Narcissist vs Psychopath vs Sociopath | How To Spot The Difference

so what's a narcissist what's a sociopath what's a psychopath what's someone with antisocial personality disorder these terms are being thrown all around and I'd like to provide some clarity on this and I'm really curious why you are here if you can just right up front comment below and let me know are you a mental health professional looking for a differential diagnosis are you somebody in the criminal justice system and I can talk about why it's relevant there are you simply curious you've heard these terms you're wondering and you're like okay I'll watch a quick video on it or do you have somebody in your life who's very problematic for you and you're trying to figure this out so if you're in that latter category towards the end of this video I'm going to address whether it matters or not to know the difference and also just some other things that might be applicable for the regular person not the professional but I'm going to start really by addressing somebody who's in the mental health field who really wants to know what is the differential here in terms of how somebody's diagnosed and obviously for people who aren't licensed to diagnose they shouldn't be diagnosing so sometimes having sort of a sense of O this may be what I'm dealing with sometimes that really can help you make decisions about what you can do and what you should do within the construct of the relationship and so for just everyone to understand the diagnosis for somebody who is a narcissist is a narcissistic personality disorder and there is no official diagnosis of sociopath or psychopath it's actually called antisocial personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder incompasses kind of what people think of as a sociopath and as a psychopath but often when I have used that term with someone in the general population they'll say to me oh but this person's not antisocial so antisocial personalities disorder has nothing to do with somebody not wanting to be around other people it has nothing to do with whether you're an introvert or an extrovert nothing and a social is used in the context that the person violates social norms in a way that's very either dangerous for themselves or others or quite destructive for society so that's how that term antisocial is used but I know it gets very confusing so we have this umbrella term let's say of antisocial personality disorder and diagnoses of mental health disorders or personality disorders and those are different they're done based on something called the DSM 5 the diagnostic statistical manual and the version that is currently being used is the DSM 5 TR so I'm going to share officially how somebody is diagnosed like what's required to achieve either the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder or antisocial personality disorder and then I'll also make a comment about how psychopath and sociopath is seen within the criminal justice and mental health field so personality disorders are seen as pervasive patterns of personality traits and behaviors that the person has had for a long time I'm going to show here on the screen a slide that shows the difference between narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders so narcissistic personality disorder has a pervasive pattern of grandos need for admiration and lack of empathy for antisocial personality disorder it's a pervasive pattern of disregard for and a violation of the rights of others so you might see people who have an overlap but those are fairly distinct kind of pervasive patterns right for narcissistic there's a requirement that the pattern has been in evidence since early adulthood and for antisocial personality disorder the patterns been in place since age 15 and the person exhibited behaviors that would have qualified for a diagnosis of conduct disorder prior to the age of 15 so conduct disorder whole another diagnosis but it is only diagnosed in children obviously not all people who come into the system to get diagnosed were diagnosed as kids but there needs to be evidence that had they been diagnosed they had behavior that would have qualified them for conduct disorder without that there's not a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder and the other thing noted here on this page personality disorders are only diagnosed in people over the age of 18 and then in addition to the criteria on the prior page here is a slide that shows that somebody with narcissistic personality disorder will qualify for five of these nine things and for antisocial personality disorder they have to qualify for at least three of the following seven so you can see in looking at these that the ones for narcissistic personality disorder are very much focused on a grandio sense of self a preoccupation with them just being wonderful brilliant amazing people they really require excessive admiration extreme sense of entitlement they lack empathy and they're very arrogant and huy okay so those all would be the things they would have to have at least five of those nine to qualify for that diagnosis and the list under antisocial personality disorder is much more a about violating laws and harming others so you can see it's unlawful behaviors deceitfulness lying conning others for personal profit or pleasure impulsivity and I'm going to summarize a handful of these points a little bit later in the video which might be a little more helpful for the general population they also have irritability and aggressiveness as indicated through physical fights Reckless disregard for their safety or the safety of others consistent irresponsibility like they don't pay their bills they don't keep a job really obvious behavioral manifestations of irresponsibility and a lack of remorse now you could look at this list and you could say okay well narcissists and people with antisocial personality disorder have a lack of remorse lack empathy con others for personal pleasure or profit and that's true right so making these differential diagnosis takes some time and some training and it can be complicated and sometimes people have more than one