A while back I said to somebody

[conuly]

that many autistics I know seem to have at least one narcissistic* parent. (Edit: It's more specific. The ones I'm thinking of have one narcissistic and one probably-autistic parent. I didn't think of it because, duh, you expect autistics to have autistic parents.) And then I went back and edited to say "anecdotally".

And ever since then it's been percolating in my mind. Is this some sort of fluke of the autistics I know, or is it a legit trend? Am I perhaps in my mind blowing up a couple of people into a pattern that doesn't even really exist among people I know?

Hard to say. Has anybody else noticed this, or do you think I'm full of it here?

Edit: I crossposted here and you may want to read Lucy's comment. Additionally, google suggests other people have noticed this trend. And I had to wade through a lot of shitty "is autism really narcissism????" links to find anything useful, so you can thank me for that!

I need better numbers. It's all well and good to say "I think you're wrong, only 10% of the autistics I know are in this situation", but if only 3% of non-autistics with no autistic siblings have a narcissistic parent, well, that's your correlation right there. But I just pulled those numbers out of my butt because I don't have numbers.

Maybe I should go back to google with better search terms.

* Here used in the more informal sense of "unpleasant and/or actually abusive with these character traits" rather than a strictly clinical sense, though I imagine there is some very strong overlap.

Comments

[conuly]

Indeed. And this one is not anecdata, though anecdata is how I noticed it. (Almost all my transgender friends are on the spectrum.) There are legit studies about this.

I'm scared to try to look up for actual studies about this one I'm asking about, though, because of the strong tendency for people to try to conflate autism and sociopathy due to a wild misunderstanding of the concept of empathy.