There have been many, many articles like this, and I think they have little value except the glorification of psychopaths. The term "psychopath" is fascinating to many, due to the cultural references linked to it. However psychopathy has never been clearly defined in the DSM. Maybe it's just a combination of other disorders (autism + NPD ?), maybe it's a separate disorder waiting to be discovered. Either way, nothing to be fascinated about.
The bits of the transcript about having to wear a mask in order to function, having to internalize algorithms of human behavior that are totally unintuitive, and realizing that one’s deepest interpersonal instincts are out of sync with the rest of your kin remind me strongly of some individuals I’ve known with Aspergers/severe ADHD.<p>Additionally, her descriptions of not feeling fear, processing emotions at a lower intensity level than others, needing constant stimulation, and having a cognitive, but not truly emotional, understanding of romantic love and empathy ring true to my experience knowing these people.<p>I wonder if there is a legitimate grey zone at which these disorders overlap.<p>Or, alternatively, maybe my friend is just a psychopath.
Makes me wonder if a society of 100% psychopaths could function or would fall apart. In that society, there would be no reason to wear a mask and pretend. Everyone feels (or fails to feel) basically the same way. If you knew that anyone would take advantage of you given the opportunity, then how does society function?<p>Kind of like how the Dark Mirror Universe in Star Trek managed to get so far.
Judging by how many people in this comment thread identify with the traits described in the article, it probably just shows that those traits are pretty ordinary, just a facet of the normal diversity of humanity, and have probably been with us forever.<p>The true problems of recent societies might in fact be overdiagnosis and Hollywood-style oversimplifications, not the traits themselves. Not everyone needs to be hyper emphatic (though we probably need a great number of such individual to keep our societies cohesive).<p>In other words, don't judge, do live and let live, defend yourself and people around you if attacked. Don't watch TV.
Similar discussion from 5 months ago about an 2014 article:<p>"Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath (2014)"<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584565" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584565</a> (122 comments)
> they’re convinced their ex is a psychopath, when really their ex was just a toxic, awful person. There are millions of those, and they’re everywhere, and they come from every neurotype.<p>That's the most interesting quote I find. It poses a paradox. What makes a person awful and toxic? Are there common personality traits to this? Are there biological causes?<p>Do we need a new pathology for this? Toxipath?<p>She later mentions this:<p>> I think it’s important to hold people responsible for their actions, not brain formation. People make choices. Psychopathy is not an excuse, and it’s definitely not a reason why someone does bad things.<p>So what are those reasons then? And what are those bad things? And what mechanism governs one's choices?<p>It does seem to me like psychopaths, by definition, lack all natural controls which would allow them to know what the bad things are and that they shouldn't choose to do them.<p>Thus, they need social controls instead. Like, society has to make it easier to achieve her goals through good means, and make it very hard to do so through bad means. Otherwise she has no means of containment. She does not fear, she does not rejoice. She does not regret or feel guilt. She does not hope and dream.<p>That said, what are her goals? What drives a psychopath? Adrenaline rush alone? That's what she hints at.<p>Finally, I noticed the quoted doctor goes out of his way to mention a spectrum. And that he'd only classify of psychopath the more extreme cases, at the far end of it. For those, he says all four traits must be clearly demonstrated. And those by definition mention:<p>> take pleasure in hurting others<p>> are physically aggressive<p>Which are arguably at the top of the list for "bad things".<p>So purely from the quoted doctor, if she does not have those traits, she's probably not high enough on the spectrum to be labeled a psychopath. At least not based on the quoted doctor's diagnostic model.
> I have no comprehenion of why people enjoy opioids. We also can’t get addicted to things because of the way our brain works. There are psychopaths that use drugs, but you can cut them off cold turkey and they will not have any withdrawal. They don’t have any cravings, and they can just go on with their day like it was nothing.<p>This is the first time I've seen it explained by someone else but it's how I feel all the time. Makes me wonder...
I find the concept of not being able to feel fear quite interesting. I've always seen fear/anxiety as an emotion that is automatically bundled with the ability to imagine a possibly bad outcome for a given situation someone is in. If that is true, then not being able to feel fear would mean not being able to imagine this outcome, or not caring about the outcome - neither of which seem to be the case for psychopaths. The outcomes they want might be totally different than what might be considered normal, but they still desire them - why doesn't the thought of not being able to get what they want generate at least some degree of fear?
It could be that I'm totally mistaken about the origins of the emotion of fear, in which case it would be refreshing to view another take on it.
I liked this. It offers hope. Bleak hope, but hope. But I can't stop thinking .. yea but maybe she isn't. Still.. the lack of fear and addiction risk in opioids bears thinking about. It suggests some brain chemistry difference.<p>Definitely not a sociopath either. She cares enough not to want to cause pain even if she can't always read the symptoms of emotions. So.. if you have psychopathy but care enough to work around it, do you really have it?