personality disorder or sometimes they have like a little piece of this one a little piece of that one and they end up with a diagnosis of personality disorder not otherwise specified so sort of like yep they got one but we can't quite fit it into any one of these boxes so I just want to say I am a licensed psychotherapist but I no longer provide Psychotherapy instead I'm doing this YouTube channel and trying to bring information around the world that's reliable valid helpful for people and if you support what I'm doing here I'd greatly appreciate if you subscribe and if you give me a like if you like this video but I'm also sharing that just so you know I am licensed to diagnose and in general the people who are licensed to diagnose somebody could have a variety of different master's degrees or phds or they could be medical doctors and actually also nurses psychiatric nurses in particular but psychotherapists who could have a masters in marriage and family therapy they could have a master's in Social work they receive training on how to diagnose and they need to diagnose for insurance purposes other than that pretty much I think I got everybody in there people aren't licensed to diagnose right so just to be careful about how we Throw around these terms and these diagnoses and before I come back to just summarizing four points on kind of how to tell the difference that should be accessible to everybody watching this I want to come back to the term sociopath and psychopath both terms have been around for a long time and they don't as I said before have an official definition and because a lot of people watching these videos are lay people so just sort of what's in the general population as the definition of these words I did look up the Miriam Webster definitions and they Define a sociopath as a sociopathic individual or a psychopath and then they Define sociopathic and I'm going to read this to you as relating to or characterized by asocial or antisocial Behavior or exhibiting antisocial personality disorder so Miriam Webster dictionary relatively accurate I don't know how helpful it is but they are pretty much equating these terms and I'll read you their definition for psychopath a mentally unstable person especially a person having an egocentric and antisocial personality marked by a lack of remorse for one's actions an absence of empathy for others and often criminal Tendencies so I've mentioned the criminal justice system before so within the criminal justice system and the people who do forensic psychology they do look a lot as whether somebody fits the psychopath definition because those are the people with the highest recidivism rates often the most violent crimes and there is some thought that if they can really Target how to differentiate that that is helpful and then also perhaps helpful for providing treatment so there is a screening tool that's very well accepted within that pop population in the criminal justice system and the forensic psychologists and it's a screening tool it used to differentiate somebody who is psychopathic and not just sociopathic in general a lack of affect which means sort of a lack of Expressions would be one piece of it higher level of violence and there's a number of other criteria not going to talk about it right now if you're interested in that leave a note leave a comment and I will come back at some point and address that but I guess my basic point Point here is that neither of those terms are official diagnoses so let me summarize this in terms of how this manifests or shows up in our lives sort of four different things I'm going to focus on the first one is that in general somebody with narcissism versus somebody with antisocial personality disorder will have a different view of how they want to be viewed so somebody with narcissistic personality disorder is very focused on wanting to appear to be an upstanding system they focus on how they look from the outside what their Community thinks about them what people outside their home think about them and what people outside the home think about everybody in their family an example could be you know a father who is abusive at home but then of course is on the school board and involved in Community Affairs and helps the elderly neighbor right now somebody with antisocial personality disorder if they care about those things it is to achieve some other end in General they don't care too much they don't obey the law they have no regard for rules and they usually present with consistent irresponsibility quit their job often don't pay their bills don't care about whether they pay their bills or not they might laugh about driving in a way that it was so dangerous somebody else got harmed so that would be a little bit more on the spectrum of the antisocial personality disorder the first thing is about how they want to be perceived or whether they care about it all right number two is impulsivity so again if you remember that to get the diagnosis you only have to have a certain number of the various points not all people with antisocial personality disorder are impulsive but it's one of the criteria that it could be them but in general the narcissist is going to be very calculated very careful right because they care so much about how they're perceived and the person person with antisocial personality disorder might be incredibly impulsive they might fail to plan ahead they might just start a fight in the middle of anywhere middle of a family gathering outside at a bar where they're going to get arrested something got to them and boom they just went there right whereas The Narcissist fights a little bit more strategically and again these now are General comments not like this is the diagnosis I also just want to say here cuz with my other videos unrelated topics people are like well I do that am I a you know narcissist or sociopath no these are right it's the entire package so there are a lot of people who have anger management problems not narcissists not sociopaths not antisocial personality disorder Fair number of people who are impulsive don't have a personality disorder so just want to be clear but