Miranda Devine, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull, and the age of preening narcissists

(Above: oh go look in a mirror, under thirty dummy).

Thank the lord I finally know how to deal with anyone under thirty if they approach me for some reason.

You might think it's enough to carry a wooden cross, or at least make the sign of the cross, or pack a silver bullet, or perhaps a clove of garlic and a little holy water in a bottle. It's like acid to them, that distilled essence of goodness.

But I think a healthy shouted bit of abuse will be enough. How about this?

Begone vile narcissist, get you gone from my presence, you preening coxcomb prat.

And who's helped me to understand the young? Why none other than Miranda the Devine, who has taken Brendan Nelson's psychological analysis of Malcolm Turnbull to its logical conclusion in Face it, we are all narcissists now:

Nelson has good reason to be critical of Turnbull. But his diagnosis could equally apply to most people aged under 30, to politicians, entertainers, lawyers, business people and, no doubt, to a good number of byline-chasing journalists.

You see! Not that Miranda or I are in any way into pop psychology or intergenerational judgment, but you know I look at young people, anyone under thirty, and they seem well like preening narcissists. Look at the way they have youthful bodies, and move with ease or dress in outrageously attractive ways because they're young and can get away with it.

How I hate their self-regard, and their arrogance and certainty and I "suck on it old dude and dude-ess" air, and that certainly applies to most people under 30. Sure a few ugly ones aren't narcissist in the obvious way, but even the geeks and nerds have a preening self-regard for their ability to sort out a kernel panic. As for the goths and the emos, have you ever seen such self-regarding Emily Bronte types, with their inclination to suicide so 'me, me, look at me' and emotionally selfish.

Everyone's a potential narcissist these days, as 15 minutes of fame has become a 24/7 proposition. For instance, the average Australian woman is said to spend at least 3 ½ hours looking at herself in the mirror each week, according to a survey last month by the Bureau of Statistics.

Yep, it had to be the women. Little princesses preening in front of a mirror each week, unless you're wondering how you might describe the behavior of the little man in the corner in the bathroom with a stopwatch working out that it was three and a half hours for each woman in the survey. Sick voyeuristic stalking gratification by statisticians? Skewed by a few self-regarding commentariat columnists?

Of course it wouldn't be an in depth study unless the scandal du jour was dragged into the analysis:

The 26-year-old mistress of the recently resigned NSW Health Minister, John Della Bosca, appears to have diagnosed her "spunky" former lover with similar symptoms, telling The Daily Telegraph: ''I now realise … he liked me being in love with him because it was all about ego … It is incredulous [sic] that he thought the way he treated people would not have consequences.''

That's narcissists for you. They never see the karma train coming.

Well we'll see about the karma train, because now the woman's name is out in the public arena, and she's already copped a bizarre psychological analysis from Janet Hall, a Melbourne-based clinical psychologist who has probably never met the woman but who nonetheless - on the basis of her ramblings in the Daily Terror, decided that she was predatory, delusional and at risk of ruining her life (Mistress who dumped Della 'predatory': psychologist). Of course she needs counselling. Will the work of psychologists urging counselling ever be done? May Freud and his bounty be blessed for ever and ever amen.

But back to the Devine, so that we can understand that the narcissists who now walk and work amongst us are much larger in number that the vampires and zombies we so rightly fear:

What's more, narcissism is on the increase, becoming a pervasive condition of society, according to two American psychologists, Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, who published a book this year, The Narcissism Epidemic.They include a long-term study of 37,000 American college students, in which the incidence of narcissistic personality traits increased on a scale rivalling obesity, accelerating in the past decade.

In 1982, 15 per cent of students scored highly for narcissistic personality traits. By 2006 the percentage had climbed to 25. Twenge claims only 12 per cent of students in the 1950s agreed with the statement ''I am an important person''; by the late 1980s that percentage had climbed to 80. The reason for the explosion in narcissism in recent years, according to the Melbourne adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg, is not just the self-esteem movement but poor parenting.

Yep, you might think you're important, but really that's just in your own self-deluded lunchtime. Actually you're nothing, a nobody, a very unimportant person, a speck of dust on a remote planet revolving around a minor star in a corner of a rather large galaxy which is in turn just a mote in the eye of the universe.

Before leaving the house today, please recite at least ten times "I am a very unimportant person". And if you're under thirty, triple the dose please (and lawyers, and entertainers and politicians and business people and journalists, but not of course psychologists who only need to say it once).

