Can we agree that Trump is clinically a narcissist?

[_EAllusion]

On an aside, I once asked in a class if we should consider women who continue to try to read in a society that bans female literacy under threat of criminal penalties as being dysfunctional. This was in response to the idea that continued drug use in the face of criminal penalty is by its nature evidence of a mental disorder due to the dysfunction it represents. My point was that isn't the problem with a person's functioning in society sometimes society rather than the person? Nonetheless, the answer from the professor was an unambiguous yes, in that society those women would be dysfunctional. Their behavior clearly is maladaptive to their circumstances. Stories of oppressive societies treating political opposition as a mental health problem begin to make a lot more sense. There's no model of what constitutes a "mental disorder" that doesn't have problems, but this never has sat well with me. I don't think it's controversial to think that understanding mental disorder in terms of personal distress and dysfunction in society is at least incomplete, but it still is dominant in our understanding of what a mental health issue is.

[_Some Schmo]

Can we agree that Trump is clinically a narcissist?

You'd think so, but apparently not.

We shouldn't diagnose someone we haven't examined personally, so I think we'll need to agree with the more pedestrian, "Yeah, that dude is screwed in the head" and leave the assessment at that. His public pronouncements have at least made that clear.

The only difference between him and an old fart ranting on a park bench is a few million ill-advised votes.

[_Res Ipsa]

The “insanity defense” varies from state to state. I had to do a survey of them years ago to prepare a brief. I don’t think NPD would qualify for any of them. Nor would it fit with the line of dimisished capacity cases. I can’t recall ever reading of an attempt to use NPD as a defense.

Generally, when mental incapacity is a defense, the consequence is commitment to an institution until the condition is improved to the point that the person can be safely returned to society. From what I understand about folks with NPD, that would be a life sentence for most. To me, that argues for not allowing NPD as a defense. Similarly, the fact that a person with NPD can understand what the law requires and has the capacity to comply suggests to me that NPD should not be a defense.

in my opinion, the legal principles in this area lag far behind our understanding of psychology. They don’t interface well with the diagnostic categories used by mental health professionals.

It's been 20 years since I was required to study the insanity defense, but the upshot is I once studied the insanity defense in college coursework for a psych class. My impression has always been that the law is behind philosophy, not psychology. The law seems to come from a political process controlled by people with naïve views on moral responsibility and determinism. Of the used insanity defense standards I recall, The Model Penal Code Test is easily the best and the Durham Rule is the worst.

The Durham Rule is the only one I can think of where NPD could plausibly be argued as a basis for defense, and even then, probably not. I'd be surprised if it's ever actually been successfully used, but wealthy defendants get away with a lot, so you never know. The issue there is that all behavior is ultimately predetermined by psychological causes beyond a person's control. The extent to which psychology can or can't label dysfunctional behavior as part of a mental disorder speaks to the limits of psychological knowledge. If psychology were sufficiently advanced, all criminal acts could be described in terms of being a byproduct of "mental defect" because abnormal psych conventionally thinks of mental defects in terms of mental conditions that produce thoughts or behavior that cause personal distress or significantly interfere with a person's functioning in society. Criminal acts that have gone to trial by their nature do that. Whether or not there is a clinical diagnosis for any given psychological basis for dysfunctional behavior is just a matter of how fine-grained clinical psychology has gotten.

Good point. The law and psychology do seek the answers to different questions. I agree that the MPC has the best test of those used.