Disturbing the Disturbed: Empathy, Where Art Thou?

Unfortunately, the post I wish to make is not fully researched yet... this can be blamed on three things:
The first thing, is my uni work.
The second thing is that I have over 40 links to go through.
The third thing is that of those 40 links I have to extract the useful information from the piles of "mean narcissists" pages. I have found no less than 3 blogs that explicitly state their contempt for narcissists.

To clarify, I am not a narcissist. While I am fairly vain and rather proud, I have other characteristics that definitely don't fit the criteria as well as missing key parts.
In my posts I try to be objective - which is why I stick to medical journals and Wikipedia... more so towards the former. I'm not going "if someone has this, stay clear", I'm trying to be informative as to what these terms actually mean - hence why I try to include both the good, the bad, and the difficulties faced by sufferers (also a few statistics never hurt).

However, after reading "X" number of pages with titles like "Narcissists Suck" (which I am only enduring to see if they have anything the journals don't) one begins to see a very large "them versus us" mentality. I found a similar thing when I researched Borderline Personality Disorder.
(Not to mention the number of pages where the author declares they will use "narcissist" and "psychopath" interchangeably which, to borrow a phrase from my sibling, makes me want to rip their heads off.)

This is a sample bias - people don't tend to talk about something if they're happy with it. My very first statistics unit taught me this, which is why voluntary participation is a nuisance. The people who know "normal" people with mental disorders won't speak up because they're content, only the ones with bad experiences will.

Psychologists are still trying to figure out narcissism and are not sure what causes it yet. People who suffer from personality disorders and other mental illnesses are not to blame for their disorder - just because someone has a disorder it doesn't mean they'll play up to the the "evil insane person" image that is so prominant.

Take sociopaths for instance: one of their symptoms is a lack of empathy. They're not all going to use this to hurt people! Most of them will "just" have a hard time getting on in society - it hurts the sufferer, not the "sane people". There's a reason why I call them sufferers and not beneficiaries!
Admittedly some of the mentally ill channel their tendencies into less than socially beneficial activities, but then so do "sane" people!

Anyone else noticed the irony that while narcissists and sociopaths are reviled for not having empathy a lot of the "normal sane people" who have empathy don't even want to try and sympathize with them? And television's no help: any character who isn't the main one who sympathizes with the "villain" is guaranteed to be dead within half an hour - we're being told that it isn't acceptable to try to understand. It's a big reason why I don't watch crime dramas with my mum - eventually some mentally ill person will be cast as the criminal and it'll lead to an argument. (I'm not saying I defend every mentally ill criminal, but some of them are just heartbreaking.)
My sibling is on board with this - we actually had a nice long conversation on the matter after a TV cop sneered "typical narcissist" - as though the guy woke up one day and said "Hey, you know what would be really fun? Being a narcissist." The cop's statement was especially jarring because the main murder in the episode was committed by a "sane" woman in complete cold blood - she wasn't even sad that she murdered the wrong person: "They looked the same from behind" was her justification.

Hell there are people with "empathy" who don't care to know about people's problems when it doesn't directly involve them - even a few who don't want to know when it does involve them.
Actually, here's a blog post that mentions the Milgram experiment. 65% of the participants would electrocute someone with 450V because they were told to, and the 35% that didn't still did some electrocuting and never checked on the "slow-learner". Wait! It gets better. They did variations on the study and tested how compliance went depending on the subject's proximity to the experimenter and found that compliance decreased to 30% when the subject had to physically move the person's hand onto the shockplate. My sentiments? That's right - 30% of people are willing to do that. Fun fact: 30% of the population are not sociopaths, so those were "sane" people.

(Before someone brings up my sampling bias again I will mention that subjects were not told that they would be playing Zeus when they signed up - just that they would be particpating in a learning thing. So, no we didn't just get sadists sign up.)

Tell me, where's this empathy thing again? Because I'm failing to see it.

How are they better than a sociopath who cannot feel empathy even if they wanted to? Doesn't that strike you as sad - a barrier that they just aren't able to cross?

Whatever happened to compassion? You can be compassionate without being stupid, it's not hard.

... and now I'm ranting when I should be researching. Well... maybe this was informative. Maybe... to the readers who are not the one who already knows this rant... and who made a post strikingly similar to this now that I think about it. However since I held this belief prior to meeting them it... [appropriate end of sentence which I am too tired to think of right now].
Ah, well, this is my rant done in my way (read: more sarcasm, sneering, and fist-shaking most likely) at 1:30am. Next week I shall have a proper post.

All I can say is that if this is how badly people are reacting to narcissists I am not looking forward to researching for the sociopath and psychopath post...