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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]
Removing criticism of transphobia because “the evil hexbears” is fucking wild.
Placing anticommunism above transphobia on your priorities list guarantees a slide into fascism. Once you start covering up and defending bigotry as long as the bigots are anticommunists you give the perfect cover for fascists to fuck around in your space. By the time a server owner realises that they’ve made everyone non-fascist leave (or conform to the culture they create thus becoming part of them) they end up just accepting it because doing anything about it would mean killing the entire community population. Because the narcissistic power of being community owner comes first.
they’re prioritizing anti-leftism over transphobia on an instance literally named after a transgender shark lmfao
I agree with you and you’re being really correct, but narcissistic is a slur. The origin of the word comes from the disability Narcissistic Personality Disorder. You’re obvious talking about neurotypical behaviour, so could you use a different word?
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?
As someone who used to have a personality disorder, I have a really hard time buying that they are akin to either neurodivergence or disability.
Like, personality disorders are generally defined as a set of maladaptive behaviors and symptoms that are in no way essential to a who a person is, but can be incredibly damaging to both the person and the people around them.
In my opinion, having words that precisely describe the disordered nature of these behaviors is necessary for both the person with the behaviors and the people they may have victimized. I’m highly skeptical of medicalization and strict diagnostic categories and whatnot, but words like narcissism have a tremendous amount of utility both for people raised by abusive parents trying to understand their behavior, as well as people who may exhibit these behaviors and need to realize they’re toxic and should be worked on (I was both).
It’s not the same as having different abilities or focus levels or whatever, the toxic behaviors should not in any way be tolerated. And they very much can be relearned given the right resources and a willingness to do so.
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.
To avoid getting into a semantic debate, the essence of what I’m saying is there is systemic, oppressive otherization experienced by people who are neurodivergent or differently abled. Then there are people who (because of childhood trauma or for whatever reason) develop maladaptive behaviors and cognitive distortions that affect their ability to have healthy interpersonal relationships. The usage of certain words to describe the former can be problematic when the words serve to reassert systemic otherization or dehumanization. Whereas in my opinion words that describe toxic interpersonal behaviors aren’t doing so. Thus narcissist isn’t a slur and we don’t need to be careful to tolerate “different” (read:toxic) behaviors like we should tolerate different capabilities and inherent, unchangeable characteristics that define people.
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?
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.
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
My contest is with the idea that the medicalized category and its label takes supremacy over any behavior that uses the same label, especially when the specific behavior in question is defined by its problematic nature.
In crystalizing this issue, I can maybe agree calling someone a narcissist isn’t ideal because it reasserts the existence and immutability of the category (which I and others believe is institutionally/socially constructed, not real in and of itself). But even so, the behaviors that define the word are not something I think should be tolerated or accepted, both due to their harmful nature and their ability to be relearned.
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?
I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. After years of therapy and multifaceted self-work, I no longer exhibit enough symptoms/behaviors to meet the DSM criteria. I know one person irl and multiple people online with somewhat similar experiences.
I’m agnostic about the label for various reasons, I don’t care that much if someone describes me as a borderline person with coping mechanisms or a “cured” borderline person or doesn’t mention it all. There’s things I still have to work on, things that still are harder for me than they might be for other people. But I’ve gotten to the point where it doesn’t define me or my interpersonal relationships very much. So I tend to say “used to” because it more accurately conveys my experience with it.
Ultimately I’m skeptical that the categories actually exist in nature. I’m more inclined to believe there’s a wide array of behaviors that may be maladaptive, that the DSM categorizes largely for insurance purposes. There’s certainly utility in using the words to group maladaptive behaviors that commonly go together, so that people experiencing them can find help and so that treatments can be explored. It’s useful to put a name to an experience. Like, being able to search “borderline” and come up with communities of people, descriptions of patterns and distortions I wasn’t aware of, theoretical treatments, etc-- that was useful. But identifying permanently as a borderline person-- unchangeable, always gonna be this way, this is who I am– seemed like a self-fulfilling prophesy. Also ignores neuroplasticity and cognitive therapy and narrative therapy etc.
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”.
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:
Which then would no longer be categorized as BPD
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.
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.
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).
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.
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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
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.
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Wouldn’t choosing to maintain the fake sense of status that running an online community creates instead of deleting it because of the harm it does or will do definitionally narcissistic? Or is there a requirement here for such actions to be a lifelong pattern?
i would just change it to self-centered. this is an online topic that’s not worth the argument and also narcissism unfortunately does have lightly ableist connotations now since the word has now been medicalized
i think calling people narcissists is kind of a
ism in general and should be abandoned entirely for that reason when as you said ‘self-centred’ accomplishes the same aims.
Narcissists are only 1% of the population, yet we see this behaviour from anyone who owns a large platform. Unless you want to present the thesis that people with NPD are privileged because we own all the social media sites, we must conclude that this pattern of behaviour is common to neurotypicals as well.
narcissism doesn’t have to be disruptive enough of a persons’ life to be a disorder diagnosis. Should we start calling anxious feelings something else because some people have severe anxiety that we label a disorder? petty narcissism isn’t the same as NPD and this is the first time i’ve seen someone try to equate the two.
I’m not really against moving off the word I just feel a bit odd about it. Like you point out.
I think with anxiety there’s a small difference in that it’s never used perjoratively. Whereas narcissism is. But I agree with you that if anxiety can be used descriptively for a type of behaviour without meeting the standards for it being a disorder narcisisstic behaviour can be the same thing without meeting the standard.
In the same way anxiety could also be replace with “uncomfortable” or “scared” but this would not be as strong in tone, not really describing the seriousness of the emotion. In this same way narcissism shares that.
Again though, not really a hill I’d die on or anything. It is certainly overused for even incredibly minor things at times.
Well, slowness doesn’t have to be severe enough to be considered intellectual disability, but the R word is still a slur. And tan skin doesn’t have to be dark enough to cause racial prejudice, but the N word is still a slur. It seems that from our pre-existing examples, the answer is that if people are going to use “narcissist” as a pejorative it’s a slur
Again how is anxious not a slur or at least appropriative in your definition, seeing that it follows a very similar pattern of standard use followed by use in medical settings
Because it doesn’t have a pattern of pejorative use. A slur is created when a word is consistently used to express hatred. Hatred of anxiety sufferrers is much less than that of narcissists. It’s largely confined to jokes about people being “triggered”. Whereas people wish death on narcissists with regularity.
By analogy, there is a reason that megalomaniac are more likely to be corporate ghouls or sociopaths are more likely to be cops, there is an element of self-selection.
Nah I think it’s moreso the use of the word, but I’ve only ever known of it by that term; I’m not sure what other label would exist for it.
Well the word for self-interested behaviour is “selfish”
or egocentric
Egocentrism is something else. You’re probably thinking of egotistical.
Egocentrists don’t necessarily hold themselves in high regard, they just have a bias towards interpreting things as being about them. The most self-loathing person I know is highly egocentric.
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