• MindTraveller
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    4 months ago

    The problem is that you haven’t once described Trump fulfilling a diagnostic criterion for NPD. You’ve just listed a random hodgepodge of negative traits. The diagnosis of NPD does not label someone “asshole”. It labels someone “patient”. In order to prove that Trump has NPD, you would need, instead of just listing bad traits, to explain how he is caused distress and social impairment by a pattern of symptoms that align with the 9 criteria and how he could benefit from medical treatment. And when I say “benefit”, I don’t mean “become a nicer person”, I mean “feel better and have fewer problems functioning”. The diagnostic criteria do not exist as objective standards, they exist as subjective standards in relation to the patient and their goals and needs. Trump needs to be suffering in order to get a diagnosis. You have to prove he’s suffering. And he’s not, he’s not suffering, he’s not impaired, he’s not disabled, he’s not neurodivergent, he’s just an asshole.

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      Okay cool, so anyone bipolar insisting there’s nothing wrong with them because they’re riding a manic episode all the way to the shitting stars must not be suffering in any way. Observing their behavior and going “hey I think that guy’s having a manic episode” is an abuse, actually, because how could anyone - in that moment! - prove it would be better for them personally?

      I say this with two bipolar musicians in mind: Kanye West and Rob Scallon. Rob’s a decent guy who went through some weird shit. He eventually accepted that everyone around him identified the shit he was going through. He’s on better drugs now and hopes it won’t be an issue. Kanye is a complete fucking asshole, in ways obviously made massively worse by the negative traits associated with his painfully visible personality disorder. He chased off everyone who’s tried to help him. He will probably never seek medication again. Would his various financial and relationship troubles count as “suffering” in spite of that? Because The Idiot’s committed a shitload of crimes associated with the egotistical and transactional nature of clinical narcissism. Ask his third wife if he had emotional problems, and if her hair ever grew back where he ripped it out.

      Being an asshole and having brain problems are not mutually exclusive. Either can make the other a lot worse… for everyone.

      • MindTraveller
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        4 months ago

        Because The Idiot’s committed a shitload of crimes

        Crimes are not suffering.

        Ask his third wife if he had emotional problems, and if her hair ever grew back where he ripped it out.

        Spousal abuse is not suffering.

        Seems like you don’t have any evidence that Trump is sick. And I mean sick in the actual medical and scientific way, not in the colloquial “sickness = badness” way that you seem to mean it. This is probably why Dr Allen Frances, the guy who literally wrote the DSM 3’s entry on NPD, says Trump doesn’t have it.

          • MindTraveller
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            4 months ago

            I didn’t want to quote the second half of that sentence because it was too gross.

            • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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              4 months ago

              … it’s what you fucking asked for. You wanted examples. That’s what they’d look like: the direct results of how a personality disorder negatively affects someone’s decision-making. In this particular case, The Idiot’s bottomless egocentrism, mixed with a life of consequence-free privilege, produced a lifelong spree of banks that won’t touch him, organizations he’s legally barred from running, and former lawyers / spouses / co-conspirators loudly warning the world that he’s shallow, self-obsessed, emotionally fragile, vengeful, and incapable of modeling people as unlike himself, to such a degree that he would be in prison forever if he was not effectively above the law.

              Do you think it’s fundamentally impossible for someone to have a personality disorder, if they’re rich enough to escape consequences?

              • MindTraveller
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                4 months ago

                Do you think it’s fundamentally impossible for someone to have a personality disorder, if they’re rich enough to escape consequences?

                Not fundamentally, but practically often yes. Neurodivergence is, after all, socially constructed. Social disabilities exist in relation to a social context. If society adequately accommodates a person such that their differences do not cause problems, then they’re not disabled. Now, describing being rich as “adequate accommodation” is perhaps an inappropriate use of language, but in a literal sense that’s the case. Trump’s money, fame, and whiteness erase his cognitive differences. Trump isn’t neurodivergent, because his mind is not different to what society expects of powerful white men. He is thinking exactly the way society expects him to. This is a very severe difference to the daily experiences of a poor, underprivileged person with NPD who actually suffers and who would personally benefit from therapy. Trump wouldn’t benefit, he’s already “on top of the world”, as it were. That’s why diagnosis has no point with him.

                • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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                  4 months ago

                  Not fundamentally, but practically often yes.

                  Then I don’t care what you mean when you bicker about these words.

                  You can’t freely bounce between hyperfixation on internal state (like whether a bipolar person after a visible manic episode might want to kill themselves during the predictable depressive slump) and how cushy life is toward people having these brain problems.

                  He is thinking exactly the way society expects him to.

                  He’s a career criminal who recently survived an assassination attempt presumably related to his failed coup d’etat.

                  And he has visible brain problems. He’s a moron and an asshole in very specific and predictable ways, for which we have labels. Some of them are clinically relevant - some of them are just clear shorthand for common problems.

                  ‘We expect rich people to act like they have a personality disorder’ is not the tut you think it is.