THE EGO HAS LANDED

In a world of social media and selfies, it can be tempting to diagnose everyone with narcissistic traits. Helen Coffey asks experts about the reality of narcissism in its different forms

- Helen Coffey

“I inherited the narcissism from my father,” Miley Cyrus said in a recent interview. The singer was telling David Letterman about her childhood during an episode of the Netflix interview series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, describing how she and her five siblings had moved from Tennessee to Los Angeles to facilitate her career in show business. Siblings the Hannah Montana star didn’t “know anything about” or even think about at the time, she said. “I was moving to LA, and that’s all I really knew,” she added.

Her admission prompted much speculation: is narcissism really something you can inherit genetically, like being able to roll your tongue or having red hair? And is it even possible for someone to be a narcissist if they’re self-aware enough to start considering that they may be one in the first place?

The word “narcissist” is bandied about with increasing regularity these days, casually levelled at an entire generation of selfie-taking social media addicts as well as being the topic of innumerable TikTok videos telling you the signs to watch out for. But beware of making sweeping armchair diagnoses. The first thing to remember is that narcissism is a spectrum. There’s a difference between someone who is narcissistic or displays some narcissistic traits, and someone who has narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD, a mental health condition recognised by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

Helen Villiers is a psychotherapist and, along with Katie McKenna, co-author of the recent bestseller You’re Not the Problem: The Impact of Narcissism and Emotional Abuse and How to Heal. She highlights five main traits she would expect to see in individuals with NPD. “They are: grandiosity, entitlement, exploitation, impaired or motivational empathy and impaired self-awareness.”