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UPDATE: The transphobe Ada has been defending says they misgender all trans women/NBs on Blahaj who are strangers - Blåhaj Lemmy
lemmy.blahaj.zoneFurther information on the situation with the transphobia: Abigail has
repeatedly misgendered me and defended her choice by saying she chooses to refer
to all people of unknown gender as male. > Hey, Abigail here. I just want people
to know the reason this person got banned is likely because of a deleted comment
not included in that thread. OP called me ~~autistic ~~ mentally unwell for not
liking politics. THAT kind of behavior is not acceptable on lemmy.blahaj.zone,
so I reported the comment and let Ada handle it. Ada tried in good faith to
reason with OP but it was clear they just wanted to fight. So yeah, they got
banned. Ada’s a fantastic lady who’s been great at keeping the trolls at bay. >
Edit: and the bit about me misgendering them is also wrong. Gender didn’t come
into play until after I had left the conversation. English default on the
internet is male for strangers. Source:
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2319669
[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2319669] WRT the statement that I accused
them of autism for not liking politics, further info is available here:
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2319669
[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2319669]
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2320815
[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2320815]
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2321026
[https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/2321026]
The origin of the word actually comes from the Greek myth, and vastly predates the disorder but I’m going to assume you’re just trolling.
Bad take, that’s fucking dumb and you know it, the common usage of the term relates to the disorder not the mythological character.
we ban calling people a sch*zo here, why shouldn’t we ban calling someone a narcissist?
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Personality disorders are divergences from normal patterns of thought and behaviour. In plenty of cases, they are caused by physical differences in the brain.
They are definitionally neurodivergance, and become disability when the resulting behaviours impact an individual’s ability to function normally in society.
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Well, you said that the word narcissist is useful because it helps people identify abusive parents. Which would imply you think there’s some connection between being an abuser and having NPD. So the fact that you think a mental disorder is responsible for abuse is an example of that systemic, oppressive otherization that we narcissists experience. I was told by a former friend that I don’t deserve to live, because narcissists don’t have a shred of humanity. Is that not oppressive otherisation to you?
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I agree that it’s not desirable to conflate the two in common usage, but I don’t really see how that can be done while continuing to use those specific terms.
What constitutes toxic behaviour is culturally subjective. Many people in the first group would have been considered a part of the second not so long ago.
In this case narcissist is being used as a general insult for someone where we have no indication whether she’s a narcissist or not.
we don’t ban the word because it could have general use for someone who’s actually a narcissist in the same way we don’t ban the word schizophrenic except when it’s used as an insult
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I find the claim that you used to have a personality disorder dubious, unless you’re saying it like Mitch Hedburg said he used to do drugs. Personality disorders are incurable and lifelong. Symptoms are often mitigated with therapy and age, but those are the result of learning to live with a disability, not curing it.
Could you say what personality disorder you used to have?
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Here are the top 4 google results for “Can BPD be cured?”:
bridgestorecovery.com/borderline-personality-disorder/can-bpd-be-cured/#:~:text=Borderline personality disorder (BPD) cannot,in intensity%2C or entirely eliminated.
https://www.verywellmind.com/is-there-a-cure-for-borderline-personality-disorder-425468
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4500179/
https://embarkbh.com/blog/borderline-personality-disorder/ask-a-therapist-can-bpd-be-cured/
Look at it this way: Imagine your leg was amputated and you had to get a prosthetic. With time, and physical therapy, and a leg that matches your needs, you’ll eventually be able to walk, run, and jump again. But you’ll always rely on the prosthetic leg, and there are some things you’ll never be able to do. You might have a leg that’s better for soccer and a leg that’s better for sprinting, and you’ll need to switch legs to keep up with two-legged athletes. And you might end up surpassing two-legged athletes at some things. It’s still a disability, you’re still disabled, but it’s effectively treated. My NPD and your BPD are like that missing leg. We have tools to solve our problems, and we can get really good at using them, but the fact we still need them means we’re still disabled. And at the end of the day, no amount of skill is going to help us if a fully abled person decides that today they hate “cripples”, or they hate “borderlines”, or they hate “narcs”.
