Psychopaths (Adult and Otherwise)

I find this stuff really interesting too! I like your nose-against-the-glass story, DLH

I read somewhere that a psychopath behaves similarly to a color-blind person who has learned societal techniques to mask their inability to see color. That resonated quite a bit with me personally, being colorblind myself. Not that I'm a psycopath lol but I understand the 'masking' behaviour and stress of trying to fit in and be 'normal' when you have a physical inability that can let you down in very public and humiliating ways that aren't apparent until they're pointed out to you by a very disapproving public. I've thought about it a bit, and have tried to parse it out somewhat, thinking that perhaps at some point that burden of conformity either becomes so soul-destroying, deadening your sense of self over time, and if you encounter a particularly stressful period of your life then maybe it's more than you are physically able to handle to maintain the mask under such stress so it just gives way, and cracks....or alternatively, the resentment of having to maintain the facade just fosters your resentment of the people you're 'performing' for, and the desire to show your true self becomes a private dream/ambition/wish, and left unchecked the resentment and desire to punish slowly replaces the mask

Or something. I dunno, I am a bit like DLH, and very selfconscious of my 'airy fairy' theories that are not really grounded in anything much beyond speculation.

mordy, the only person that springs to mind right away for me is a friend from high school. i always used to predict to our mutual friends (only half-jokingly) that he would end up in white collar prison at some point. just googled him and he appears to be an extremely successful financial advisor these days.

i was good friends with him at one time... i dunno, maybe he was just a garden-variety asshole? the last time i saw him was in college... he had joined a frat and told me that he was taking acid on a daily basis. on that occasion he was disconcertingly phony towards me, and then a few months later when i ran into him he was almost disconcertingly upfront, saying something like "well, i would say 'hey let's go hang out and get a drink sometime' but people always say shit like that and let's be real, we both know that'll never happen". when i was close to him i remember him liking the idea of being manipulative towards people and even being a little sadistic. i knew he was not the kind of person it would be good to confide in. but who knows? maybe he has matured into a really sweet guy.

also is it just me or does the Dad, Miguel, seem particularly interesting in that article.

oh yeah, definitely. u have to wonder whether he's embellishing his own childhood to give himself false hope about his kid, or whether someone who might register as a child psychopath really can right themselves at some point. his line about a force coming from outside to modulate your behavior was really fascinating

and that quote at the end, like "repress-repress-repress, son, it's the only way" was kind of scary and sad and...yeah. I dunno. Either way, he is going to have to be 100% right with himself to be handle what Michael has in store for them.

re-reading my post up there it sounds like i am really downplaying the possibility of my friend being a p'path. not only do i want to think the best of him but also i just saw a picture of him-- the first time i've seen his face in 20 years, and with that came a flood of memories of doing fun stuff with him

anyhow, the reason why i always predicted him becoming a white collar criminal: my other high school friends, most of whom were far from being saints themselves, upon hearing of his latest enterprise (at different times he was booking shows, selling records, selling drugs...) would always immediately say "oh, well with 'x' you know it's gotta be something shaaaaady", and in fact there usually was an angle to it.

this was a kid who you got the idea was more into booking shows for the wheeling and dealing aspects of it and the money he could potentially pocket for himself as opposed to the sheer fun of being able to see his favorite bands play in town. this was a kid whom i hung out with and talked on the phone with every day but who would charge me just about the highest price he could get away with if i were buying a record from him. he was the kid whose parents were ridic loaded, but who stole money from his employers if he had the opportunity to do so.

another thing that sticks in my mind about him-- in senior yr of hs he had a girlfriend for the first time. that summer he went out of town for a couple of wks on a family vacation. when he came back into town he met up with the girlfriend at a party. apparently when he walked in the door she ran up to him, threw her arms around him, saying "'x'!! I've missed you omg!" etc... and his reaction was to say something like "yeah yeah, let's go upstairs. i've been out of town for two weeks. i haven't had sex for TWO WEEKS!". i just remember hearing this story at the time from his friends, who were all sort of assholes in their own way, but were all shocked by how coldly he had behaved towards her. again this was his first girlfriend of any sort, ever. it wasn't as though she was just another in a long line of drunken hookups or whatever.

over the years whenever i've read about psychopaths he always came into my mind as a candidate. one of the things that always gave me pause about mentally labeling him as one, though, involves a memory of him telling me how the first time he took acid he started crying and couldn't figure out why, until he realized that it was because he happened to be in a part of town which unlocked a buried memory he had of a sad experience from childhood involving his family. i'm not sure that a psychopath would confide in such a way-- i'm guessing that would mean too much vulnerability. i should add that at the time he told the story i didn't have any sense that he was trying to be manipulative or produce some reaction in me-- he was just trying to explain what his experience of the drug was like.

