Psychopaths (Adult and Otherwise)

Bc I couldn't find a better thread* on ILX to post this link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/magazine/can-you-call-a-9-year-old-a-psychopath.html

He wasn’t fast enough. Seeing the video playing, Michael gave a keening scream, then scanned the room for the guilty party. His gaze settled on Allan. Grabbing a wooden chair, he hoisted it overhead as though to do violence but paused for several seconds, giving Miguel a chance to yank it away. Shrieking, Michael ran to the bathroom and began slamming the toilet seat down repeatedly. Dragged out and ordered to bed, he sobbed pitifully. “Daddy! Daddy! Why are you doing this to me?” he begged, as Miguel carried him to his room. “No, Daddy! I have a greater bond with you than I do with Mommy!” For the next hour, Michael sobbed and screamed, while Miguel tried to calm him. In the hall outside his room, Miguel apologized, adding that it was “an unusually bad night.”

Also cause it's a topic that interests me in general.

*Found this thread: My wife is telling me that I'm a sociopath

I really enjoyed this Ronson book too: http://www.amazon.com/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp/1594488010

Appropriately enough, everything the kid said reads like Cartman dialogue.

I like to think that with sufficient practice and dedication, anyone can be a psychopath.

I believe that it's a psychological disorder with possible (hopefully one day treatable) genetic markers.

kid sounds scary. this is what bags, rocks and rivers were made for.

kid sounds scary. this is what bags, rocks and rivers were made for.

― 10. “Pour Some Sugar On Me” – Tom Cruise (contenderizer),

Seriously! Terrifying story.

The parents have him seriously monitored and in counseling. I don't know whether it can be treated through behavioral psychology but early intervention is really powerful.

Magnetic resonance imaging on the brains of adult psychopaths has shown what appear to be significant anatomical differences: a smaller subgenual cortex and a 5 to 10 percent reduction in brain density in portions of the paralimbic system, regions of the brain associated with empathy and social values, and active in moral decision making. According to James Blair, a cognitive neuroscientist at the National Institute of Mental Health, two of these areas, the orbitofrontal cortex and the caudate, are critical for reinforcing positive outcomes and discouraging negative ones.

no pressure, parents!

and these are parents who actually care enough to get doctors and testing and carefully monitor their own behaviour as parents

lol serendipitous thread; i just got drunk and impulse-kindled robert hare's WITHOUT CONSCIENCE

i haven't read it. tell me if it's good?

the thing that interests me most about psychopaths is the contempt they (apparently, i'm told, i am not an expert, plus one of the books i've read on this totally reeked of pop-psych and i've decided to just disregard the whole thing, like a jury) feel for normals, who are insultingly easy to manipulate and do all kinds of stupid irrational things based on stupid irrational attachments to other people; i imagine (although perhaps i am being romantic) that for some psychopaths this contempt comes not just out of a sense of superiority but of a kind of jealousy? since it must be apparent to them that the nonsensical and counterproductive empathy and love the people around them feel for each other is nevertheless a source of great joy and satisfaction (we need the eggs, etc) -- which psychopaths can only get temporarily, from victory and power (apparently if you're a successful, concealed psychopath your biggest problem is boredom). so to grow up this way -- even though your lack of empathy allows you to do all kinds of stuff that (particularly in the good ol capitalist west) can pay off very well for you -- is on some level to have your nose pressed against the glass of life, forever. PLUS isn't the christian conception of hell to be alone with yourself, disconnected from god, disconnected from the universe, isolated in the outer dark? i feel like at least some psychopaths must realize that there is something, some source of happiness, going on for the whole rest of humanity that they have for some reason been excluded from, and i can't imagine it makes them feel any better-disposed towards us.

xp i will!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaBTbMW3vbc

(ignore the TED stuff, his book is terrific)

wr2 youngish psychos: i wouldn't be comfortable w/ the idea that i would be training a real-life Dexter Morgan.

dlh, that's a really interesting theory that i've never thought of or heard.

the thing that's always compelled me about them is their skrull-like ability to hide it from ppl (tho ppl have mentioned feeling uncanny feelings around psychopaths that they couldn't otherwise explain). like you could know a psychopath casually and never know it.

well put, DLH

yeah, knowing the notes but not the music, and all. but people are so eager to be paid attention to and loved i guess it's not too hard to make them feel like they are.

yeah your "romantic" theory is an interesting take, difficult, esp. with the hell analogy.

that was a great post, dlh. not sure i'm totally sold by the "nose against the glass" metaphor, cuz i don't know how often the recognition of loss via alienation/incapacity really overcomes the contempt, but it's an interesting notion.

in dealing with psychopaths, i've experienced a lot more contempt than self-awareness of that sort, but i'm hardly an expert

i love to hear psychopath stories hinthint

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.

