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Comment by frellus | Hacker News Reader

Spot on. It's a shame that we haven't prioritized (and de-stigmatized) mental health, especially at a young age, so horrible children don't grow up to be horrible ego-centric adults.

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Arguably these kind of personality disorders aren't really "mental health" issues. Or, certainly not in the same way that something like ADD, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety, etc. are. It's basically a nice way of saying "your personality sucks so much that we've decided to label it".

I disagree, I believe they are mental health issues because they're highlighting a process breakdown in how someone is perceiving the world, relationships and challenges.

Is that to say that people don't have personalities which suck? Of course they do. That being said, there are many ways of balancing a person's tendencies towards negative outcomes, but ONLY if they can admit they have a problem and they're willing to put in the effort to re-balancing themselves.

This probably also raises if you incorporate people who were traumatized as children. Someone having a trauma response can definitely look like horrible ego-centric behavior, when actually they're having an internal meltdown where they're emotionally re-experiencing their trauma with no coping mechanisms because we basically never teach adults to recognize when this is happening.

A lot of hyper-toxic fiddly freakouts over small things actually turn out to be deeply rooted in some sort of horrible trauma.

Absolutely agreed, and I hate to sound like a Scientologist here, but I think a lot of people's struggles have roots in some trauma in their past. We're all shaped by bad things which happen to us, and for some people -- the ones especially with low Emotional Intelligence -- they can be re-balanced quite a bit in their thinking and patterns but ONLY if they're willing. That's like 80% the battle.

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