anyway, now i am super-curious as to what he is like these days. i should put on my best millionaire's voice and call his office.

thanks for posting this, mordy, really quite fascinating. the quotes from the kid made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, i really can't fathom what it must be like to parent a child like that. do anne and miguel lie awake at night wondering if he's going to try and kill them? or his brothers? idk this seems like a horrifically stressful and scary situation to be in.

as to the dad - one thing they didn't address in the article, that i wondered about, is the possible guilt miguel has, like does he feel responsible for the way michael has turned out, bc of the genetic link?

del, wd love to hear yr millionaire's voice.

An hour later, after the boys were finally asleep, Miguel and I sat down at the kitchen table. Growing up, he said, he had also been a difficult child — albeit not so problematic as Michael. “A lot of parents didn’t want me around their kids, because they thought I was crazy,” he said, closing his eyes at the memory. “I didn’t listen to adults. I was always in trouble. My grades were horrible. I would be walking down the street and I would hear them say, in Spanish: ‘Ay! Viene el loco!’ — ‘Here comes the crazy one.’ ”

According to Miguel, this antisocial behavior lasted until his late teens, at which point, he said, he “grew up.” When I asked what caused the change, he looked uncertain. “You learn to pacify the rough waters,” he said at last. “It just happens. You learn to control yourself from the outside in.”

I've never been a psychopath, but this resonated with me because I had behavioral problems as a kid that alienated me from other kids & it seemed to dissipate magically within a few months towards the end of puberty.

was in school with a dude like this from middle school through the end of high school. he killed his parents in college. :-/

I don't feel like I have quite enough sense from that article on just how those kids have been raised. they might be getting enough attention, and are disciplined sometimes, but maybe the parents aren't raising them to have a moral sense... which would perhaps develop naturally, or by example, for some kids, but for kids with Michael's condition, maybe there needs to be a moral framework to explain the actual significance of compassion and reciprocity. a lot of parents seem to just think as long as their kid is happy and equipped for success in the world, then they're doing their job, without really teaching them to actually be nice. and in my experience with sociopaths and emotionally irresponsible people, they were never really given that kind of lesson or example. I kind of get the sense that Miguel is bit aloof about it all... 'oh, he'll figure things out'... while the mom maybe just disciplines without explaining why this kid should bother giving a shit about other people

afaict, a lot of people raised in fucked environments don't suffer from serious, tragic, organic mental disorders. and a lot of people raised in safe, loving homes with a coherent "moral framwork" do. hesitant to blame the parents psychotic kids, though obviously bad/inept parenting can lead to all sorts of problems, too.

...the parents of psychotic kids...

well, there are exceptions, and I'm not suggesting it's the whole story, but actually I'm trying to think of even one sociopathic type I'd known growing up that didn't have a distant/cold/lazy upbringing. you could always trace it back, in part, to having absolutely no example to build on, or if there was it was more 'life's a game'. I'm not suggesting everyone with inept parents end up that way, but if someone's chemistry is off it's probably worse that they're coming up in this meaningless suburban context getting their sense of others through screens

I was involved for a few years with a guy who I suspect was borderline psychopathic. He was deeply manipulative and had this calculated, smirking way of doing really horrible things to people - mostly me, at the time. Lying about having ever borrowed money or something and twisting recent events around and accusing you of being forgetful and stupid. Subtle implications and dropped comments to imply all his friends hated me. Werid acting out. Completely forgetting/denying shitty things he'd do, the next day. He was adopted and he was SO HORRIBLE to his parents, who were older, and seemed to really try their best (and you could tell had always struggled), and he hated his sister because she wasnt an adopted child.

Hes dead now, and I dont know what from. Probably alcoholism. Ive never known anyone as intensely, deeply spiteful, malicious and *delightedly* so as that guy could be.

Yeah, the psychopath in my life also died young, but not before possibly getting away with murder. It was a super complicated act of manipulation, probably nothing any jury could ever convict on, and I cannot and will not get into the details, but a very close relative of his whom he despised got DNRed under very strange circumstances. He did the terribly dutiful family member bit very publicly afterwards, grieved beautifully, but I saw him hissing coldly to his victim "I wish you would hurry up and die already" a month or two before, while other family members were talking loudly and friendlily in the same room and thus not paying attention. He saw that I saw, and didn't care.

was in school with a dude like this from middle school through the end of high school. he killed his parents in college. :-/

― the late great, Saturday, May 12, 2012 2:50 AM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I know someone who killed his parents, too, and although I didn't go to school with him, I was part of the same church youth ministry and later had some college classes with him. I don't know if he was a psychopath, but he was, on reflection, a weird guy.

