system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Narcissistic and Histrionic Personality Disorder, as well as Factitious disorder is underdiagnosed.

I'm starting to notice high degrees of toxic personalities in today's shallow and superficial society, especially ones with big NPD and HPD characteristics.

And also you likely know there is a lot of attention seeking and self absorbed people self diagnosing themselves because they think mental illness will give them the attention they crave. The most common targets of this are mood disorders, gender dysphoria, autism spectrum disorders, and anxiety disorders.

So with this in mind, I am starting to suspect that there is a lot of cases of NPD, HPD, and factitious disorder that are going unchecked. What do you guys think? Could my view be wrong?
gpt
I work quite a lot with people who have had these diagnoses thrown at them, often as a justification to dismiss them and their issues.

I think the thing to realise is that these 'disorders' are really a description of the behaviours and not the person. Nobody *is* a disorder, just the same way as nobody is a broken arm. It's a simplification, and often a drastic one.

Think of baking a cake, cakes often have a little bit of lemon juice in them to give them flavour, but if you squeeze six lemons into your cake, you end up with an unpalatable cake. We wouldn't label the cake as a "over lemon disorder cake", we'd just say there's too much lemon. 

I guess the issue with personality disorders too is much like the cake, the disorder is very much "baked in" and it takes quite a bit of effort to manage, but lemon-meringue pie exists and is actually pretty good.

So, in the end diagnosis is often only tangentially related to working with, relating to, or improving the person. It's more a matter of recognising the behaviours and understanding their personal limitations, and enabling the person to self-regulate better. Sure there's hopeless cases, but they're still people too.

It's very tempting when you first learn about personality disorders to go around throwing the diagnoses at people like some kind of arm-chair psychiatrist, but overall doing that just isn't very helpful and you're doing yourself a disservice by characterising individuals as a card-board cut-out of their actual selves.