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Now that we’ve exhausted the subject of “Is NPD curable”, let’s focus on your original claims You said you didn’t buy that personality disorders are neurodivergence, because they’re curable. The two most commonly discussed neurodivergences are ADHD and ASD. Can ADHD and ASD people learn coping mechanisms the same as personality disorders that reduce the symptoms and make them harder to diagnose? Yes, 100%. I have seen testimony after testimony from autistic adults whose psychiatrists said it was hard to diagnose them because they learned masking. Narcissists and borderlines learn masking too, and that’s how we’re “cured”. So what’s the difference making NPD not neurodiverse to you?
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I find your faith in DSM categorizations misplaced. There are lots of places where the DSM fails to have any sort of mechanistic idea of what it labels a disorder (just a diagnostic one) and thereby no real ability to say whether it is curable or not.
don’t do this comrade.
Narcissus is a Greek name. Narcissistic is an english word. The ancient greeks did not call anything narcissistic, because the word didn’t exist.
The N word comes from Spanish but people who use it aren’t speaking spanish, are they?
The English word “narcissistic” existed long before the diagnosis, just like “Sisyphean” exists without an attached disorder (ODD in another timeliness, maybe).
I find your claim dubious, but in any case, the N word existed in english before it became a slur too. But centuries of racial abuse made it into a slur
Why do you think the N word existed in English as anything but a slur? Narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder are not equal. I’m open to changing terminology if it’s doing harm, but I think this one needs to be that the term for NPD should likely change. From what I know (and correct me if I’m wrong please), the common usage of “narcissism” has very little to do with NPD, which was coined later and seems almost derogatory in itself (in effect, grouping those with NPD along with the type of asshole commonly called narcissists)
Edit: I have been convinced that this story I was told was wrong about NPD. There doesn’t seem to be a usage of narcissism outside of attempted psychological prescription before 1900 in english, and only first in 1899 in German which caused its use in English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*removed*#Etymology_and_history
This says first use in english was 1574, first derogatory use was 1775
The separation of ‘derogatory’ and ‘patronizing’ as your link shows is not a difference in it being a slur or not, but a difference in social understanding of the word. It was always a slur
edit: I say this not as a disagreement about the term narcissism, but that it’s comparison to the N word seems unfounded to me and not related, maybe even downplaying the relative harm of the N word.
That’s an interesting thing. Most people are biased to think that everyone else sees things the same way they do. If Adam says pears are just as tasty as apples, and Bob thinks pears taste like shit, then Bob will jumpt to the conclusion that Adam thinks apples taste bad. Because Bob is incapable of imagining that Adam disagrees with Bob on the taste of pears. Whichever is the more deeply held belief is the one projected onto the one drawing the equation. If I say the N word and the other N word have a single thing in common, then I must be making light of racism, because people believe I must agree with their disdain for narcissists more strongly than they believe I must agree with their progressive views on race. Perhaps because they hold the disdain for narcissists more closely.
I actually do think the racial N word is a whole world more offensive and more serious than the other N word. I was just drawing a single point of similarity: They both have an older, non-bigoted root in another language. And I was just using that single point of similarity to attack a bigot’s argument. But it’s interesting how most people will turn a single point of similarity into a sweeping statement.
