One thing that never fails to amuse me is the amount of gatekeeping within the NPD/ASPD/psychopathy land of things. I am a believer in professional diagnosis over self-diagnosis, but I also believe that the individual knows best when it comes to whether their cognitions create a problem for them. There’s always infighting between the more adjusted and the less adjusted, but at the end of the day, what are we really accomplishing? By the very nature of disorder, it means things are not particularly or fully working out for the individual with the disorder. We should be comparing notes and offering guidance, however knowing full and well that many will never become fully adjusted.

I am not the most well-adjusted individual living with psychopathy. By the very nature of the condition, extremity in all things is all but given. There was a time in my past where I thought I had it mostly figured out and I am actively taking steps to try and return to that mental state. Over the years, I’ve communicated with various groups sharing the same condition or related conditions (NPD/ASPD) and have observed the power dynamics between those that function well and those that do not. It’s interesting, but frankly a waste of everyone’s time. By virtue of diagnosis and self-awareness, disorder implies that the life of the disordered is not being lived remotely optimally. Getting into arguments over whether one can ascend to a higher level of functioning does nothing to alleviate any of that disorder. It simply causes people to entrench themselves and, I’d argue, makes prognosis worse.

As a means of trying to build a community in the Cluster B (BPD/ASPD/NPD/HPD) and psychopathic spaces that can learn from each other, I have created a Mastodon instance tied to the following domain: https://mastodon.cluster-b.online . Mastodon is a fediverse-driven twitter alternative that promotes individually curated communities and there are no algorithms to suggest or promote or force content down people’s throats. I highly recommend that the interested reader consider joining an instance part of the larger Mastodon federated network, even if it’s not with the instance I have spun up.

My promise to anyone that joins the instance dedicated to Cluster B and psychopathic anecdotes and communication is that I will never punish people for speaking authentically so long as no legal concerns are raised that require reporting. We all have our experiences; we should be sharing them. Let’s communicate.