OHmigod my dad is like SUCH a psycho like do you WANT me to become a friendless xtian luddtardddd{unintelligble vocal fry}

i figure even in the year 2040 being able to make eye contact and being outdoorsy and athletic and knowing how to read books will still have more cachet than "being good at the internet"

one thing that strikes me about kids today compared to when i was in high school are that kids who are "good at computers" are not actually very good at computers ... like i had a kid who told me he did "procedural 3d graphics" and i was like "oh wow cool" and then i found out that meant that he'd pirated an expensive CGI program and was good at highlighting regions of the screen and pressing a button that said "TREES" or "MOUNTAIN" and manipulating the sliders

american kids who are "good at technology" nowadays seem to basically be just good consumers and proficient end-users rather than innovators or creators, but maybe it's just always been the case that 0.001% are creators and innovators and everyone else is basically just a "vulgar mechanick" in the words of isaac newton

xxp

the trait in stalin that gives me pause is his incredible patience. i don't know if a psychopath would have been able to play that long-term a game. but who knows.

lbj definitely comes off as one in the first couple caro volumes, especially in childhood; later on it's easier to attribute his psychopathic features to just Being A Politician. but yknow. don't have to be crazy to work here but it helps.

can someone link to studies showing what TV did if anything to the attention spans and social skills of the first generation exposed to it?

yeah Stalin could be impulsive but I can't think of any decisions after 1930whatever motivated by a bad temper (are there instances of Stalin yelling at subordinates like Hitler did to his?). The guy was methodical.

xp to myself (sorry for blogging) then again, i guess that's just the state of the american math and science educational system that values "watch what the teacher does and copy what the teacher does and then do it again accurately on a standardized test" rather than tinker and explore and figure it out yourself

re stalin and lbj i agree with DLH, i'm not sure how good of a working definition this is going to be because under that rubric pretty much every general or admiral or executive is going to turn out to be a psychopath

alfred i don't think that's going to be forthcoming because afaict ideas about social skills and emotional intelligence or whatever postdate the introduction of TV

he had those weird sadistic dinner parties where he made everyone drink way too much but that's in the twilight of his rule when he's genuinely starting to come unhinged and seems like pretty standard-issue Absolute Power madness.

the most psycho-like guy i ever spent real time with was a dude named l____ with whom i lived for about a year. this was during the early 90s, in a large, cheap and deliriously scuzzy rooming house full of drug & street casualties in seattle's university district. he was a smelly, perennially shirtless young hippie who inhabited a nice, expensive room upstairs with his girlfriend, while i lived in a dismal basement closet for which i paid $50 a month. l____'s girlfriend was sweet, smart and seriously cute.

l____, otoh, was completely insane. he said everything with a weirdly challenging smirk, so you could never tell if he was being sincere or just fucking with you. he was prone to proclamations of his own divinity and fits of furious anger in response to minimal provocation. while he could be decent, in a strangely childlike, moon-eyed way, he often expressed total, withering contempt for everyone around him, including his girlfriend. he seemed to reserve a special contempt for "social fictions" like love and friendship, and was quite up front about the ease with which he was able to manipulate others (including his long-suffering girlfriend, who fled back to massachusetts after a few months).

anyway, i spent a lot of time with l___ because we were both unemployed, creatively dedicated and heavily into weed. we slept until the mid-afternoon and spent days into weeks on end smoking out and painting in his room, going out dumpster-diving or just running around being crazy at night. i've never done better work than during that year. l____ believed that the forces of nature communicated to him through the movements of animals and the patterns of glowing lines he saw everywhere, and he tried to represent this in his work. his extrasensory perceptions mostly made him wrathful, and he often talked about doing harm to the government figures supposedly for responsible for this or that building. he was really pissed about the arrangement of municipal buildings.

i remember hanging out with him on the roof once, watching birds come and go, and he told me about killing animals when he was a kid. squirrels, cats, dogs, etc. he related this with a creepy sort of dispassion, so i asked if he still did it and how he felt about it now. he said no, that he didn't want to kill animals anymore, that he felt bad about it and knew they deserved better. i got the impression, though, that this is what he felt he should say as a good hippie-shaman-type, that none of it really meant much of anything to him. while he was too obviously delusional to be a pass-for-normal psychopath, there was some really dark shit in there that he mostly kept hidden.

