W. Keith Campbell

Their disorder may be rooted in pain, but it does not follow that we need to allow them to bring pain into our life as well.

For as Gene Twenge and Keith Campbell write, A recent psychiatric study found that the biggest consequence of narcissism, especially when other psychiatric symptoms were held constant, was suffering by people close to them.

While we lack studies indicating whether the rate of malignant narcissism is increasing, the number of people moving the wrong way down the narcissistic spectrum and developing mild to moderate levels of narcissism appears to be rising.

Or as Twenge and Campbell write in The Narcissism Epidemic, which was published in 2009, In data from 37,000 college students, narcissistic personality traits rose just as fast as obesity from the 1980s to the present, with the shift especially pronounced for women.