This is really interesting. Thanks. I have often wondered whether psychopathy is actually antisocial personality disorder, as dsm calls it, with comorbid autism. I would love to see this tested. And there is an additional neglected aspect of vulnerable and grandiose narcissism: Some people oscillate between both. I havent read up on your references. But my first query would be whether a questionnaire measures of narcissism are validated for detecting narcissism in those with autism. Most arent. This sounds like a potential problem with interpreting the results. But i think as a research question its important.
Thanks for your insightful comment. I followed up on your methodological question -- I haven't found evidence that the PNI-52 questionnaire has been validated specifically for an autistic population. So I take it, the challenge you're pointing out is that we don't know whether autistic individuals interpret the items the same way as the original population samples used to validate the PNI-52? Interesting caveat! Thanks.
Thanks for looking into this Laura! I think my specific concern would be that in autistic people, the PNI questionnaire would ‘interpret’ certain answers as reflective of narcissism when they are actually reflective of autism.
What an excellent post! I am an autistic LCSW that has often wondered about the similarities between other people’s perceptions of ‘narcissists’ and how it may feel to the person displaying the traits. I have recently come to the awareness that I likely fit the bill as a ‘vulnerable narcissist’ but without harm to others. It’s more likely a result of ongoing sensitivity to rejection and coping mechanisms from many many micro rejections over the years.
It also seems like more and more traits that used to be associated with shyness or introversion are now being labeled as narcissistic. Genuinely hurt and withdraw? Toxic. Being quiet to process or feel that you want to manage your emotions so you don’t lash out? Passive aggressive silent treatment. The tendency to label anyone as a narcissist (or other equally damning words like fascists or ists) lacks nuance and damns people to being irredeemable and is ultimately dehumanizing. It puts people in tidy boxes that we never have to engage with.
There’s no winning with the MH industry. There’s so much cognitive dissonance within it that continues to label variations in personality as deviant. Despite the thousand plus pages in the DSM, none have ever been able to define what ‘normal’ is.
There’s a great documentary called the Century of the Self by Adam Curtis about the early origins of the psychology industry and how it derived from propaganda and crowd control techniques developed by Edward Bernard.
Kelly, I'm so happy this resonated with you as an autistic LCSW, and as a person who identifies with vulnerable narcissism traits as well. That's lived validation of these ideas.
Narcissism seems like one of the most loaded, pejorative labels out there -- perhaps along with borderline personality disorder. Whoops, and how I can forget histrionic personality disorder, which as I just learned from google is diagnosed at a rough ratio of 65% women to 35% men.
There's so much bias and sloppiness in all this.
I'm increasingly convinced that all these different labels are mostly noise and that we've been suffering from a top-down, assumption-driven approach (using assumptions first formed over 100 years ago), whereas we need a bottom-up, data-driven approach that begins with more neutral schemas like the FFM.
Also, to your point about "normal" -- another hill I'm increasingly convinced I will die on (in addition to challenging the DSM's validity) is that there's no such thing as a neurotypical person. Period, the end. Perhaps what we mean by "neurotypical" is really just a value judgment that one way of being is better than another. Or, perhaps it's an academic fiction useful for hypotheticals only, like the rational actor in economics or the reasonable person in jurisprudence. No one's wholly rational, no one's fully reasonable, and no one's totally "typical."
I couldn't agree more. Though certain diagnostic categories may constitute exceptions, as a whole the DSM strikes me as ineffectual and even a-scientific. As I see it, that's because they're only reshaping it at the margins to keep pace with research, when what's needed is a renovation from the ground up. It rests on a foundation of early-20th century frameworks that represented progress in their time, but are now past their use-by dates.
This is really interesting. Thanks. I have often wondered whether psychopathy is actually antisocial personality disorder, as dsm calls it, with comorbid autism. I would love to see this tested. And there is an additional neglected aspect of vulnerable and grandiose narcissism: Some people oscillate between both. I havent read up on your references. But my first query would be whether a questionnaire measures of narcissism are validated for detecting narcissism in those with autism. Most arent. This sounds like a potential problem with interpreting the results. But i think as a research question its important.
Thanks for your insightful comment. I followed up on your methodological question -- I haven't found evidence that the PNI-52 questionnaire has been validated specifically for an autistic population. So I take it, the challenge you're pointing out is that we don't know whether autistic individuals interpret the items the same way as the original population samples used to validate the PNI-52? Interesting caveat! Thanks.
Thanks for looking into this Laura! I think my specific concern would be that in autistic people, the PNI questionnaire would ‘interpret’ certain answers as reflective of narcissism when they are actually reflective of autism.
What an excellent post! I am an autistic LCSW that has often wondered about the similarities between other people’s perceptions of ‘narcissists’ and how it may feel to the person displaying the traits. I have recently come to the awareness that I likely fit the bill as a ‘vulnerable narcissist’ but without harm to others. It’s more likely a result of ongoing sensitivity to rejection and coping mechanisms from many many micro rejections over the years.
It also seems like more and more traits that used to be associated with shyness or introversion are now being labeled as narcissistic. Genuinely hurt and withdraw? Toxic. Being quiet to process or feel that you want to manage your emotions so you don’t lash out? Passive aggressive silent treatment. The tendency to label anyone as a narcissist (or other equally damning words like fascists or ists) lacks nuance and damns people to being irredeemable and is ultimately dehumanizing. It puts people in tidy boxes that we never have to engage with.
There’s no winning with the MH industry. There’s so much cognitive dissonance within it that continues to label variations in personality as deviant. Despite the thousand plus pages in the DSM, none have ever been able to define what ‘normal’ is.
There’s a great documentary called the Century of the Self by Adam Curtis about the early origins of the psychology industry and how it derived from propaganda and crowd control techniques developed by Edward Bernard.
Really love the work you’re doing here.
Kelly, I'm so happy this resonated with you as an autistic LCSW, and as a person who identifies with vulnerable narcissism traits as well. That's lived validation of these ideas.
Narcissism seems like one of the most loaded, pejorative labels out there -- perhaps along with borderline personality disorder. Whoops, and how I can forget histrionic personality disorder, which as I just learned from google is diagnosed at a rough ratio of 65% women to 35% men.
There's so much bias and sloppiness in all this.
I'm increasingly convinced that all these different labels are mostly noise and that we've been suffering from a top-down, assumption-driven approach (using assumptions first formed over 100 years ago), whereas we need a bottom-up, data-driven approach that begins with more neutral schemas like the FFM.
Also, to your point about "normal" -- another hill I'm increasingly convinced I will die on (in addition to challenging the DSM's validity) is that there's no such thing as a neurotypical person. Period, the end. Perhaps what we mean by "neurotypical" is really just a value judgment that one way of being is better than another. Or, perhaps it's an academic fiction useful for hypotheticals only, like the rational actor in economics or the reasonable person in jurisprudence. No one's wholly rational, no one's fully reasonable, and no one's totally "typical."
I couldn't agree more. Though certain diagnostic categories may constitute exceptions, as a whole the DSM strikes me as ineffectual and even a-scientific. As I see it, that's because they're only reshaping it at the margins to keep pace with research, when what's needed is a renovation from the ground up. It rests on a foundation of early-20th century frameworks that represented progress in their time, but are now past their use-by dates.