Mordy, have you read Dave Cullen's "Columbine"? It makes the clearest, most well-argued case I've seen that Eric Harris was a psychopath, and that there were people in his life who should have recognized it.

My favorite part in The Psychopath Test was his meeting with Toto Constant. I think about it all the time.
1. Toto Constant had a roomful of happy meal toys he'd collected.
2. At one point Constant tells Ronson he's glad Ronson likes him. Why? "If people like me, I can get them to do what I want." (paraphrase) I think about this when I'm irritated someone doesn't like me. Do I really want to be like Toto Constant, though?

the eric harris journals are fascinating if you're interested in this kinda stuff: pages of total contempt, sometimes icy and sometimes enraged, for the deluded people around him who think there's a point to life besides power and are so easy to lie to. helped me understand nazism better: that eugenic worship of power and disgust at weakness.

haha abbbottt

i have two enduring memories of this guy (who was an AP student and went to a competitive engineering college)

1) in junior high school, telling everyone he could get the pr0n if they wanted (videos or magazines) because his dad supplied him with pr0n (i believe this was true) ... afaict everyone was creeped out by this, kids starting teasing him by giving him the nickname MISTER P, and this followed him through the end of high school

2) in high school, senior year, he played frisbee in the lawn on the quad at lunch every day, and sometimes when a throw would go wide, he would go charging after it at a full sprint, yelling "HEADS UP" and "LOOK OUT" and literally running through circles of seated freshmen on the grass to get the frisbee, sometimes almost kicking girls in the head in his rush to catch the damn disc

so basically lack of understanding of social conventions mixed w/ total disregard for others' well-being

he murdered his parents because

-- he flunked out of the prestigious engineering school he was at

-- he forged transcripts to transfer into berkeley, which they figured out, leading to revocation of his successful transfer

-- he forged enough paperwork to convince his parents he was transferring to berkeley, and managed to get like $10k off them for it

-- his dad figured it out, confronted him about it one evening at the family business, and he murdered his dad with a handy pipe wrench that was sitting on the table

-- his mom showed up at the office as he was trying to clean up the murder scene, and so he murdered her too

they interviewed his next-door neighbor on the TV news, who was also in our high school class, and iirc he said something to the effect of "well, you always hear people say i couldn't believe he'd do such a thing, but honestly if there was anybody in our high school i would think would do this it would be him"

and sadly enough everyone from high school i've ever talked to about this has said something to the same effect

i have two enduring memories of this guy (who was an AP student and went to a competitive engineering college)

if you had just mentioned these bits without the murdered-his-parents part, I would have just assumed the kid was autistic/asperger's. :/ which, i think, just shows how hard it is to diagnose someone as a psychopath before they actually do something horrible.

, in which 'Roz' shares their wisdom

?

except all of my autistic / aspergers kids in my classes tend to be very introverted and would be sitting by themselves looking at pr0n or sitting as far away from other kids as possible making lists of types of frisbees

i agree there is a similarity but the behavior is very very different

the proportion of engineering majors at good schools with autism spectrum disorders is probably higher than say the number of child soap actors or fast food workers with autism, but probably not so high that engineering majors can just be assumed as 'autistic'

there is no reason a psychopath couldn't have other developmental disorders or psychiatric conditions

engineering majors are just generally terrible, it's not a dsm-v thing

tbf i think roz was referring to offering other kids pr0n (unaware of social norms) and chasing the frisbee (lack of empathy)

yeah i think so, i misread that

frisbee example doesn't sound autistic at all tho

like higher forms of communication, intuition etc are impared, but most aspergers cases would realize jumping on some random person's someone's skull is problematic behaviour

i think of it as not understanding the tradeoff

i.e. assuming that being an athletic frisbee dude (he was big and stocky and muscle-y and i think he did track and lifted weights) who chases down frisbees w/ intensity would be impressive to girls rather than realizing girls are looking at him going "wtf is wrong w/ that psycho"

I was just reading the thread when tlg posted the first part and I was like, how is this guy a psychopath? and yep I was referring to the high school anecdotes - I wasn't assuming that engineering majors were autistic! I know I quoted that bit, but the part about him being an engineering student didn't quite register. sorry if it came out that way.

my theory is: our society favors psycopathic behavior. bingo, psycopaths!