> Even people who are 16, 17, 18 on the PCL-R are nasty sons of bitches. Do they meet the diagnostic threshold of what we would call meeting a diagnosis of psychopathy? No.”<p>So apparently the PCL-R is a scale to measure how nasty a son of b one his.<p>I just don't get it. What happens at the 30 mark in the scale that makes it an illness versus you just being a terrible human being?
The book "The Psychopath Test" goes into how common some attributes are in society and being cautious giving out such labels with out thoroughly understanding the person. It gives a specific example about Tony being held in a mental hospital for years against his own will.
So even a person who only has very tuned down emotions, does not mirror other people’s emotions and mostly reacts very rational comes to prefer the same kind of relationships neurotypicals do.
That’s interesting.
I had a “commander Data” Moment while reading this.
I think an equal attention should be paid to the self defeating personality disorder spectrum which seems to be the opposite of psychopathy, if the goal is betterment of society.
>Do you think it’s something that people suspect about you? Or do you think people’s perceptions are so off that they wouldn’t really know what psychopathy looks like?<p>>No. Psychopaths use what we call a ‘mask.’ It’s basically an entire affectation of being like everyone else. We learn at a really young age that if we respond to things the way that we naturally respond to things, people don’t like that. So you just learn how to affect the behavior and how to appear like everyone else, and that’s just what you have to do.<p>Psychopaths always believe this to be true, and to their “credit,” it does deceive many people. But it’s also symptomatic of their narcissistic delusions.<p>It’s been my experience that people who have had the misfortune of spending a lot of time around a psychopath can quite quickly identify others. It’s hard to describe exactly, but psychopaths are very deterministic in their behavior patterns. It’s as if the dulled emotions and fear response subtract some of the randomness that makes people without this pathology actually unpredictable. They can still be surprising in the moral thresholds and social boundaries they’ll cross without hesitation, but in terms of what they pursue (opportunities to deceive and manipulate, power over others), they’re dully predictable.<p>So, many do actually see completely through them, it’s just that this knowledge isn’t very useful. Social hierarchies and asymmetries of power do more to preserve their capacity to cause damage than anything else, so without the opportunity to fundamentally change the context you’re navigating, there’s not much you can do. Your boss will, in most cases, still be your boss, even if they’re transparently psychopathic. And their power to harm you is inherent to their title, not the specifics of their personality.<p>This is why if you ever read a book about dealing with psychopaths, the first thing they’ll almost all tell you is that nothing is gained by confronting them and your best recourse is to disengage as completely as possible. It’s a realpolitik approach to social dynamics, because only in rare and limited circumstances does a deep understanding of the psychopathic mind allow you to transcend them.
as a psychopath I can usually spot them from a mile away. I invariably hate them a lot.<p>my current gf is also a psychopath, if she wasn't in jail we probably would have killed each other already.
Maybe there is a good reason for psychopaths to exist. Maybe it keeps the community from becoming too trusting, and then later having one person completely take advantage over the whole community. Psychopaths could be a vaccine to keep humans wary of the negative possibilities. It also reminds me of the fact that having small amounts of disturbance (e.g. environmental) in a biological ecosystem keeps biodiversity high.
Yet another article with misleading information about “psychopathy” (“sociopathy”, “antisocial personality disorder”, etc).<p>The fundamental pattern these terms are all trying to address is the same: antisocial behavior, or a consistent pattern of behavior that harms others. Do we all have it in us to act selfishly sometimes? Yes. Just like we all have it in us to act altruistically. Psychopathy is a spectrum with Mother Theresa on one end and Hitler on the other. (I realize Mother Theresa may not have actually been all that saintly in real life, but bear with me for the sake of argument.)<p>The major flaw in the article is how it focuses on someone who was eventually diagnosed as a psychopath after seeking treatment. The issue here is that the people who are actually dangerous, i.e. very high on the Hare psychopathy checklist, i.e. true psychopaths, are never going to voluntarily be diagnosed. Real psychopaths don’t seek treatment to change their behavior. If they get caught, they try to destroy whoever exposed them, and if that doesn’t work, they move on to new targets and start over.<p>My point is that we need a consistent way to refer to people who are dangerous social predators. It doesn’t matter what the term is, sociopath, psychopath, ASPD, whatever. What matters is that the term doesn’t get watered down or confused with other so-called personality disorders which don’t share this aspect of harm to others. For example, aspergers/autism has absolutely nothing to do with psychopathy. If the term “psychopath” becomes meaningless, then it becomes harder to talk about and expose the real predators in our midst. In other words, the psychopaths win.