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Can You Blame a Narcissist for Being Narcissistic?
Is it their fault if it’s a mental illness?
Since 1949, May has been known as Mental Health Awareness Month — raising awareness to a topic that we should be aware of all year round. It is a great opportunity to bring up issues, to open up about our vulnerabilities, to become more tolerant and educated about mental illness in general.
We must take mental health just as seriously as physical health. We need to understand it more, we need to accept it more, we need to come to terms that mental issues are not just a “phase”. One of the most hated suggestions from bystanders, when it comes to certain mental health issues is to snap out of it, to stop overreacting it, to handle it. If you compare mental illness to any other illness or physical condition, it becomes clear how offensive it is to tell someone suffering from clinical depression to snap out of it — just as you don’t snap out of cancer, high blood pressure or a heart condition by willpower, depression, anxiety, personality disorders are equally impossible to just ignore or shift the focus from.
I have written extensively about narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder, and while I am no mental health expert, I had the first-hand experience with a clinically diagnosed narcissist — manifesting in the misfortune of…
