Sadly, his cognitive development never progressed beyond early adolescence, and therefore he suffers from numerous stunted cognitive and personality traits that make him difficult to communicate with and just a miserable person to be around. His original post in this thread for example demonstrates infantile egocentric thinking -- not in the colloquial sense, but in the clinical sense -- in that he doesn't understand that other people don't know his frame of mind or what he is thinking, therefore he has no need to explain his out-of-the-blue statements. This is commonly seen in three-year-olds, but is usually outgrown by age four. Not so with him. This leaves him in a perpetual state of imaginary audience ("a state where an individual imagines and believes that multitudes of people are enthusiastically listening to or watching him or her") which is usually outgrown in late adolescence. Unfortunately, his cognitive development was permanently stunted and never progressed beyond that. The consequences of growing into an adult with his stunted emotional and cognitive development led to a formal, official psychiatric diagnosis that he suffers from the Spotlight Effect ("phenomenon in which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are"), illusions of transparency ("tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which their personal mental state is known by others") and control ("tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events"). I asked a top psychiatrist what moment-to-moment existence might be like for someone that cognitively distorted, and he said "similar to walking around looking through the wrong end of binoculars and hearing the screeching violin sound from Psycho in a perpetual loop in your head." He's been like this for many years now, accomplishing nothing, swaying nobody, reduced to angrily lashing out at random, anonymous people on quiet chatboards. His is a very sad life. Hopefully he'll leave here and move on with something more productive instead of staying in his miserable rut. Icarus |