‘You are constantly told you are evil’: inside the lives of diagnosed narcissists
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There are times when Jay Spring believes he is “the greatest person on planet Earth”. The 22-year-old from Los Angeles is a diagnosed narcissist, and in his most grandiose moments, “it can get really delusional”, he says. “You are on cloud nine and you’re like, ‘Everyone’s going to know that I’m better than them … I’ll do great things for the world’.”
For Spring, these periods of self-aggrandisement are generally followed by a “crash”, when he feels emotional and embarrassed by his behaviour, and is particularly vulnerable to criticism from others. He came to suspect that he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) after researching his symptoms online – and was eventually diagnosed by a professional. But he doesn’t think he would have accepted the diagnosis had he not already come to the conclusion on his own. “If you try to tell somebody that they have this disorder, they’ll probably deny it,” he says – especially if they experience feelings of superiority, as he does. “They’re in a delusional world that they made for themselves. And that world is like, I’m the greatest and nobody can question me.”
Though people have been labelled as narcissists for more than a century, it’s not always clear what is meant by the term. “Everyone calls everybody a narcissist,” says W Keith Campbell, psychology professor at the University of Georgia and a narcissism expert. The word is “used more than it should be” – but when it comes to a formal diagnosis, he believes many people hide it, as there is so much stigma around the disorder. A narcissist will tend to have “an inflated view of oneself”, “a lack of empathy”, and “a strategy of using people to bolster one’s self-esteem or social status through things like seeking admiration, displaying material goods, seeking power,” says Campbell. Those with NPD may be “extremely narcissistic”, to the point that “they’re not able to hold down stable relationships, it damages their jobs”, and they have a “distorted view of reality”, he says.
Though up to 75% of people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder are men, research from the University of London published last year suggests this figure does not mean there are fewer narcissistic women, but that female narcissism is more often presented in the covert form (also defined as vulnerable narcissism), which is less commonly diagnosed. “Men’s narcissism tends to be a bit more accepted, just kind of like everything in society,” says Atlanta-based Kaelah Oberdorf, 23, who posts about her NPD and borderline personality disorder (BPD) diagnoses on TikTok. It is not uncommon to see the two disorders co-occur.
Read more https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/15/you-are-constantly-told-you-are-evil-inside-the-lives-of-diagnosed-narcissists
Content retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/15/you-are-constantly-told-you-are-evil-inside-the-lives-of-diagnosed-narcissists.
