ASPD Advice & Information

I made a post about how June 1st is going to be Narcissist Appreciation Day. At the behest of some other lovely cluster-Bs, we’re expanding this into Cluster-B Appreciation Week, spanning from June 1st to 7th! Each day, I’ll be rolling out some relevant posts, so get ready! For now, here’s the lineup:

June 1st - Narcissist Appreciation Day

This day is dedicated to supporting those with NPD and combatting stigma against them!

June 2nd - Antisocial Appreciation Day

This day is dedicated to supporting those with ASPD and combatting stigma against them!

June 3rd - Borderline Appreciation Day

This day is dedicated to supporting those with BPD and combatting stigma against them!

June 4th - Histrionic Appreciation Day

This day is dedicated to supporting those with HPD and combatting stigma against them!

June 5th - Cluster-B Comorbidity Day

Cluster-Bs have high rates of comorbidity, so this day is dedicated to discussing and destigmatising all the other disorders we experience!

June 6th - Cluster-B Support Day

This day is all about showing support and sharing resources for cluster-Bs, helping us to find acceptance and recovery in our community!

June 7th - Cluster-B Creators Day

Last but not least, this day is about the art cluster-Bs make and the art we appear in. Cluster-B creators will be promoted and cluster-B representation shared, canonical or otherwise.

This depends a lot on what traits each person has! 

From my interactions with others with ASPD and NPD traits, the most common overlapping symptoms are the lack of affective empathy, willingness toward morally gray things (i.e. conning or manipulation), and grandiosity. 

ASPD with NPD traits might commonly look like grandiose delusions, with grandiosity more focused around one’s view of self rather than the perception of others in relation to self. Having said that, with comorbid full NPD, I know in my own experience I care a lot more about what others perceive me as than antisocials without the disorder tend to. In other words, with full comorbid NPD it’s more likely for an antisocial to have a focus on the social aspect of narcissism, while with traits alone it tends to circle around the egocentrism aspect of narcissism. 

Granted, all of this is based on my own experience and the people I’ve known with the disorders, and my experience certainly has room for growth! This also doesn’t necessarily encompass every case---even if the majority function in a way like this, it’s still possible for other experiences to be in play and those experiences are just as valid. If any antisocials with traits or full NPD have any separate experiences, I’d be more than happy to hear it!

Before I start talking I want to make it clear this is the first I’m hearing about this and what I am saying here is going off of what I’m hearing in this specific message—nothing more and nothing less.

I think, personally, that for Cluster B to be refined into a single disorder, it would have to take a LOT of in depth and careful, unbiased thought with suggestions from people with Cluster B disorders themselves. I would NOT trust psychologists to not muddy up criteria and start to paint every Cluster B disorder as the same.

As someone with pretty strong traits of everything in Cluster B, while I know that while there’s a lot of overlap, there’s also a lot of symptoms that change depending on what comorbidities you do or don’t have, and I often have things like conflicting thought processes between different pds, even with the overlap! I also know my experience as someone matching those criteria is often different in many ways from the experiences of people with just ASPD, or just NPD, and I feel having them separate allows me to be able to explain that in a more clear and concise way. If you ask me, specifiers of “with [blank] emphasis” sound pretty ridiculous and honestly would just do better as separate diagnoses as there currently is.

I mean, at what point is “with antisocial emphasis” different from just saying “they have ASPD/ASPD traits”? And it seems like it’d prevent things like getting the full message across of the severity of each of their symptoms. Overall, it sounds more counterintuitive than not. In my mind, it’s easier for me to say “I have dx’d NPD and ASPD, with strong traits of possible BPD and HPD that we’re looking into” than it is for me to say “I have Cluster B Personality Disorder, with narcissistic and antisocial emphasis, but I also have histrionic or borderline emphasis but with a LITTLE LESS EMPHASIS”. Like, at that point, I’m just emphasizing the entire thing, and I can’t really make it clear in a quick and fast way which ones my doctor’s pretty positive on and which ones are more in a gray zone.

In addition, Cluster B disorders are grouped together in a category because of overlap, yes, but this doesn’t mean that they’re all able to be adequately represented under one umbrella dx! They remain separate right now for a reason, and it’s because there are some things that are seen in, say, ASPD that doesn’t come with, say, BPD, or vise versa! Saying ASPD and NPD are the same is like saying autism and ADHD are the same—sure there’s big commonalities between them and they’re comorbid often, but each still has its own particular symptoms that make it unique. The DSM-5 currently is pretty clear that if you fit criteria of more than one pd you’re very easily just able to be diagnosed with both, I don’t see why a dx LIKE Cluster B Personality Disorder would be necessary in the first place.

Tl;dr: I’m not particularly fond of the idea, it sounds kind of unnecessary, and it sounds like a fast, good way of confusing research and spreading more misinformation on these disorders all at once and in a package deal.

Of course! NPD is actually primarily definable by the delusions commonly associated with the disorder. These are commonly described in general as 'delusions of grandeur'' but there’s a lot more to them than that. 

In general, there are several different variants of delusions, including but not necessarily limited to: Erotomanic, grandiose, bizarre grandiose, jealous/infidelity, persecutory, referential, negation/nihilistic, and somatic. 

Within NPD, as far as I know, the most common types are erotomanic, (bizarre) grandiose, persecutory, and negation/nihilistic can also show up mixing with grandiose. I suspect somatic could also show up based on what I know about the disorder, but I don't see it commonly spoken about.

Specifics about what each type of delusion means under the cut!

Hey there, anon, thanks for the ask! Here are a few articles I could find!

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/hidden-suffering-psychopath - An article speaking of ASPD in a more sympathetic light

https://www.thecut.com/article/what-its-like-to-have-narcissistic-personality-disorder.html - An interview with someone with NPD on their experiences

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317225899_Therapist_Stigma_towards_Narcissistic_Personality_Disorder_Lessons_Learnt_from_Borderline_Personality_Disorder - A paper on stigma against narcissists

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/can_a_psychopath_learn_feel_pain - A bit of brain studies of sociopaths versus that of murderers, as well as information on cognitive versus affective empathy

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4495310/ - A research paper on stigma against personality disorders in the medical field

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/making-evil/201902/what-we-get-wrong-about-psychopaths - A paper about stigma against psychopaths (though, in this article they do express that psychopathy and ASPD are not the same, even though their symptoms are practically 1:1 and the terms are often used interchangeably)

https://www.parental-alienation.education/2020/04/13/the-stigma-tied-to-aspd/ - A paper about stigma against people with ASPD

https://psychcentral.com/blog/surprising-myths-facts-about-antisocial-personality-disorder/ - An article about some of the myths around ASPD (they call it ASP for some reason here, but the information is mostly good)

If anyone else has any resources, feel free to add on!