After my long and very fruitful video-call with my friend in Hampshire the other night, I had texted a couple of friends down the road suggesting that we might meet for a coffee in the next few days. The evening before last, my Italian friend replied apologising that she had not been in touch before, but she had experienced quite an arduous three quarters of an hour session with her local (private) dentist and felt rather unwell as a result of it all. I sympathised because this does sound a long time for a dental treatment session and I told her about my own recent experiences where I had been massively overcharged but managed to rectify the situation. My friend is still in the business of selling her house so that she can eventually live nearer to her daughter but she does not have a buyer in prospect at the moment. My Italian friend and I go back a long way and, of course, she knew Meg very well so was appreciative of the chat and we will probably do it on a weekly basis from now on. Another wonderful surprise was an invitation from my Irish friends down the road for a lunch in a day or so and, as it happens, we have quite. lot to talk about with each other as we have not had a really good long chat since Christmas time which is fast receding into the difference. It is fairly well recognised that much of Donald Trump’s demeanour is due to an excessively narcissistic personality (as well as impending dementia) so I decided to undertake some internet researches to ascertain how common what is termed NPD (Narcissistic Personality disorder) might be in the general population. What I learnt was not only information about the condition itself but how toxic the condition could be for those caught up in relationships (marriage, friendship, work colleagues) for those interacting with persons who exhibit NPD. My internet researches revealed the following. NPD is estimated to affect approximately 0.5% to 5% of the general population, making it a relatively rare clinical diagnosis, although some studies suggest higher lifetime prevalence rates up to 6.2%. It is more commonly diagnosed in men (50-75% of cases) and often appears in early adulthood. While estimates vary, it is generally believed that 1 in 20 people (5%) may exhibit traits. In mental health clinics, the prevalence is higher, with estimates ranging from 2% to 6% of patients seeking help. Many experts believe the condition is under-diagnosed because individuals with NPD rarely seek treatment, often appearing only when co-occurring issues like depression or substance abuse arise. While full NPD is relatively uncommon, narcissistic traits are more frequently observed, especially among younger adults. In the same researches there was often practical help for those caught up in a relationship with those exhibiting NPD. The bulk of the advice was to get away from the person and not try to ‘reform’ them as such efforts nearly always ended in failure. Moreover, a failure to get out of a relationship could have severe adverse consequences for both the mental and physical health of those who were having to cope with relationships in which the other partner was exhibiting NPD. I found this quite fascinating material as I do not think it is widely appreciated (not least by myself) how toxic NPD could be for those who get caught up in its trail.
Later on in the morning, I made sure that I attended my Tai Chi class which I was glad to do as I had missed last week’s session. Afterwards, I was a little disappointed that my bank manager friend with whom I normally chat with over coffee had to dash off to transport his wife somewhere but today was one of the days in the month when a couple of police did their stint in the community centre by sitting down and having a coffee whilst making themselves available to anybody who might need the kind of advice that the police are able to give. I enjoyed chatting with them for the best part of an hour and they were explaining to me how decades or so they go to a shop lifting incident and they could get the whole incident processed within an hour or so whereas today the necessary bureaucracy takes up the rest of the shift. We exchanged quite a lot of stories about modern day police work and others from the ‘chatty table’ joined in. After they had left, I dropped into conversation with a couple who had married to each other for 62 years and who both had a wicked sense of humour which has, no doubt, kept them going over the years. We had some interesting conversations about the wife’s role in acting as a mentor/adviser in the local mental hospital in Bromsgrove. I had often heard people talk about Barnsley Hall and so did a bit of a search on it history. Barnsley Hall in Bromsgrove was a major psychiatric facility and mental hospital that operated from 1907 until 1996. Originally established as a county lunatic asylum to relieve overcrowding at Powick Hospital, it treated patients with various mental illnesses and epilepsy. The site was largely demolished in 2000, and is now a housing development. After these interesting chats, I collected my newspaper and then came home and cooked myself a meal of salmon, potatoes and sugar snap peas.
I have always had a high regard for Beth Rigby, the chief political correspondent for Sky News. But today she had dropped out of her normal job reporting politics and wrote a personal piece how she was coping with overseeing the work of her two teenage daughters, as they were now part of the internet generation, replete with smart phones and social media in abundance. She writes that she is probably known best as Sky News’s political editor, but also a mother to two teenagers aged 13 and 16. They were babies born into the age of the iPad, the smartphone and social media and have grown up in what I call the digital Wild West. Like the Wild West frontier of the 19th century, this technological frontier of the 21st century is rapidly expanding, lawless, and lacking in institutional regulation. It is populated by some good actors and many bad ones. That’s why she could completely sympathise with the parents now screaming to the politicians that they want to turn it off and stop under-16s using social media. It is a conversation that has been turbocharged by Australia’s decision in December to bring in a social media ban for under-16s and a series of landmark trials brought by parents in the US to hold the world’s biggest social media companies responsible for harms to children. I found this whole story a brave one to write but she must have felt that the whole dilemma is one bursting with significance but one in which the politicians always seem to be several months behind the tech giants.