I only mention it because I'm reluctant to blame kids these days when I'd rather yell at their parents.

like the idea of social skills dates back to the 30s and 40s but i don't think people were really doing actually empirically studying it until the 50s so there's really no data set to look at

also it's an interesting question to ask what exactly are social skills and interpersonal skills and empathy defined as in societies that did or do things we think are really unthinkable like own slaves or force women to wear burqas or practice human sacrifice

http://www.arthistoryguide.com/images/294.jpg

what kind of social skills did these people have

would they be good at tumblr?

tbh I would prefer if a lot of parents my age would stick to playing with iPhones if it meant I wouldn't have to listen to their drivel.

as far as The Terror goes i think beria was probably a psychopath. he made stalin's wife's skin crawl from the moment she met him (and stalin back then was not totally dismissive of his wife) but he was a talented enough sycophant that he got to hang around the dacha all the time anyway.

tbh I would prefer if a lot of parents my age would stick to playing with iPhones if it meant I wouldn't have to listen to their drivel

QFT

(plus i think svetlana has a story about playing in the garden and running into beria's feet and looking up and seeing him smile down at her and for a moment just being really fundamentally freaked out in a way she couldn't explain.)

(but she blames him for everything cuz she can't bring herself to put it on her dad.)

recommend me a good book about stalin, this all sounds v v interesting and is something i know zilch about

tbh i think most of what i know about stalin is inferred from "animal farm"

all my juicy stuff here has come from this one; it is also suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuper interesting to read svetlana's memoir twenty letters to a friend, even if she's obv not the most objective source. then there's conquest's the great terror for a dryer and less personal but totally exhaustive and horrifying analysis of the purges. the montefiore book also has a prequel called young stalin where he's running around being dashing, writing poetry, robbing armored cars for lenin, etc..

whoa at contenderizer's story . jeepers

what kind of social skills did these people have

would they be good at tumblr?

social skills are entirely context-dependent, so theirs were probably somewhat different than ours. i'm inclined to think, however, that social skills have always existed, whether or not they were defined as such. some people seem easily able to observe, absorb and make use of the complex social environment they inhabit (whether or not they do this consciously). others are almost catastrophically unable to do this. a lot of western literature, going back to shakespeare at least, concerns the application of social skills to achieve personal ends.

Conquest's book is wonderful.

contenderizer did you get the impression that the guy was telling the truth about having killed the animals?

yeah, he seemed pretty reflective in that moment

yikes

i know. that was when i realized i couldn't really be his friend (though his treatment of his gf should have warned me off earlier). i started getting worried he was gonna push me off the roof or something.

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

i'm not trying to undermine the story at all nor resort to cliché, but srsly aren't mebbe 50% or more of teenagers like this? i was quite a bit like this (green screen game boy 4 lyfe) and my two younger brothers were a lot more so like this, lots of my friends were like this, etc

it's hard to explain w/o actually spending some time w/ these kids and of course everyone has hobbies they fixate on to the exclusion of socializing (lol ilx) but really (like any other "deviant" syndrome) it's a matter of degree and consistency

re conversation upthread comparing autism to sociopathy, obv one connection between the two is undeveloped empathy. i kinda want to read this which i believe deals with the topic of comparing the two: http://www.amazon.com/The-Science-Evil-Empathy-Origins/dp/0465023533

very creepy excerpt from the hare book i mentioned upthread, context not really necessary:

Later Russell worked out several scenarios for handling his problems with his wife and wrote them down on a piece of paper: "Do nothing"; "File for Paternity/Conciliation Court"; "Take girls w/o killing"; "Take girls killing 4"; "Kill girls and Justin."

it was the "w/o" that got me, for some reason

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinion/sunday/fables-of-wealth.html?_r=2&hp

A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is 1 percent.) Another study concluded that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.

