I see your point here. The negative stigma associated with personality disorders isn’t great. And the way the disorders are viewed by some medical professionals, the way some medical professionals treat people they categorize as PD, probably qualifies as systemic otherization.

I’m gonna have to reflect on this.

Like, I know how certain institutions want to categorize and pathologize and medicalize things, I’ve spent years reading about it. But there’s a lot of good criticism of these institutions too, particularly against the DSM (is homosexuality a disorder?)

The whole idea that our behaviors exist as a specific disorder, like there’s an NPD gene or a BPD gene and we just “have” it, to me is much more harmful/offensive/stigmatizing than anything. Human consciousness and behavior is infinitely more complex and dynamic than that.

Part of the problem is the restrictive (and usually false) assumption that emotional/cognitive/behavioral pathology can be categorized and treated like medical disorders. Like, “I have appendicitis so I need an appendectomy” is supposedly equivalent to “I’m experiencing depression so I need an SSRI.”

But appendicitis or a missing limb or whatever is itself observable-- we can actually measure the cause. Mental, emotional, behavioral, personality disorders-- by and large, we can only observe the symptoms, then try to make educated guesses as to the categories and causes. Pharmaceutical/insurance based psychology seems unable to understand or explain many of these categories that they’ve constructed and thus write them off as incurable.

But even within the four sites you linked:

symptoms can be…entirely eliminated

Which then would no longer be categorized as BPD

no definitive cure

They haven’t discovered a wonder drug that passes double blind tests to 100% of the time “cure” BPD, which, of course not. It’s a behavioral disorder, not a bacterial infection. It has to be treated at the source.

…remain for longer periods… may not be fully addressed by current treatments.

Again a limitation of the empiricist fixation in US psychology. The replicability crisis is happening because a lot of things are hard to definitively prove using the methods commonly accepted for simpler medicine. Cognition and behaviors are too complex to easily model in a test with a control group.

can’t be cured and won’t go away, Gatlin says

Yeah this is a great example of the medicalization and stigma coming from overconfident generalists happy to make broad sweeping statements that are impossible to actually prove (and which anecdotal evidence suggests aren’t universally true).

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.

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

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.