no actually i misread yr post and got snarky on a false premise, sorry for that

im trying to read ronsons psychopath book and drink wine

in my mind

psychopath = doing socially unacceptable things (offering strangers pr0n, endangering underclassmen to catch a frisbee) in order to get a perceived reward (social acceptance)

asperger's = being intensely obsessed w/ a few interests to the point of not being able to relate to people on any other level, no cognitive impairment

autism (low-functioning) = serious neurological disorder w/ cognitive impairment which is not really the same as asperger's even though it has the same biological root

i'm not a psychologist so i'm not really qualified to draw these lines but i do work w/ a lot of special education students and have done some professional work on autism spectrum disorders and that's where i got my ideas about asperger's and autism (i have no professional experience w/ psychopathy)

my uncle's son has asperger's, he is super good at school and very very smart (he's in 10th grade and doing calculus) and does everything like a normal person (eating, dressing, hygiene, etc) but basically has no interest in anything but video games, particularly sims like farmville and pokemon-type rpgs, but if you want to he is glad to have a two-hour adult-level conversation with you about those topics that even though he is 15. he understands social norms and whatnot and will like get up from his pokemon to help his younger brother if he falls on his face (which he does a lot since he's a rambunctious kid who loves doing this like jumping off furniture) but he would really just rather play pokemon than make friends - except he has a ton of online friends and a few IRL friends who are also super-into pokemon and gaming and they do friend-type things like have little parties that revolve around those interests

but i have never seen him engage in antisocial behavior (as wikipedia puts it "behaviour that lacks consideration for others and may cause damage to the society") although he is pretty much what you might call "antisocial", ie introduce him to other kids and he'll say hello and smile and then go back to his ipod touch and ignore the other kids

i do sorta fear the day when he discovers pokemon pr0n (if he hasn't already) :-(

i guess that's a pretty stupid thing of me to say, he is 15 for god's sake

i had dim sum w/a bunch of friends and their kids and all of them were zoned out on iphones and made zero eye contact. could be a technology thing to some extent? kinda chilling to think how much i rely on technology and ~feel the lure~ and it didn't become prevalent at this level of 'necessity' until i was in my early twenties.

yeah when my parents have parties sometimes there will be like a circle of kids in the living room and the ones in the middle-school to high-school range will all be on ipod touches or iphones chatting with their "real friends" or facebooking or whatever and yeah, zero eye contact or interest in each other, asperger's or no

the younger ones at least seem to show some interest in each other and are still into running around and doing things like playing with the cat and dog

i guess kids attitude nowaday is "why bother to make friends with these new kids who i'm only connected to cause our parents know each other and i probably won't see again for weeks or months if at all and i can just be hanging out with my IRL friends in computer land"

i've pretty much decided if i ever have kids i'm not going to let them have iphones or ipads or computers or nintendos ... EVER

although he is pretty much what you might call "antisocial", ie introduce him to other kids and he'll say hello and smile and then go back to his ipod touch and ignore the other kids

i think "asocial" is the official word for this kind of thing -- disinterest rather than hostility. but yeah everyone says antisocial.

i've pretty much decided if i ever have kids i'm not going to let them have iphones or ipads or computers or nintendos ... EVER

― the late great

word

right, like non-social basically

was LBJ a psychopath?

It's easier to see the traits in Stalin and not just because he ordered the death of thirty million people.

That's ghastly. So sorry to hear about this Phil.

yeah Phil that's awful

fuck dude

My mother told me Saturday that as far as she is concerned I'm an only child. I mean . . . as a parent, how do you even?

What are your feelings on all this? Would you be willing to speak with your sister, or is that it?

At this point, no. I have tried with her over the years, but everyone in the family knows that any dealing with her, and especially any criticism, is met with any or all of three reactions. She will either deny (in the face of all evidence), lie, and/or turn on you like a rabid dog. There is literally nobody she won't attack with all guns blazing if she feels threatened, including her own kids.

I talked to my dad yesterday for Father's Day, and while his reactions aren't as severe as my mother's, he makes it a policy to keep her at arm's length. He told me they've spoken twice in the last year, and both times she asked for money. (And he told her no. Four years ago, he loaned her $300 ostensibly to have her furnace repaired. She promised to pay him back when she got her tax refund, and of course never did.)

What do your parents say about her before she was 10? or when they first started to notice

I'm having some family issues currently - that are nowhere near on this level but I can see some commonalities. I believe something happened to my father around the age of 10 and he changed into something.- it was also something that i think was seemingly innocuous (but patently not). I never met my grandparents so its only going on what he has said, that has led me to think this

My dad actually thinks her bad behavior started when she was about 7 years old. That's when he remembers her developing a consistent pattern of lying and manipulation, as well as associating with people she could easily dominate.