Marxism as a framework already answers many of these questions sufficiently for me by taking the social whole always into account as relativity van ABSOLUTE relativity. That’s why I describe it as harm, not as some inherent good or bad outside of the social structure of its use. And I think it’s relatively much more harmful to black people to be called the N word than to those with NPD being called the other n word (considering the ways that oppression occurs to such groups being actuele different). That is not an excuse to use the word tho
The common use of narcissism in the vernacular originates with Christopher Lasch’s book The Culture Of Narcissism, which put forward the thesis that NPD was becoming more normalised in contemporary america. That book inspired self help guru hacks to sell books which told people that all their problems are caused by people with NPD holding them back and abusing them. People love being told that all their problems are caused by a vulnerable minority that seeks to destroy them, that’s how Hitler got into power. So anyway, these books inspired the idea that everyone’s abusive parents and bosses and partners are narcissists, and once that happened, more and more people started drawing on this growing linguistic awareness of the word narcissist, generally falling into one of two camps: Either they hate people with NPD and think we’re all abusive, or they don’t know the history of the word and just repeat it without thinking. And those two groups sound identical when they throw the word about as an insult. When I call out use of the slur, I never know which of the two groups I’m about to have an argument with. Sometimes it’s both.
I’m taking you in good faith here, despite being warned that you’re a possible “wrecker”. I have been convinced that my post (where I tried to make clear that I could easily be wrong) was incorrect about the origins in english.
I think what we’re really getting at here is a difference between some of what constitutes a psychology which is deserving of protection from incorrect associations with acute attributes found in broader populations. The R word clearly describes something which cannot be described as “traits everyone has but this person has more of it” but is instead taking a broad and incorrect category and using it to demean both the target and those who are neuro-atypical. With Narcissism, it seems that those in favor of using the word broadly are really then taking a stand that NPD exists as just an extreme of the scale of narcissism and is, therefore, to be less protected. I am unconvinced of this argument, or at least not convinced that, even if it were true, the word “narcissism” is really necessary outside of medical contexts. I think this is unpopular on hexbear based on the posts I’ve seen, but I’m fine with stopping using the word outside of describing possible the specific psychology.
I think an interesting thing to consider though, which doesn’t discount this argument, is the social situation which leads to the commonly used terms. Anxiety was a term used broadly to describe a spectrum of anxious traits in the middle of the last century and was for the first time made primarily psychological instead of sociological. The same can be said of despression in recent years. I think that narcissism as a psychological disorder likely also has a base in liberal capitalism which has only gotten more acute, and it may be less widespread and blamed on failures of society once we move on from this terrible ideological base
Your point about anxiety reminded me of the term “hysteria”. It comes from the Greek word for uterus, because old timey psychologists were deeply misogynist. Despite a lot of non-sexist use during the years in which I grew up, it’s now said very rarely, and I think the sexism is a component. It’s gone the way I wish “narcissism” would go.
Speaking of origins, I’m reminded of the fact that Narcissus, the original narcissist, died because he was a narcissist. He couldn’t drink a sip of water right in front of his face because he was so obsessed with his self-image. When your brain works so badly that you die, I call that a mental disability. Maybe all the people saying it’s not a disability because it comes from Greek should learn more Greek.
This is a simple version of the “if it affects your life” argument for defining disorders, and I think all would agree that someone so narcissistic that it would kill them have a situation which must be treated much more seriously than someone who is just self-centered in a way that makes them a successful asshole (I would place many successful businesspeople in this category). These are of course fluid, and I think describing them as self-centered and lacking empathy is fine enough to avoid utilizing a word I’ve been convinced is unnecessary and possibly ableist
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An English word that existed long before anyone was ever diagnosed with NPD. I’m very sorry for your diagnosis but trying to make an entire existing word unusable for everyone else is kinda the definition of narcissistic also.
X to doubt on your claim there, but why does that matter? The N word and the R word existed before they were slurs too. Are you going to apply the same logic there or do you have a unique hatred for pwNPD?
You doubt that a word meaning “like Narcissus” was used to describe behaviour similar to the popular thousands of years old mythological figure, before modern psychological science used it to describe a personality disorder?
Yes. I’m also going to doubt that anybody in this thread was speaking Greek when they used the word narcissist, given that all these comments are in english.
English mugs other languages and their associated grammatical rules all the time, especially Greek and Latin, and especially especially words related to mythological figures, like Herculean, Titanic or indeed, Narcissistic.
English isn’t a person, it’s a language. The root word narcissism was pulled into english by people. Those people were late 19th century psychologists.
And since it has become a part of general usage English
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