Narcissistic Personality Disorder

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is defined as grandiose feeling of self-importance about ones personality. The patient feels the need for constant admiration from other people and has a complete disregard for the feelings and lives of others. They believe that the world revolves around them and that their life and well-being should be prominent in everyone minds. Those diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are characterized as very condescending and snobbish. It is generally recognized as a personality trait and not necessarily behavioral.

Symptoms of Narcissistic Personality disorder are varied but generally revolve around the patient’s own fantasy that they are the most important personage in the world and should be treated as such. They are preoccupied with fantasies about extreme power over those they perceive as unimportant. They believe that they are beautiful, well-educate individuals and in most cases, actually fall short of their supposed identifiers. They believe that they are “special” and therefore should only associate with other alleged “special” individuals. They will address the “lower class” with utter disdain and believe it is those persons sole aim in life to please and fawn over their perceived image. They require excessive praise and admiration for any accomplishment, however great or large. When they don’t get it, they become rude, dismissive and can burst into uncontrollable rage. They believe that they are entitled to the “finer things of life” and consequently will spend large amounts of money and time to ensure that they are consistently presenting a “perfect” image to the outside world. A person diagnosed with NPD will exploit the others around them to the point of alienating people from their lives. They are totally unsympathetic to the needs and desires of others. The thought that someone else may need attention almost never crosses his or her minds. Generally, the person will simply ignore the needy individual or remove that person from their lives. They believe that everyone is envious or desiring of their supposed status and therefore, must worship them. There behavior is almost consistently haughty, rude and arrogant.

When diagnosing a person suspected of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the patient must be at least 18 years old in order to allow for growth of their personality. You cannot diagnose an adolescent with NPD because they have not fully developed their personality yet. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is generally more prevalent in males than females and surprisingly this mental disorder is believed by experts to only occur in less than one percent of the general population. Age plays a big part in NPD. Those patients in there 20s and 30s are most likely to experience the most extreme of NPD symptoms while those patients entering their 40s typically see a decline in their symptoms. Typically a person suspected of having Narcissistic