Young people 'feel they have nothing to live for'

[Simon_Jester]

Like depression and attention deficits, narcisissm and psychopathy force us to ask: what's the difference between a mental illness and a personality trait? Is there a difference between "is depressed" and "is a very gloomy person?" Or between "is so narcissistic and self-centered that it's a mental disorder" and "is very very self-centered and narcissistic?"

[Ahriman238]

Isn't the threshold usually 'causes significant impairment in day-to-day living?'

[Simon_Jester]

That's reasonable

But then we look at all the people out there who are obviously making poor life choices "because they're irresponsible." Or who are pushing people away "because they're a jackass." Or because they're arrogant, overconfident, obnoxious, weird, foulmouthed, partiers, silly, moody, et cetera.

So we still end up blurring the line a bit. I look at someone who manages their depression effectively enough to hold down a job and stay alive. I compare them to someone who's just, well, gloomy and thinks their prospects suck. How do I tell them apart in the fringe cases? How do I distinguish between 'my boss is an asshole' and 'my boss is a moderately functional psychopath?' It's not simple, and that makes it very natural to try and 'diagnose' people whose behavior is pathological, even if those people seem functional.

[JME2]

How do I distinguish between 'my boss is an asshole' and 'my boss is a moderately functional psychopath?' It's not simple, and that makes it very natural to try and 'diagnose' people whose behavior is pathological, even if those people seem functional.

And, as I noted on the last page, if you're too close to the situation, it's difficult to arrive at an objective conclusion.

In the case of my part-timer employer, he's certainly egocentric and narcissistic. There's no denial there.

But full-on sociopath? I don't know. I don't know what goes on in his head.

[Napoleon the Clown]

I'd like to note that the term psychopath isn't in psychiatric journals because it covers a broad spectrum of personality disorders and because it's a really fuzzy thing.

As to the divide between being a self-absorbed dick and having narcissistic personality disorder, it depends more than just if the person is a self-absorbed dick. The dick doesn't check off sufficient symptoms. How the symptoms were arrived upon is a good question, naturally. There's a reason it takes years to get a degree that allows you to diagnose mental disorders, much less write medication for them. And even with all the training and schooling involved, it's still pretty fuzzy. The harder sciences aren't completely unjustified in looking at psychiatry funny. Personality disorders do often come with marked differences in brain activity, but it's not terribly economical to scan every potential sufferer's brain. Prior to the technology to look at brain structure or activity there was almost nothing we could do to look into what's going on in the brain of someone who's mentally ill.

tl;dr: There's basically a checklist (that varies by country) to determine if the person qualifies for a specific disorder, though even if the person doesn't have a disorder there's counseling or short-term medication treatment. Psychiatry has come a long way, but it's still damn hard to nail down when someone has something vs just a personality trait.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, I know- which is kind of my point. It's hard, and so I'm sympathetic to people who say "my boss/ex/mother is literally mentally ill" as opposed to merely saying "my boss/ex/mother is a jerk, a fool, gloomy, or whatever."

It's a very natural reaction when we see a person behaving in "insane" ways.