Humans 101
Sympathy for the Narcissist
Can we stop maligning people with a highly stigmatized mental illness?
I’ve been fighting with people about narcissism since the day Trump declared his candidacy. So many left-leaning people seem to relish mental illness as an explanation for his actions. Calling Trump a narcissist seems to satisfy a deep need many people have to understand him as an aberration, an evil defect taking advantage of a system that otherwise works and is fair: If he’s a narcissist, then he’s almost inhuman. Absolutely evil. And all we have to do is get rid of evil people like him, and then we can return to normal.
Of course, the “normal” way of doing things was never any good. Normal American life created Donald Trump. The normal American outlook preaches that there are people who are good and people who are bad, and we can discriminate against the bad ones with a clean conscience. Trump and his allies believe things like that. Our threadbare social welfare system is predicated on that belief. It’s a very reactionary, conservative perspective, yet many liberal people embrace it when the subject becomes “evil” people, narcissists, and Donald Trump.
You can’t actually diagnose a public figure with a mental illness from afar. There’s a reason the American Psychological Association…
