Is it narcissistic to spend 30 minutes out of a hectic day filling out a quiz entitled “Dr Drew's Narcissistic Personality Inventory Test”?

If so, Americans are in big trouble: they can't seem to get enough of this 40-step questionnaire on the topic of self-love that has been circulating throughout the narcissphere for the past week or so. Having said that, of course, if taking a narcissism test is worrying in itself, what does that say about someone who takes a narcissism test and then writes about themselves taking a narcissism test in column?

Actually, don't answer that question.

The quiz was devised by Dr Drew - full name, Drew Pinsky - along with the academic S. Mark Young, as part of the research for their book, The Mirror Effect: How Celebrity Narcissism is Seducing America. The authors claim that the average score for the general population is 15.3 while the average score for a celebrity is 17.8. This, they argue (a little shakily), proves that celebrities don't become narcissists, but that narcissists become celebrities - perhaps because fame fills the empty void where their souls should be, and because an inability to experience empathy tends to help when it comes to a career in television.

Nevertheless, the authors are keen to reassure people that scoring high “doesn't mean you have a disorder, or that you're a good or a bad person”. This is lucky for me: I scored 17, which means that pretty soon I'll be ready for my first tabloid lesbian fling.

Perhaps the most interesting - or rather, troubling - contention in Dr Drew's book is that human beings are “social learners”, which means that we tend to mimic the behaviour we observe in others. And because the narcissism of celebrities is so painstakingly documented and celebrated these days, our children are being taught that the symptoms of what was once considered a rather tragic personality disorder are entirely normal. Hence the phenomena of “Octomom”, the mother of the California octuplets, and the employees of the bankrupt insurance group AIG who believe they are worth $165 million in bonuses.

All of which is plausible enough. But there's one problem: while Dr Drew is busy accusing society of glamorising a destructive mental illness, he also hosts a reality show on VH1 entitled Celebrity Rehab with Dr Drew. Which gives me the feeling that when it comes to self-serving media hogs who like to manipulate for their own gain, Dr Drew knows of what he speaks.

Mirror image

Another problem with the Narcissistic Personality Inventory Test: it's almost laughably easy to guess which answers are going to result in a high score, so it would be easy to rig the result if you were feeling a bit delicate about the number of times you'd googled your own name recently.

Question number 29, for example, asks you to agree with one of the following statements: a) I like to look at myself in the mirror, or b) I am not particularly interested in looking at myself in the mirror. A true narcissist, being a shifty, exploitative sort (with no feelings), would presumably answer “b” in the hope that a low score would make him or her more loveable and thus more likely to gain the compliments and/or adulation of others.

Without prompting

Quibbles aside, I'd be genuinely interested to see where, say, Barack Obama ranks on the 1-40 score. The man just cannot get enough media attention - and the more he messes it up (insulting the disabled, giggling while discussing bailouts, reading the wrong speeches) the more he seems to crave it, presumably because he's convinced that the more we see of him, the more we'll love him. Someone needs to give him the uncomfortable news: as much as we all know that politicians are prone to the N-word, when your teleprompter gets its own blog (baracksteleprompter.blogspot.com - very amusing), it's time to lay low for a bit.

Russian revolution

Speaking of jobs that tend to attract self-absorbed types, I attended a grand luncheon a few days ago with Valery Gergiev, the Russian conductor and principal stick-waver of the London Symphony Orchestra. Gergiev, known for his Wimbledon-style grunting at the podium, is a truly terrifying sight in the flesh - imagine Tony Soprano's stockier, stubblier and generally less cuddly-looking half-brother. The man is also fiercely patriotic: soon after Vladimir Putin waged war against Georgia, Gergiev conducted a defiant concert in the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, for an audience that included Russian soldiers standing on tanks.

Thankfully he was in Los Angeles under rather less intense circumstances: to play two-nights with the LSO at the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Orange County, as part of a US itinerary entitled The Prokofiev World Tour. Still, Gergiev's Putin-like force of personality can occasionally become a little unsettling. When asked how the tour was going thus far, for example, he growled: “The London Symphony is performing very well as a Russian orchestra now.”

Feast on that one, Dr Drew.

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