“I THINK MY boss is a narcissist.” “Your mom sounds like a narcissist.” “Oh, my ex-boyfriend was so abusive, a total narcissist.” You’ve heard these extremely common sentiments out in the real world.
More than half a million videos on TikTok are tagged with #NarcTok, indicating that they are about narcissism and narcissists. Videos with titles like “things my husband did that I thought was normal” and “10 signs you’re in a relationship with a narcissist,” or delving into narcissistic parents and friends, are posted largely by alleged survivors of narcissistic relationships.
Unsurprisingly, some particularly popular videos are from people that are diagnosed (or identify as) narcissists while others are actually from professionals within the psychology field—but the majority of the content is from completely uncredentialed TikTokers. They’re merely content creators, and yet within a couple of videos it’s easy to feel informed and send you into a spiral about the people in your life, maybe even yourself.
How likely is it, though, that the person you’re armchair-diagnosing is actually a card-carrying narcissist? Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is thought to affect up to 5% of the population and is 50 to 75% more common in males than females.
“When we talk about narcissism, we’re not always talking about Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Unfortunately, all we have are numbers on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, because this tends to be done in clinical research settings,” explains Dr. Ramani Durvasula, a clinical psychologist and author of the book It’s Not You: Identifying and Healing from Narcissistic People. “If we’re talking about enough narcissism in a person’s personality to cause relationship problems or for other people to notice, that number is probably closer to 10%.”
The Dangers of Armchair Psychology on TikTok
Oftentimes on social media platforms, popularity and engagement are conflated with expertise or insight. And that can lead to a whole lot of misinformation being circulated with a veneer of authority. “There’s an arrogance of TikTok that everyone’s an expert in anything just because they read two sentences about it,” Dr. Ramani said. “I baked one cake, and that makes me a pastry chef.”
She prefers to think of TikTok specifically as entertainment. “I’m not going to go watch Saturday Night Live to figure out how to manage my back injury,” she laments.
It’s Not You: How to Identify and Heal from NARCISSISTIC People
Mental health professionals like psychiatrists and clinical psychologists possess the education, background and proper credentials to diagnose NPD, and even then, it takes hours of assessments to determine if someone actually meets the diagnostic criteria. Similarly, when working with clients who are speaking of others, Dr. Ramani says it takes much more than a singular session to bring narcissism into the conversation, and substantially more than a viral TikTok clip. “It’s more like, ‘I’m seeing some patterns here, a lack of empathy.’ It takes a minute for me to figure this out. I sit with them for weeks, and little by little, the picture emerges.”
Although it also has its own negative contributions to people’s mental health, the existence of social media and widespread access to information has had some positive effects on the destigmatization of mental health and an uptick of awareness of the dangers of narcissism within relationships.
At minimum, the increased conversation allows people to acknowledge unhealthy, abusive or even dangerous aspects of their own relationship. “Once upon a time, people would have that stuff happening in the relationship and would write it off as ‘relationships are work’ or ‘this is just how things are,” Dr. Ramani said.
But on TikTok, where the algorithm incentivizes creators to post videos that users will watch to the end, the pursuit of going viral can easily undermine any sort of value these accounts may be offering.
“There are people out there who are really suffering in narcissistic relationships,” Dr. Ramani said. “As more and more people are given misinformation or use the word incorrectly, it ends up minimizing and trivializing the experience of people who are in these relationships.” In other words: if everyone’s ex is a narcissist, were any of them really a narcissist? This dilutes the gravity of the personality type. “A layperson can’t diagnose schizophrenia, a lay person can’t diagnose cancer, and this is no different than that,” adds Ramani.
Due to the characteristics and common behaviors of a narcissistic, most will never see the inside of a therapist’s office. And statistics can’t really tell the whole story, so flippantly calling everyone a narcissistic risks rendering the word entirely meaningless.
Debunking #NarcTok
“Narcissism is a personality style that’s characterized by a person with low or variable empathy, entitlement, grandiosity, brigance, pathological selfishness and excessive need for praise and validation and admiration, a real sort of sense of superficiality, very surface level way of focusing on appearances and even a superficial approach to things like relationships,” Dr Ramani said.
They tend to envy other people and in turn assume everyone is envious of them. A major key, she says, that the narcissistic person likely isn’t aware of and that others won’t typically pick up on without spending a lot of time with them, is that all of these unsavory traits mask a deeply insecure person, enabling them to avoid the discomfort of looking within and facing those feelings about themselves.
“These traits are also associated with a lot of very unhealthy behaviors in these relationships, like manipulation, gaslighting, invalidation, minimization, contempt, trivializing other people’s issues, betrayal, lying, domination, anger, rage, passive aggression, withdrawing and withholding when they don’t get their way, what we call future faking or making promises and then breaking them in the name of manipulation to keep someone around, and shifting blame onto other people and not taking responsibility,” she said. The motivations behind this conduct are primarily power, domination and control.
It’s easy to spend time around someone and deduce that they’re entitled and perhaps even a very jealous person by their patterns of behavior, but these are just pieces to an incomplete puzzle. “If I came to your house and I gave you six eggs, what would you think I gave you? Would you think I gave you a cake? No, but you couldn’t have a cake without the eggs.” The eggs alone do not make a cake.
It’s OK to just call someone self-centered, entitled, or say that they think very highly of themselves, without it expressly being narcissism. Cherry-picking and pathologizing these traits doesn’t dispel the stigma around mental health issues, and it frequently leads to misuse and miseducation. For example, the idea that a little narcissism is healthy is plainly an incorrect application of it.
“I think that what happens is people pull out a strand, like, ‘It’s okay to have a little healthy narcissism and sometimes be a little selfish.’ Being a little selfish is just being a little selfish, and that’s okay. “ she says.
When they say “healthy narcissism,” it’s nothing more than an attempt to be provocative. They’re referring to someone with a healthy ego. “[They] can set boundaries, sometimes even when it’s uncomfortable, but still be aware of the other person. It might occasionally include making a decision that is more self-serving but also being aware of the consequences and ramifications.”
Finally, a lot of social media advice for those with navigating relationships with narcissists lacks nuance. “It’s people saying the only way to heal from a narcissistic relationship is by going no contact, which is a lie. That leads people to panic,” she says. Not everyone can just get (or afford) a divorce or wants to stop speaking to a parent, family member or friend. “That’s the thing I probably run into the most: ‘Well, I’m hearing that the only way to heal is if I break up from this relationship or get a divorce.’ And, it’s patently untrue.”
Therapy isn’t about diagnosing others, it’s for you. Dr. Ramani helps clients understand what’s happened to them and why they felt crazy, validates their experience, and gets them to a place where they feel more emotionally stable again. Then, they work on education so the patient can make more informed decisions. #NarcTok isn’t intended for this. Frequently, the posts are used to end a conversation, rather than open one or offer reputable resources.
Dr. Ramani makes content for social outlets and has been for a few years now, but is aware that all mental health content from professionals and laypeople alike is in the same format and being delivered together. She says: “At best, TikTok is a dysfunctional door that, hopefully, will take you to wiser places.”