At least you might be able to feel important about your unimportance. But let's get back to the poor parenting. I think we can all take that as a sign that baby boomers have failed dismally, and their spawn have produced tadpoles which are the blight of loon pond, what with the self indulgent croaking and the self regard, and the bizarre expectation that they will transform from frogs into princes and princesses:

"Parents are becoming increasingly self absorbed [believing] 'the single most important thing in the world is for me to work like a dog to get the house, the car and the holiday house' and don't … realise all their kids want is to be loved and to have one-on-one time with their parents.'' He says an "epidemic of poor parenting" is to blame for a drastic rise in psychological problems in young people. "Generation Y is being ravaged by depression, anxiety disorders and stress disorders."

Well thank the lord that materialism has nothing to do with the capitalist system, as espoused by the Devine, with its constant emphasis on the marketplace, constant growth, the price of shares and the eternal dilemma of the prime interest rate. Because you see, it's genetic first:

For narcissistic personality disorder to take root, a person has to be born with a genetic "template" for over-sensitivity and over-reactivity. "Then something has to happen."

And then it's environmental:

Carr-Gregg says parental abandonment, coupled with invalidation of the child's corresponding emotional pain, triggers the disorder. "If you grew up in an environment with time-poor parents, you are brought up in a Lord of the Flies [type of] emotional silo by other disaffected young people. It's the psychologically blind leading the blind.

"I see … kids who are overindulged from a very early age … and become incapable of delayed gratification. When I meet these kids in later life they tend to exaggerate their achievements and talents, tend to believe they are special and unique and interesting. They require excessive amounts of admiration and if they don't get it, they'll wipe you off the face of the planet."

You know, like becoming PM or leader of the opposition is such an under-achievement, such an exaggeration of talent, that it's almost obscene that those two gherkins should require excessive amounts of admiration. But hey I'm suddenly terrified because if we don't worship our fearless leaders, they're going to wipe us off the face of the planet. Like we're suddenly trapped in Lord of the Flies, and they'll smash up my glasses and use my body as a punching bag.

Carr-Gregg - who coincidentally was three years behind Turnbull at Sydney Grammar - won't comment publicly on the Nelson diagnosis.

But, along with the psychometrician Simon Kinsella, he is working on a series of psychological profiles of famous Australians for an upcoming book, to identify personality structure and psychopathology in different professions, from politicians and journalists to creative artists and sports people.

What a pity there's no mention of psychologists and psychiatrists and the class war between those two bunches of mental health experts.

Never mind, I'm sure a pill or two will fix what ails us all. Must rush off for a script now.

"I would give anything to do Malcolm Turnbull," he says. It's one way for Turnbull to prove Nelson wrong.

Sigh. So now Malcolm Turnbull has to sit down and go through a shrink fest to prove Brendan Nelson wrong. All this from a clever put down by Nelson which the Devine herself announced was a delicious diagnosis by a fallen rival with an axe to grind (with her only good line, Brendan's own case study involving "post-traumatic embitterment syndrome", borrowed from the filthy intertubes).

You'd hope it was a game. The Devine says it is, right at the start of her column:

Let's play a game: who doesn't have narcissistic personality disorder in our self-obsessed age? A surfeit of self-love is almost a prerequisite for success now, and the proliferation of egomaniac sites, from Twitter and MySpace to Facebook and YouTube, make the peer pressure to be grandiose and irrationally self-confident almost irresistible.

See! I told you the intertubes were filthy, a psychological nightmare, a deep endless pit without light from which you never return.

Yet by the end of her column, you have to believe that the Devine actually believes a narcissist plague is sweeping the globe with Napoleonic fervor, with the Devine's damning everyone under thirty as narcissists and everyone over thirty for making them so.

Thereby allowing the Devine to ride off into the sunset having pronounced the end of the world in yet another and new form - psychopathological.

Yep, she's right as usual. I see I have some trouble-makers in the corner of the pond, making trouble for all us terribly unimportant people going about our terribly unimportant lives. While we happy helots and slaves head off to work, hoping to get together enough of a grubstake to ensure we can afford psychoanalysis for these next thirty years or so, the lazy sods are staring into the water again ... and of course they're under thirty, worried if the obesity epidemic is going to end their good looks and a career as a porn star on the intertubes ...

(Above: section of Echo and Narcissus painting by John William Waterhouse, 1903. Below: a terribly self-indulgent cartoon which perhaps only someone over thirty could understand).