I sent the article in the OP to my mom because she has always been interested in psychopaths, and she told me that it reminded her about the kid who used to live across the street from her, the older brother of her friend. she said he would laugh all the time, like when he was being punished, or yelled at, and he acted out A LOT so he got punished A LOT. he punched holes in doors and stuff like that. so she told me about how he would sneak up behind her silently and then start laughing. stuff like that, really menacing.

so she read the article, and we were talking this morning after she read it, and she was like, "yeah, and he was so cute" and i said wait a second, you never mentioned that he was cute...and she said OH YEAH he was cute and proceeded to describe him like some kind of suburban new jersey adonis. she then reconfirmed that she thought he was a psychopath and never knew what happened to him, but assured me that if he had become a murderer, she would have heard about it by now...

http://io9.com/5916074/should-we-eliminate-psychopaths-from-the-gene-pool

mental health expert Jon Ronson

lol

reading these stories, and talking with some friends about that psycho kids article, it's made me think: is there an opposite to psychopathy?

if psychopathy is basically a human tuned toward self-empowerment at the total expense of feeling for others, is there a problematic state going the other way? or is that just sainthood.

lol femininity

depression

no i'm just kidding but yeah, i definitely think the opposite state is a problem. don't know if there's a diagnosis. martyr complex?

xp oh yeah, good call

if you look at the depression thread that's pretty much what it is - people feeling guilty and awful and beating themselves up about shit that's not their fault, trying constantly to live up to some normative ideas about being a good or productive person or making their families proud or whatever that they can't ever live up to

i don't know if depression necessarily includes feeling for others at the expense of oneself, though?

that's kind of where i was going, but psychopathy seems like a constantly painful state as well (i'm brewing another post on this)

well i think depressed people tend to blame themselves when other people do hurtful things, not sure if it necessarily leads to empathy but there is a common thread of "oh that person was an asshole to me, no wonder, i am an unlikable loser and they probably have better things to do" rather than "oh f them they're assholes anyway"

my understanding is that there's a part of your brain that helps you give up. otherwise, we'd never learn to not do anything, and we might kill ourselves trying to reach that same frustratingly distant banana on the end of that branch, or alienate the other members of our monkey tribe by being all "me first" all the time. and your brain does similar things when its frustrated / giving up as depressed people's brains do all the time. i imagine an impulsive person or a psychopath might have the opposite brain make-up

but who knows, i am kinda suspicious of evolutionary psychology and i know that in neurobiology its frustratingly hard to separate cause and effect in the way you want to.

of course i am not a doctor, but, my experience with people who fit the dsm markers for psychopathy really leads me to believe it is a disorder of fear and anxiety, fwiw.

as a basic set of statements, everyone has some kind of mixture of fear and hope when dealing with any stranger (politeness and basic social norms govern these) and some mixture of will-to-pleasure and sympathetic connection to others in your life. ime the borderline-types have their fight-or-flight responses jammed always to fight, over basically nothing. it seems like a really extreme form of self-protection. they can't bear to give anything or to place themselves in a position of weakness for a second, and have to struggle to maintain dominance in all situations, no matter how trivial or short-sighted. the unknown is always trying to fuck you over, and everyone is always unknown to some degree.

i guess this could be a learned (or, uh, beaten in) variety of the disorder as the examples i had in mind had some really rough and, importantly, arbitrarily horrible experiences while young. what i'm describing is not a soul-deep understanding of the human world as being pathetic and weak, but being sneaky and hostile.

right, and that squares w/ the accepted idea that depressed people are basically constantly in flight / withdrawal mode

well put!

it is important though to recognize the social norms involved - a psychopath might be very disruptive to the lives of the people around them, but a depressed person can be the same (by not getting out of bed for several days, to use an example i'm acquainted with). we tend to think of the former as much worse than the latter but i'm not sure that's true.

http://guyism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/ferris-cameron.jpeg

Lock thread

goole, what you're describing does not sound to me like psychopathy

my understanding is that there's a part of your brain that helps you give up.

Don't I fuckin' know it.

Thread relevant but pretty terrible article about how we can all learn some good tricks from psychopaths:

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/13/how_psychopaths_take_over/

I think maybe more interesting as Exhibit A on the pop cultureization of psychopathy.

What would you think if somebody started trying to make deals with somebody you didn't get along with about you behind your back online , then openly announced they'd done that to a whole chatlist you were on?

Just been wondering about this for a while.

also if after a rather psychotic flame had been posted about putting an individual's child in the microwave, somebody reposted the flame message to show how it was punctuated?

http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201305/confessions-sociopath/confessions-sociopath

i'm distrustful of that magazine on the whole but goddam

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/31/5025744/james-fallon-the-psychopath-inside-interview

jimmy-fallon-the-psychopath-inside-interview

Should I find the pop-culturisation of psychopathy more frightening than the existence of psychopaths?

