Categories: Diseases & Conditions

Richard Heene: A Classic Narcissist?

Most people have heard of narcissisism but may not know that it is actually a mental illness. Below is s description of narcissistic personality disorder quoted from Google Health ( https://www.google.com/health/ref/Narcissistic+personality+disorder).

A person with narcissistic personality disorder:

Reacts to criticism with rage, shame, or humiliation
Takes advantage of other people to achieve his or her own goals
Has feelings of self-importance
Exaggerates achievements and talents
Is preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, intelligence, or ideal love
Has unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment
Requires constant attention and admiration
Disregards the feelings of others, lacks empathy
Has obsessive self-interest
Pursues mainly selfish goals”

Does this sound like someone we’ve been hearing a lot about? That’s right, it describes Richard Heene perfectly. I’ll go through all the characteritics and relate them to Heene’s behavior.

Reacts to criticism with rage-anyone who saw him on wife swap knows that he did exactly that many times with his swapped wife.

Takes advantage of other people. The sad thing is that this included Heene’s little children. He also took advantage of the entire TV viewing population both here and in other countries.

Has feelings of self importance. While no one can know what Heene “feels” we can assume by his behavior and comments that he thinks he and everything he does is top priority.

Exaggerated achievments and talents. While Richard Heene is certainly highly intellegent, his ideas have not attracted much interest in the scientific community and he is generally viewed as a mad scientist. He says his balloon may one day help people commute to work-that’s quite a stretch.

Is preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, beauty, intelligence, or ideal love. While again, we cannot go inside his head, but Heene certainly represents near delusional ideas about the potential of his projects.

Has unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment. Did he really think creating an emotional roller coaster for us based on a Hoax would get him favorable treatment? Did he really think Wolf Blitzer would treat him with hero worship and not ask hard questions to get at the truth?

Requires constant attention and admiration. It would seem from his love of media coverage that this is indeed the case.

Disregards the feelings of others, lacks empathy. This one is obvious, he sacrificed his children’s emotional health being to pursue his warped sense of stardom.

Has obsessive self-interest. See all of above.

Pursues mainly selfish goals. While Richard Heene may pretend all of his storm chasing etc. is for the sake of science and to educate his kids, it seems pretty clear that his goal is fame for himself.

I should say here that this is my opinion of Richard Heene’s mental status and is not a proffesional diagnosis. If I am right I hope he will seek help and will stop harming his family.