Over the years, I've been invited to write entries about mental health and psychology in various online encyclopedias and apps. So I wrote dozens of entries for the Open Site Encyclopedia, the X-term Medical Dictionary, and others. And then I assembled these definitions into a Mental Health Dictionary.
Mental Health Dictionary is available on my website, but now I'm converting it into a project.
Every two, three days, I post an image on my Instagram account, Narcissism with Vaknin. Each image contains a definition. If you collect these images, over time, you will end up having a Mental Health Dictionary of your own.
Another thing I'm going to do, I'm going to record these definitions on video. Letter by letter.
Today's letter is, surprisingly, the letter A. Then I'm going to put all the letters together, all these videos together, into a single video, a Mental Health Dictionary.
So you could download these videos letter by letter, or you could wait for the ultimate product, all the letters combined in a single Mental Health Dictionary.
As I said, today's letter is the letter A.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignan Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and a member of the faculty of CIAPS, Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies.
And let's get right on to the definitions.
We start with acting out.
Acting out is a defense mechanism.
When an anxiogenic inner emotional conflict, for example, a dissonance, most often experienced as frustration.
So when such a conflict is communicated via behavioral aggression, we call it acting out.
Acting out involves little or no insight, foresight, impulse control, self-awareness, or self-reflection. It is often dissociative. It is sometimes intended to attract attention and to disrupt other people's lives. It's an aggressive act.
Next definition, affect.
Affect is how we experience our innermost feelings and how other people observe and interpret our expressions.
Affect is characterized by the type of emotion involved, sadness, happiness, anger, etc., and by the intensity of the expression.
Some people have flat affect. They maintain apathy, monotonous, immobile, apparently unmoved. This is typical of schizoid personality disorder and some psychopaths.
Others have blunted, constricted, or broad, healthy affect.
Patients with dramatic, erratic, Cluster B personality disorders, especially histrionic and borderline, have exaggerated and labile, changeable affect. They are drama queens.
In certain mental health disorders, the affect is inappropriate.
For instance, such people laugh when they recount a sad or horrifying event or when they find themselves in morbid settings, for example, in a funeral. Looking at a funeral is an example of an inappropriate affect.
Ambivalence.
Ambivalence is possessing equipment but opposing and conflicting emotions or ideas.
It's not a cognitive dissonance. A cognitive dissonance requires resolution.
Ambivalence is there.
In someone with a permanent state of inner turmoil, her emotions come in mutually exclusive pairs. Love and hate, for example. Her thoughts and conclusions are read in contradictory diets.
The result is extreme indecision to the point of utter paralysis and inaction.
Sufferers of obsessive compulsive disorders and obsessive compulsive personality disorder are highly ambivalent, for example.
Amnesia.
Anterograde amnesia. A loss of memory pertaining to events that occurred after the onset of the amnestic condition or agent.
And this is as opposed to retrograde amnesia. A loss of memory pertaining to events that occurred before the onset of the amnestic condition or the agent.
Amok.
Amok is a male-specific culture-bound syndrome.
An alternating pattern of dissociation, brooding and violence directed at objects and people.
It is provoked by real or imagined criticism and slights and accompanied by persecutory ideation, amnesia, automatism and extreme fatigue.
Sometimes it co-occurs with psychotic episodes. It is common in Malaysia where it had been discovered.
Laos, Philippines, Polynesia where it is called kafar or kathar, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico where it's called Mal de Pilea.
And among the Navajo Native Americans where it is called icha. I hope I'm pronouncing all this right.
Next entry.
Anhedonia.
The loss of the urge to seek pleasure and the ability to experience pleasure.
Oops, I scrolled way too far up.
So anhedonia is the loss of the urge to seek pleasure and the ability to experience pleasure.
Major depression and schizophrenia often involve anhedonia.
The patient is unable to conjure sufficient mental energy to get off the couch and do something because he or she finds everything equally boring, tedious and unattractive.
Sounds like the modern condition.
Anorexia.
A diminished appetite to the point of refraining from eating altogether.
Whether it is part of a depressive illness or a body dysmorphic disorder, an erroneous perception of one's body is too fat.
This is still being debated.
It is also perceived as a control mechanism, an attempt to reassert control over one's life.
Anorexia is one of a family of eating disorders which also includes bulimia, the compulsive gorging on food and then its forced purging usually by vomiting.
Bon appetit.
Next antisocial personality disorder aka psychopathy or is it?
Antisocial personality disorder was formerly called psychopathy or more colloquially, sociopathy.
Some scholars such as Robert Hare still distinguish psychopathy from mere antisocial behavior. They advocate for a separate diagnosis of psychopathy.
The disorder of antisocial personality disorder appears in early adolescence but criminal behavior and substance abuse abate with age, usually by the fourth or fifth decade of life.
Antisocial personality disorder may have a genetic or hereditary determinant in brain and physiological abnormalities. It afflicts mainly men.
