"Its not me, its your disorder."

The other day, two of my ex boyfriends got together and discussed their mutual tragedy; once, they had been dating me. One of them sent me an email, explaining that he has decided that the reason we don't get along isn't because we aren't compatible; Rather, its because we both have 'personality disorders'. He went on to explain that I have "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" and he has "Codependency Issues". He then linked me to an online resource where I could take some diagnostic test to determine whether or not I have NPD.
He has no background in psychology, or neuroscience, or (if you ask me) self reflection. But he has no qualms whatsoever with diagnosing me as disordered. In fact, if I have a disorder, really all of the terrible things about me (I broke up with him, for example) are put comfortably into perspective. Initially, I found this pretty hurtful. I took his argument at least a little bit seriously, and tried to decide if there was any merit to his statement. I then stressed over which was more indicative of NPD - immediately deciding that I don't have it, or self consciously obsessing over whether or not I do? Therein I became "meta-disordered".
And really, the most hilarious part of this - is that if I do have the disorder, than no matter what I do, it is disordered behavior. Because, if you can act in such a way so as to not be behaving as disordered... then it isn't a disorder, its a lifestyle choice, right? So in conclusion - I don't have NPD, I am just a 21 year old girl. Both are labels which justify some set of actions, no?
Then I thought more deeply about the motivations behind establishing that someone has a disorder. My uncle and aunt both have schizophrenia - this disorder exists because it usually renders individuals tragically incapable of 'fitting in' to society. It is important that they be diagnosed so that, broadly, society knows how to deal with them. When my aunt goes running naked down the street in the middle of winter, you shouldn't tear your clothes off and follow her - because she's crazy. You can't share in her experience, you're not "one of them". And besides, its illegal! Likewise, my ex boyfriends diagnosing me with NPD was a way for them to 'deal with' me - to not obtain much of an understanding of me, or the situation we were in, but rather to establish that this understanding can't be achieved - my actions were always biased by a fundamental tendency towards irrational behavior, which is why none of their extremely effective arguments were successful at convincing me that we should stay together, construct an idyllic marriage and live happily ever after. (I wonder if they thought we could have some kind of alternative, futuristic 'threesome' marriage?)

I have been very self conscious of a potential propensity towards various 'disorders' since I was rather young. My schizophrenic aunt would call me sometimes and explain to me that I was the only one in the family that she 'trusted' - this is when she was deciding to go off of her meds. I was extremely scared of the possibility that one day I would just entirely lose my selfness. Or of another possibility; that already, this selfness was inexorably intertwined into a budding insanity that would render me wholly incompatible with the world - unless, of course, I took a slew of personality-alterting anti psychotics, again robbing me of some fundamental meness. Akin to the fear of death is the fear of not recognising yourself, of feeling no connection to your own history which is imbedded in the world around you and the people you share your world with - I thought, perhaps due to the encouragement of my father, that if I just understood genetics and neuroscience, I could either cure schizophrenia or just "think my way out of it".
I still find there is no resolution to the paradox - the best I can do, as an individual, is have faith in my conscious self - I have to believe that I am not 'locked in', because if I am, then I'm kinda screwed. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, drug addiction, severe depression, multiple sclerosis, breast cancer, and more, these are the things I am supposedly genetically predisposed towards, and that I have been environmentally exposed to.

What I believe to some extent is that my ex boyfriends determining that I have a disorder based on their 'evidence' is not unlike modern science. Here is why:

The nematode worm C. Elegans has about 300 neurons. Human's have billions. In a laboratory, humans can model a nematode worm which effectively passes the nematode worm version of the turing test (kind of. They didn't ask the other nematode worms if they were convinced.) As far as humans are concerned, this modeled nematode does everything a real worm can do.

Paradoxically, in spite of the simplicity of this organism, what scientists cannot do is consistently predict the next action of an existing nematode worm; and the truth is, no one knows why. What this does is basically spit in the face of determinism. If we cannot even predict this tiny little worm's actions - are we, in our species' life time, ever going to construct a deterministic mapping of a human, assuming we are actually deterministic?

Ultimately we do not know why people (or worms) make most of the decisions they do on a daily basis. Every single hypothesis is just that - conjecture, not truth. We do not know "the genetic contribution" to a child's development versus "environmental" (and separating the two is perhaps absurd.). The interaction of our genes is complex beyond the understanding of modern science. The interaction of the individual with the environment, factoring in things like memory storage, cultural 'memes', - is infintely more complex. Pinker is a pop-scientist whose objective is to lubricate society in favor of scientific 'progress' - which I more or less think is a good thing. But he is inevitably engaging in a biased social analysis every time he tries to explain the "meaning" of his interpretation of a scientific study.

So really, I just want to quote Latour, again, for the third time in this course (sorry x_x):
"Your effort to establish facts has been taken hostage in a tired old dispute about how best to control the people."

Who and what does your or my interpretation and subsequent conclusion ultimately serve? Why might the scientist or the ex boyfriend or anyone for that matter want to believe a particular thing about the world? Not to say that the ideas expressed shouldn't be considered carefully - but they shouldn't be inducted into the halls of 'truth' without some rigorous analysis.