 Over the years I've been invited to write entries about mental health and psychology in various online encyclopedias and apps. So I wrote dozens of entries for the open site encyclopedia, the exterm medical dictionary and others. And then I assembled these definitions into a mental health dictionary. Mental health dictionary is available on my website, but now I'm converting it into a project. Every two, three days I post an image on my Instagram account, narcissism with Vaknin. Each image contains a definition. If you collect these images, over time you will end up having a mental health dictionary of your own. Another thing I'm going to do, I'm going to record these definitions on video, letter by letter. Today's letter is, surprisingly, the letter A. Then I'm going to put all the letters together, all these videos together, into a single video, a mental health dictionary. So you could download these videos, letter by letter, or you could wait for the ultimate product. All the letters combined in a single mental health dictionary. As I said, today's letter is the letter A. My name is Sam Vaknin, I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and a member of the faculty of CIAPS, Commonwealth for International Advanced Professional Studies. And let's get right on to the definitions. We start with acting out. Acting out is a defense mechanism. When an angiogenic inner emotional conflict, for example a dissonance, most often experienced as frustration. So when such a conflict is communicated via behavioral aggression, we call it acting out. Acting out involves little or no insight. Foresight, impulse control, self-awareness, or self-reflection. It is often dissociative. It is sometimes intended to attract attention and to disrupt other people's lives. It's an aggressive act. Next definition, affect. Affect is how we experience our innermost feelings and how other people observe and interpret our expressions. Affect is characterized by the type of emotion involved, sadness, happiness, anger, etc. and by the intensity of the expression. Some people have flat affect. They maintain a poker face, monotonous, immobile, apparently unmoved. This is typical of schizoid personality disorder and some psychopaths. Others have blunted, constricted, or broad, healthy affect. Patients with dramatic, erratic, cluster B personality disorders, especially histrionic and borderline, have exaggerated and labile, changeable affect. They are drama queens. In certain mental health disorders, the affect is inappropriate. For instance, such people laugh when they recount a sad or horrifying event, or when they find themselves in morbid settings, for example, in a funeral. Laughing at a funeral is an example of an inappropriate affect. Ambivalence. Possessing equipment, but opposing and conflicting emotions or ideas. It's not a cognitive dissonance. A cognitive dissonance requires resolution. Ambivalence is there. In someone with a permanent state of inner turmoil, her emotions come in mutually exclusive pairs, love and hate for example, her thoughts and conclusions arrayed in contradictory diodes. The result is extreme indecision to the point of utter paralysis and inaction. Sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorders and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder are highly ambivalent, for example. Next, amnesia, anterograde amnesia. A loss of memory pertaining to events that occurred after the onset of the amnetic condition or agent. And this is as opposed to retrograde amnesia, a loss of memory pertaining to events that occurred before the onset of the amnetic condition or the agent. Amok. Amok is a male-specific culture-bound syndrome, an alternating pattern of dissociation, brooding and violence directed at objects and people. It is provoked by real or imagined criticism and slights and accompanied by persecutory ideation, amnesia, automatism and extreme fatigue. Sometimes it co-occurs with psychotic episodes. It is common in Malaysia, where it had been discovered, Laos, Philippines, Polynesia, where it is called Kaffar or Kathar, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, where it's called Maldepilea, and among the Navajo, Native Americans, where it is called Icha. I hope I'm pronouncing all this right. Next entry, anhedonia. The loss of the urge to seek pleasure and the ability to experience pleasure. Oops, I scrolled way too far up. So anhedonia is the loss of the urge to seek pleasure and the ability to experience pleasure. Major depression and schizophrenia often involve anhedonia. The patient is unable to conjure sufficient mental energy to get off the couch and do something, because he or she finds everything equally boring, tedious and unattractive. Sounds like the modern condition. Anorexia, a diminished appetite to the point of refraining from eating altogether. Whether it is part of a depressive illness or a body dysmorphic disorder, an erroneous perception of one's body as too fat, this is still being debated. It is also perceived as a control mechanism, an attempt to reassert control over one's life. Anorexia is one of a family of eating disorders, which also includes bulimia, the compulsive gorging on food, and then its forced purging, usually bivomiting. Bon appetit. Next, antisocial personality disorder, a.k.a. psychopathy, or is it? Antisocial personality disorder was formerly called psychopathy or more colloquially sociopathy. Some scholars, such as Robert Hare, still distinguish psychopathy from near antisocial behavior. They advocate for a separate diagnosis of psychopathy. The disorder of antisocial personality disorder appears in early adolescence, but criminal behavior and substance abuse abate with age, usually by the fourth or fifth decade of life. Antisocial personality disorder may have a genetic or hereditary determinant in brain and physiological abnormalities. It afflicts mainly