Because in reading this thread several dozen people I knew briefly became identified as 'psychopaths' in my mind, before I remembered I have no acceptable data about them and am not a psychologist and have only the shakiest idea of what a psychopath even is

I wouldn't like to be pathologised and want to avoid pathologising others, etc

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/11/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath/#ixzz2lcOhO2WY

“I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological,” he says, noting that it showed low activity in certain areas of the frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality and self-control. Knowing that it belonged to a member of his family, Fallon checked his lab’s PET machine for an error (it was working perfectly fine) and then decided he simply had to break the blinding that prevented him from knowing whose brain was pictured. When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own.

YOUR SCORE 33%

You are warm and empathic with a heightened awareness of social responsibility and a strong sense of conscience. You like to carefully weigh up the pros and cons of a situation before you act and are generally averse to taking risks. You are very much a ‘people person’ and dislike conflict. ‘Do unto others…’ are your watchwords. But, although you avoid hurting others, those residing at the higher end of the psychopathic spectrum might not be as considerate, so stay vigilant to avoid being hurt unnecessarily.

What's your psychopathy percentile? http://psychopath.channel4.com/quizzes.html

15%

Although that's for a test with only 11 questions, on Channel 4's website advertising their 'Psychopath Night'. So, pinch of salt, etc..

39%

36% which is higher than I thought!

Though your conscience is in the right place you also have a pragmatic streak and generally aren’t afraid to do your own dirty work! You’re no shrinking violet - but no daredevil either. You generally have little trouble seeing things from another person’s perspective but, at the same time, are no pushover. ‘Everything in moderation – including moderation’ might sum up your approach to life.

Even if you only score 15%, it means if you took your personality and chopped it into 100 equal pieces with a cleaver, then sorted the pieces into two piles, you'd end up with a little heap of 15 raw chunks of pure psychopathology. That sounds very worrisome.

ha i scored 3%

100%

jk 33%

^ psychopath move

30%

what are you guys agreeing with? i hope it was just the roller coasters!

Fallon says he'd prob be a lot worse if hadn't had such a cushy life; it's nature x nurture. But also, right off, makes this other major point:
You’re right that there are a lot of definitions of psychopathy, and there isn’t one governing set of symptoms that point to it. If you look to the DSM-5 [ED: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] psychopathy doesn’t exist, and if I asked my psychiatrist friends they’d agree with that assessment. In large part, that’s because many of the traits that characterize a psychopath — things like narcissism, sadism, anti-social behavior — appear in other disorders. So there isn’t a clean set of defining traits we can look to and come up with a diagnostic criteria. Really, that’s how much of psychiatry has turned out to be: we don’t have categorical answers, because there’s much more dimensionality to these conditions.
Third point is, "Stop being an asshole." Even if it's just to see if you can do it (as he claims he's doing).

24% on this one.

There is another test which is much more interesting, and measure primary and secondary psychopathic traits. It is the Levenson scale, and is here: http://personality-testing.info/tests/LSRP.php

Took it recently and scored, iirc, over 24% of respondents for primary psychopathy (which is thankfully low), and over 85% of respondents for secondary psychopathy (which is very high). I'm pretty clearly not a psychopath, though, seeing as I spend half my life torturing myself with guilt and self-hatred.

*measureS

i also scored 36%. i'm fine with stepping over people to reach my goals. n.b. it didn't say 'fuck people over'.

9%

ha I had to ponder the semantics of "stepping over" as well

Well shit, 42%

I win?

*crosses self*

21%

I scored 24%, but I think this is higher than it would have been partly because my non-psychopathic self-doubt and cautiousness compelled me to answer 'slightly disagree' rather than 'strongly disagree' to most of the questions.

YOUR SCORE 42%
Though your conscience is in the right place you also have a pragmatic streak and generally aren’t afraid to do your own dirty work! You’re no shrinking violet - but no daredevil either. You generally have little trouble seeing things from another person’s perspective but, at the same time, are no pushover. ‘Everything in moderation – including moderation’ might sum up your approach to life.

61% lol. You all are too nice. Got the same blurb as sarahell though.

48%. But I also did it a week or so ago and got 30-something, so Xmas obviously made me psychotic.

9%, but some of that's just because I'm a wimp.

