A common health condition can also make you more likely to be a NARCISSIST

People with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are ten times more likely to also suffer from narcissism, a study has found.

That’s the finding after a team of eight psychologists analyzed 164 adults with ADHD and examined the link between this distracting disorder and the medical condition “narcissistic personality disorder” (NPD).

The team concluded that people with ADHD are ten times more likely to suffer from narcissism than the general population, where this percentage is only one percent.

The psychologists who discovered the link came up with a theory for the connection. This theory posits a childhood-based link between ADHD and a kind of impulsive overconfidence, thought to be a “defense mechanism.”

This tendency, known clinically as ‘positive illusory bias’ (PIB) in children, has been linked to a deficit in the frontal lobe of the brain that affects executive function and limits ‘pragmatic language’, they reported.

For comparison, about 9.5 percent of people with ADHD in the study also had NPD.

But those who fear the charismatic allure or manipulative skills that images of a narcissist conjure in the public imagination may be surprised to learn that people diagnosed with the disorder may pose a greater threat to themselves, the researchers noted.

The study authors – psychologists from France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom – found that two groups of ADHD symptoms were most consistent with narcissism.

These disorders are ADHD ‘hyperactivity’ and ‘impulsivity’, or having a lot of energy and acting quickly without thinking.

“These dimensions of narcissism were also associated with several aspects of psychosocial dysfunction,” the authors wrote, “including anxiety, depression, negative urgency, impulsivity, and poor quality of life.”

They found that so-called ‘inattention complaints’, or simply having difficulty paying attention, were not strongly associated with narcissism.

The average age of the adult ADHD patients studied was 36.5 years. The group consisted predominantly of women, namely 63.4 percent or 104 of the total 164 persons.

The team suspected that the link between narcissism and ADHD would have been even stronger if the patient data had been more evenly distributed between men and women.

All subjects had to be over 18 and have a credible ADHD diagnosis to be eligible. They also had to provide “informed consent to participate.”

“Research has shown that men score higher on narcissistic grandiosity, but equally high on vulnerability, compared to women,” they concluded in their new study, published in June in the journal Science. the journal for psychiatric research.

“A more balanced gender distribution in our sample could have increased the prevalence of NPD,” they said.

The researchers examined the more narcissistic traits of their ADHD patients using a version of a self-report questionnaire, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), which has proven successful in various forms since 1979.

They also worked with another, more modern self-report questionnaire, the Pathological Narcissism Inventory (PNI).

The PNI lists seven aspects of narcissistic behavior, including: the tendency to exploit others, ‘grandiose fantasies’, self-sacrifice to improve oneself (e.g. eating disorders to look thin), problems with self-image, devaluation,‘anger at being claimed’ and hiding one’s true self.

The researchers noted that these seven behaviors help researchers divide narcissists into two thematic categories: the overconfidence of “‘narcissistic megalomania’ and the vicious cycle of self-hatred, self-denial and lashing out from ‘narcissistic vulnerability’.

Previous studies have shown that vulnerable narcissism is associated with low self-esteem and low life satisfaction. It has also been reported that ‘grandiose narcissism resembles psychopathy.’

We probably know someone who regularly posts selfies on Instagram, but that person might have ‘vulnerable narcissism’

However, the researchers acknowledged that their findings were further influenced by the gender bias in their patient cohort,

“Women are more likely to be diagnosed with borderline and histrionic personality disorders,” these psychologists noted. “These considerations may explain the high prevalence of BPD.”

Overlapping symptoms between BPD and the painful self-image of narcissistic vulnerability may also have skewed their study’s results, possibly suggesting a stronger link between ADHD and narcissism than warranted, they noted.

“We would like to caution our readers not to draw too many conclusions about the generalizability of our findings to the entire population of ADHD patients,” the researchers wrote.

“However,” they added, “we believe our results may be interesting, especially given the paucity of research on narcissism in ADHD.