men. The diagnosis is controversial and regarded by some scholars as scientifically unfounded, not a clinical entity. Psychopaths often regard other people as objects to be manipulated in instruments of gratification and utility. They have no discernible conscience. Psychopaths are devoid of empathy, and this is very similar to narcissism. They find it difficult to perceive other people's non-verbal cues, needs, emotions, or preferences akin to autistic spectrum disorder, but they're endowed with cold empathy, cognitive and reflexive empathy, which allows them to gauge the motivations and vulnerabilities of other people properly. Consequently, the psychopath rejects other people's rights and his commensurate achievements and obligations. The psychopath is impulsive, reckless, irresponsible, and unable to postpone gratification. He often rationalizes his behavior, showing an utter absence of remorse for hurting and defrauding others. Charming Fellow to cut a long story short. The psychopath's primitive defense mechanisms include splitting or dichotomous thinking. Psychopaths view the world and people in it as all good or all evil. Projection. Psychopaths attribute their own shortcomings to others and projective identification. Psychopaths force others to behave in the way they expect them to or want them to. The psychopath fails to comply with social norms, hence the criminal acts, the deceitfulness, the identity theft, the use of aliases, the constant lying, and the conning of even his nearest and dearest for gain and pleasure. Psychopaths are goal-oriented, but unreliable, and do not honor their undertakings, obligations, contracts, and responsibilities. Psychopaths rarely hold a job for long or repay their debts. They are unstable, vindictive, remorseless, ruthless, driven, dangerous, aggressive, violent, irritable, and sometimes prone to magical thinking. They're highly dangerous and unsafe. They seldom plan for the long and medium terms, believing themselves to be immune to the consequences of their own actions, however adverse and imminent. Next entry. Anxiety. A kind of unpleasant, dysphoric, mild fear with no apparent external reason. A prehension or dread in anticipation of a future menace or an imminent but diffuse and unspecified danger. Usually imagined or exaggerated. The mental state of anxiety and the concomitant hypervigilance has physiological compliments. It is accompanied by short-term dysphoria and physical symptoms of stress and tension. Such as sweating, palpitations, tachycardia, hyperventilation, angina, tense muscle tone, and elevated blood pressure. All in all, the state of arousal. Aphonia. Aphonia is the inability to produce speech or sounds through the larynx due to psychological, non-organic reasons. Next entry. And there's a video dedicated to it, by the way, on my channel. Autistic or Deereistic thinking. These are ways of relating to reality, to experience, to logic, and to other people. Fantasy-infused thoughts are Deereism. Narcissistic and egocentric self-absorption is Autistic thinking. These patients' illogical and idiosyncratic cognitions derive from an overarching or pervasive daydreaming of fantasy life. They infuse people and events around them with completely subjective meanings. They regard the external world as an extension or projection of the internal one. And this is, of course, very reminiscent of pathological narcissism. Such patients often withdraw completely and retreat into their inner private realm, unavailable to communicate and to interact with others. Automatic obeisance or obedience. Automatic, unquestioning, excessive, uncritical, mechanical, and immediate obeisance of all commands, requests, and suggestions made by other people. Even the most manifestly absurd and dangerous ones. This suspension of critical judgment is sometimes an indication of incipient catatonia. Avoidant personality disorder. Social shyness and social anxiety coupled with feelings of inadequacy, deformity, and dysfunction, and with hypersensitivity to criticism real or imagined. Sufferers of the disorder avoid interpersonal contact because they dread rejection, embarrassment, disagreement, and disapproval. They strive to ascertain that their counterparty likes them and approves of their conduct, of their choices, before they actually meet them. Avoidants prefer solitary occupations and they are very restrained and called in intimate relationships. They constrict, limit their world, evade challenges and risks, and stunt their personal growth and development by avoiding anything and everything new. Unfamiliar people, novel activities or pursuits exiting the comfort zone. People with avoidant personality disorder are mortified by shame and by the possibility of being mocked, criticized, rejected, humiliated, or ridiculed in public. They are prone to having ideas of reference. They are perceived by others as reserved, timid, and inhibited because they regard themselves as socially inept, repellent, unattractive, inferior, inadequate, dysfunctional, defective, or deformed. Some avoidants even develop body dysmorphic disorders. Finally, a last entry in the letter A is abolition. Inability to initiate goals and goal-oriented activities, to pursue them once initiated. It's an overpowering and pervasive lack of will, perseverance and stamina in various fields of life, work, self-care, intellectual tasks and interests, family life, etc. And this concludes the letter A. Go to my Instagram, collect the definitions, make yourself a gift, mental health dictionary. Alternatively, you can go to my website and view the whole dictionary in its entirety and I'm going to make videos with each letter separately and in a single video with all the legends. So, go to the description for links to my Instagram, links to the mental health dictionary, etc., etc. and have fun with these appetizing tidbits of the human mind or what's left of it.