When We Lose the Plot, Fall Apart: Narrative Failure
Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin
Date: 2022-02-06

We construct or adopt narratives in order to make sense of ourselves, of others, and of the world at large. Narratives can be rigid (ideological) or open-ended (mutable or flexible).

Rigid narratives are ritualistic, prescriptive, and proscriptive. They are immutable and often counterfactual. They constitute a part of their adherents’s identity. Religion is a rigid narrative, for example.

Healthy, normal people can hold several compartmentalized narratives simultaneously and deploy them circumstantially (narrative fluidity, effected via narrative switching).

They do not resist countervailing information (they have no confirmation bias). They modify their narratives to respond adequately to their environment (adaptive narratives).

When mental health issues are present, only one narrative is active and it is always rendered rigid and constricting in order to ameliorate anxiety (anxiolytic rigidification).

The onslaught of reality engenders in the unhealthy a narrative failure and an existential crisis: a lack of meaning so profound that it often results in suicidal ideation.

Instead of narrative fluidity, mental health pathologies lead to a fragmentation of the self into self-states, each with its own single, rigid narrative.

CASE 1

Virtue signalling is not limited to the woke left. Anti-vaxxers virtue signal as do white supremacists and religious militants of all stripes.

Virtue signalling is a social bonding ritual with like-minded people. It involves prescribed and proscribed actions and cohering group entraining via repeated slogans and mantras.

Recent studies link virtue signalling to a victimhood personality construct and dark triad propensities (especially subclinical psychopathy and subclinical narcissism).

CASE 2

Ironically, the comorbidity of depression with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) reduces the incidence of reckless acting out and improves impulse control.

Depressed Borderlines have been mistakenly dubbed “introverts” or “shy, quiet borderlines”.

Outwardly, like every other dysphoric, anhedonic, and dysthymic person, the depressed borderline is mostly homebound and listless.

But when the veil of depression lifts, her true character emerges: she becomes gregarious, promiscuous, a novelty-seeker, and a defiant risk-taker.

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