| Hmm, I think it's dangerous territory to use disbelief or skepticism of personality disorders as a potential diagnostic criteria. There are a lot of incongruities in research surrounding them that psychology fails to address and warrants skepticism. For example, more recent longitudinal studies on personality disorders like Borderline Personality Disorder (BDP) pretty consistently show that 80 - 90% of people once diagnosed with the disorder no longer meet the diagnostic criteria after a decade. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst... I find this interesting, because Abnormal Psychology usually teaches that personality is resistant to change, and thus personality disorders rarely show improvement. Moreover, studies like this one https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%252Fs11920-014-044... indicate that Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is actually pretty controversial among psychologists, with a wide variation in how it is measured and diagnosed. They note a lack of longitudinal studies as well -- perhaps NPD shows a similar phenomena as BPD where 9/10 no longer meet the diagnostic criteria several year later (despite showing other social defecits). Am I a narcissist for challenging psychologists to provide better scientific evidence for the disorder? Hopefully not! Yet I still view the construct of personality disorders with skepticism. |