal thinkers understand that by networking and prizing individual human character leads societies to healthful, pro-social lattice style gains, the more narcissistic the person the more they are likely to seek to win or beat others — essentially reflecting an antagonistic desire in them that inspires them to strive to functionally collapse other peoples (as well as their own) healthy lifestyle patterns or emotionally positive and forward-thinking wave states.