if you're looking to differentiate that might be something that helps with the differential another good example would be like a narcissist who thinks y they're going to break up with you and they know they are but they also know that you have been invited to an event where some important people might be and they really want to go to that event so they are going to stay with you be Charming be wonderful until the event and then if it seems like o they do have to stay in touch with you to stay in touch with the people they met they might but otherwise okay you know bye for now whereas somebody with antisocial personality less likely to have the ability to contain their impulses and do that so I think I said I wanted to summarize four different kind of areas to think about so the third one is remorse now here I would say that in general narcissistic personality disorder or antis social personality disorder goes with a lack of remorse somebody with narcissistic personality disorder might say the right things they may know what they need to say to get out of trouble to get what they want they may even believe they care or they seem to hard to know for sure but they may even believe that they are truly sorry whereas somebody with antisocial personality disorder will probably just say yep well I'm entitled to do that everybody they might use the everybody does it they might use other excuses or reasons but basically they don't care and they don't always pretend to care all right the fourth sort of summary area is around the need to fit in or the need to be admired so in general somebody with antisocial personality sort doesn't really care whether you like them or not they don't really care what other people think about them they almost enjoy being an outlier they purposefully act recklessly and enjoy it whereas somebody with narcissistic personality disorder lives on other people's approval almost like they can't live if they don't get the admiration and praise that they think they deserve they're desperate to be admired and looked up to and if it gets to a point in the relationship where you no longer are really looking up to them they probably will lash out at you could be emotionally verbally physically but you're likely to get a very angry response somebody with antisocial personality disorder you might get an angry response whenever you don't do what they want or they don't get what they want it usually is not tied to what you think of them or their reputation so a number of things to keep in mind here that if you are somebody licensed to diagnose these diagnoses are tough and it takes some time to recognize and sort through and usually consultation with someone else is very very helpful in these situations and if you're not licensed to diagnose think through why it matters because if you have a toxic person in your life who is creating huge problems for you it doesn't really matter what their diagnosis is sometimes it's helpful to hear about the patterns of behavior because you begin to really understand that this is about the other person not about you and that can be very freeing and helpful and really confirming your gut but at the end of the day if the person is toxic for you what can you do about it so the boundary course that I have has a whole section on toxic relationships and I also talk in there how there are some people who are toxic like a lot of times if somebody has a personality disorder they're pretty toxic for almost everybody but there's other people who end up being toxic for us maybe they don't even have a personality sorder right they might just be toxic because of the history we have right if you're married and you get to divorced often those relationships end up being pritty toxic doesn't mean the other person is personality disordered and maybe it is specific to your history and what you shared together that it became that toxic but again how does that matter the key is for you to know that you get to validate your feelings you get to protect yourself you get to be in relationship with people who are supportive and energizing right people who truly value you and the work for that is really working on your own self-esteem your own sense of self your own values learning how to maybe even know what you're feeling and then to validate what you're feeling knowing that you don't have to convince the other person that what they're doing is wrong in order to set a boundary with them so this stuff takes some work I don't know that quick YouTube videos or even longer ones like this ended up being are going to solve this for you and the boundary program I have it goes deep into why you might have experienced things that gave you a negative thought about yourself that are tied to why it's difficult to set boundaries or change relationships that are destructive right but it focuses on what you can do to live a more joyful life so I really hope this video was helpful for you let me know what you think I'm really interested to see the comments about why people are looking this up because I got to tell you over 60,000 people a month are searching what is a sociopath over 22,000 a month are searching what is a psychopath huge numbers of people are searching what's the difference between narcissism and being a sociopath or a psychopath and I'm really curious why and what you feel you'll get out of understanding this better that would be very helpful for me in knowing what videos to create in the future so thank you for your help I look forward to reading your comments and if you liked this do give it a like okay see you next week am

Channel: Barbara Heffernan

Views: 14,571

Keywords: barbara heffernan, Narcissist vs Psychopath vs Sociopath How To Spot The Difference, Narcissist vs Psychopath, Narcissist vs Sociopath, narcissist dynamics, toxic relationships, healing from narcissism, narcissistic behavior, setting boundaries, healthy relationships, narcissistic abuse recovery, creating boundaries with narcissists, sociopath vs psychopath, what is a Narcissist, what is a Psychopath, what is a Sociopath

Id: SNUHOAQztjI

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 05 2023