The diagnosis is controversial and regarded by some scholars as scientifically unfounded, not a clinical entity.
Psychopaths often regard other people as objects to be manipulated in instruments of ratification and utility. They have no discernible conscience.
Psychopaths are devoid of empathy and this is very similar to narcissism. They find it difficult to perceive other people's nonverbal cues, needs, emotions or preferences akin to autistic spectrum disorder.
But they're endowed with cold empathy, cognitive and reflexive empathy which allows them to gauge the motivations and vulnerabilities of other people properly.
Consequently, the psychopath rejects other people's rights and his commensurate achievements and obligations.
The psychopath is impulsive, reckless, irresponsible and unable to postpone gratification.
The psychopath often rationalizes his behavior, showing an utter absence of remorse for hurting and defrauding others.
A charming fellow, to cut a long story short.
The psychopath's primitive defense mechanisms include splitting or dichotomous thinking. Psychopaths view the world and people in it as all good or all evil.
Psychopaths attribute their own shortcomings to others and projective identification. Psychopaths force others to behave in the way they expect them to or want them to.
The psychopath fails to comply with social norms. Hence the criminal acts, the deceitfulness, the identity theft, the use of aliases, the constant lying and the conning of even his nearest and dearest for gain and pleasure.
Psychopaths are goal-oriented but unreliable and do not honor their undertaking's obligations, contracts and responsibilities.
Psychopaths rarely hold a job for long or repay their debts. They are unstable, vindictive, remorseless, ruthless, driven, dangerous, aggressive, violent, irritable and sometimes prone to magical thinking. They are highly dangerous and unsafe. They seldom plan for the long and medium terms, believing themselves to be immune to the consequences of their own actions, however adverse and imminent.
Next entry, anxiety.
A kind of unpleasant, dysphoric, mild fear with no apparent external reason. A prehensional dread in anticipation of a future menace or an imminent but diffuse and unspecified danger, visually imagined or exaggerated.
The mental state of anxiety and the concomitant hypervigilance has physiological complements. It is accompanied by short-term dysphoria and physical symptoms of stress and tension, such as sweating, palpitations, tachycardia, hyperventilation, angina, tense muscle tone and elevated blood pressure. All in all, a state of arousal.
Aphonia
Aphonia is the inability to produce speech or sounds through the larynx due to psychological, non-organic reasons.
Next entry, and there's a video dedicated to it by the way of my channel, autistic or dereistic thinking.
These are ways of relating to reality, to experience, to logic and to other people.
The infused thoughts are dereism, narcissistic and egocentric, self-absorption is autistic thinking.
These patients' illogical and idiosyncratic cognitions derive from an overarching and all-pervasive daydreaming of fantasy life.
They infuse people and events around them with completely subjective meanings. They regard the external world as an extension or projection of the internal one.
And this is, of course, very reminiscent of pathological narcissism.
Such patients often withdraw completely and retreat into their inner private realm and are unavailable to communicate and to interact with others.
Automatic obeisance or obedience
Automatic, unquestioning, excessive, uncritical, mechanical and immediate obeisance of all commands, requests and suggestions made by other people, even the most manifestly absurd and dangerous ones.
This suspension of critical judgment is sometimes an indication of incipient catatonia.
Avoidant personality disorder
Social shyness and social anxiety coupled with feelings of inadequacy, deformity and dysfunction and with hypersensitivity to criticism, real or imagined.
Others of the disorder avoid interpersonal contact because they dread rejection, embarrassment, disagreement and disapproval.
They strive to ascertain that their counterparty likes them and approves of their conduct, of their choices, before they actually meet them.
Avoidance prefers solitary occupations and they are very restrained and cold in intimate relationships.
They constrict, limit their world, evade challenges and risks and stunt their personal growth and development by avoiding anything and everything new, unfamiliar people, novel activities or pursuits, exiting the comfort zone.
People with avoidant personality disorder are mortified by shame and by the possibility of being mocked, criticized, rejected, humiliated or ridiculed in public.
They are prone to having ideas of reference.
They are perceived by others as reserved, timid and inhibited because their regard themselves as socially inept, repellent, unattractive, inferior, inadequate, dysfunctional, defective or deformed.
Some avoidance even develop body dysmorphic disorders.
Finally, last entry in the letter A is abolition.
An inability to initiate goals and goal-oriented activities, to pursue them once initiated.
It's an overpowering and all-pervasive lack of will, perseverance and stamina in various fields of life, work, self-care, intellectual tasks and interests, family life, etc.
And this concludes the letter A.
Go to my Instagram, collect the definitions, make yourself a gift, mental health dictionary.
Alternatively, you can go to my website and view the whole dictionary in its entirety.
And I'm going to make videos with each letter separately and in a single video with all the letters.
So go to the description for links to my Instagram, links to the mental health dictionary, etc. And have fun with these appetizing tidbits of the human mind or what's left of it.