God, the stories I could tell. There was also the time that she took her two younger kids (I believe they were 3 and 5 at the time) with her and a bunch of people unknown to my family to Niagara Falls, NY, where she was arrested for possession of marijuana and had to spend the night in jail there until my mother came and bailed her out. Which she might not have done if not for the fact that the kids were being held at the jail as well.

A few years back she was fired from her job at a doctor's office because prescription pads with her signature were being used to fill fake Oxycontin prescriptions. She claims that a co-worker duped her into signing fakes, but I seriously doubt that was the case.

holy fuck Phil. i feel so lucky that i have never had to deal w/anything like this.

i have known a couple people like this and they are genuinely scary
i'm sorry phil, sounds like major rough times

sorry to be crass, but is there a treatment for this type of personality disorder? is there something that can be done other than excommunication/harm reduction? honest question, no disrespect meant whatsoever.

have read that talking therapy tends to just be deception training for these people and idk if we understand anything enough to make a drug (which would be :/ anyway cuz ludovico). i'm sorry phil this kind of thing must be insanely emotionally destructive.

i've heard it's basically incurable, unless the individual genuinely wants to change. "psychopath" is just a label anyway, so everything is on an individual basis.

my parents, grandfather, aunts, uncles, and brothers are like this, unfortunately, and they've had 0 personal growth since i've known them. only thing that changes is they get better at manipulating, or change their tactics based on new circumstances. favorite new one is that since my dad can't beat the shit out of me anymore, and no longer has legal authority over me, he tells me I'm the "most important person in the world to him." which is funny considering he's never once acted like i wasn't completely worthless to him. but he knows he fucked my head up by tormenting and neglecting me growing up, so he'll throw shit out like that to twist my head so I give him money or whatever, and if I confront him on it he'll go totally ballistic, which works since he almost killed me a bunch of times when I was a kid. fortunately I was able to pull it together enough to jump off that train.

anyway, some people like this never change, because maybe the "default" we assume people should be is just our own default, and maybe a default shared by a large number of people. compassion, empathy, desiring relationships, fairness, an aversion to hurting people, not everyone thinks like that or aspires to be like that, and there's no outside, objective reason anyone "should" think like that other than the fact that we'd prefer it that way. there are lots of different types of people out there, and some of them are pretty damn wretched.

talking therapy tends to just be deception training for these people

Ohhhhh man, Phil - can I ever sympathise with your plight. My sister is a wrong'un in many of the same ways and the only way to make it stop is for my mother to press charges. Guess what: my mother is too embarrassed to press charges.

Yeah, I can't imagine talking therapy or anything being remotely useful for her. I don't even think it's something she thinks about - it's instinctive for her to lie every time she opens her mouth, and has been for as long as I can remember.

The sad thing is that, except for her oldest son (who just turned 25), the kids know she can be a handful but don't anything about any of this other stuff. (They're 18 and 16.) They're probably going to find out the hard way one day.

xxp Thanks, suzy. My mom just basically wants her out of her life. If that means letting the money go, that's what it means.

I just remembered that four years ago she told everyone she had MS. (This was at a time when my wife and I were doing charity fundraising and bike riding for the National MS Society.) We have never heard another word about this diagnosis, which is almost certainly a lie.

I hope karma gives her fast-onset motor-neuron disease for lying about MS. Bonus: she wouldn't be able to move or speak, which would cut down on the interactive lying.

My mom flip-flops on wanting to take action on my sister but ultimately sees herself as the failure if anything goes public, rather than the wronged party. I just want my mom to have the happy retirement she planned and worked for, and for my sister to take her equally shiftless and over-entitled husband and get the fuck out of my mother's house. She's caused enough interfamily bullshit.

obv all this is horrible but your guitar, jeez, so infuriating

your sister sounds just awful, phil, and the worst part is she has kids - how incredibly hard it must be having someone like that as a parent. i hope their father is a good man.

Fathers, plural. Three different fathers, one of whom we don't even know who it is. As to how good they are . . . it varies. The oldest is trying to have a relationship with his dad, but pretty much knows his mom is poison and wants nothing to do with her.

Damn man

oh maaaan :/

are you close with the kids? i hope they can cut her off permanently. ppl like bring nothing but bad things and harm into the lives of those around them.

otm

Unfortunately I'm not as close as I should be, because I spent a number of years when they were younger living away, but I do try to be in their lives and communicate with them. They all have a good relationship with their various grandparents, the oldest is very close to his two sisters (one of them my sister's daughter, the other his father's daughter by his second wife), and my sister's most recent ex is actually who my niece lives with.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/when-your-child-is-a-psychopath/524502/

I read that last week. Never really thought about child psychopaths before!