12%

what are you guys agreeing with? i hope it was just the roller coasters!

"I like rollercoasters, and have no reaction to seeing animals in pain."

24%. Rollercoasters, and fuckups are always someone else's fault.

42%. should I, or more importantly, the people around me be worried?

27%, same answers as ledge

Twitter tells me that every hardcore fashion person who took this test got 70 per cent and they were proud of their scores.

I got 42, but my dad was/sister is a total sociopath, so could have been worse.

18% - I think I must be feeling particularly guilty about causing fuckups today.

Longer test that emil.y posted is slightly more interesting.

You score (1) for primary psychopathy was higher than 0% of people who have taken this test.
You score (3.3) for secondary psychopathy was higher than 81.09% of people who have taken this test.

Primary psychopathy was described as the usual lack of empthay/thrill-seeking etc but secondary was described thusly:

Secondary psychopathy is the antisocial aspects of psychopathy; rule breaking and a lack of effort towards socially rewarded behavior.

^^^Kind of disregards that there might be other aspects of "rule breaking" and "lack of effort towards socially rewarded behaviour" than just psychopathy? (e.g. rules and rewards which are impossible to follow or attain due to other (societal) pressure?) e.g. if the rule one is breaking is "whites only at the lunch counter" then breaking that rule is not evidence of psychopathy, but its exact opposite, a sense of justice or fairness or indeed empathy?

You score (1.2) for primary psychopathy was higher than 5.51% of people who have taken this test.
You score (2.6) for secondary psychopathy was higher than 54% of people who have taken this test.

Yep - these psychological tests usually make subtle and not-so-subtle accommodations to conservative social conventions.

See, for a moment there I was worried that I was a normal person. Phew!!!

You score for primary psychopathy was higher than 5.51% of people who have taken this test.

You score for secondary psychopathy was higher than 71.45% of people who have taken this test.

ILX0rs trending nice but iconoclastic IMO

this is a right load of old bollocks imo

Psychology is 1/2 bollocks, 1/4 science and 1/4 fair guesses, providing 3/4 entertainment.

Curmudgeon test for NV incoming.

oh i know what my curmudgeon rating is don't worry ;-)

i think i really wanted to examine the current vogue for "spot the psychopath" which to the best of my understanding is still pretty freakin contentious amongst the pyschology community but i'm still here in parental limbo and didn't think i had the brainpower to tease that one out

Possibly people are looking for a way to spot someone like Jimmy Savile before they do any actual damage.

psychopathy is a pseudo-scientific theory useful for plugging the holes left by the categorical collapse of evil

Or a concept to help people convince themselves that they're normal? "Of course I think about slashing the tyres of my boss's car, but I wouldn't actually do it, therefore I'm not really a psychopath"

idk if anything it's too inclusionary, not exclusionary "for there is not a just man on earth, that does good, and sins not."

has evil as a concept collapsed? obv not amongst people as a whole but i accept we're not thinking about that strictly. still, isn't evil still ascribed as a descriptor to actions even among people who wd shy away from describing other humans as evil in themselves?

i feel like the idea of psychopathy tries to plug a hole that isn't the shape we think it is

it's just that post determinism, esp in psycho-pharmeceutical world, evil is no longer causal - maybe descriptive - and we still need (catharsis-like) an explanation for evil. if it isn't an evil person then it's a psychopathic mind. maybe.

39% psycho

eg 'how can a wealthy man steal from the widow + orphan?' if before it was due to the evil inclination now it is bc of neuro atypical brain chemistry.

oh yeah i think many people crave explanations - wd bracket off the whole determinism argument, maybe too abstruse for general use - more importantly perhaps many people crave totalizing worldviews - psychopathy, like paedophilia, saves a little bit of hate for the sinner but disguises it as the limits of "treatability"

Would people prefer a simple but incorrect explanation that allowed them to sleep at night, or a complex but as far as possible correct explanation that kept them awake with worry? I suspect that given enough stress and pressure, any one of us could become sociopathic, drawing a line in the sand where everyone else is on the other side and 'fair game' for abuse. On the other hand, there is still a degree of choice: that people choose to behave badly towards others. Or a least it would be nice to believe that, even if it couldn't be proved.

which explanation allows one to sleep better at night?

it's a problem to talk about "people" in that generalized way, i guess, as well as to distinguish between what we want to believe, choose to believe and happen to believe.

i think i choose to not believe in a scorecard approach to anticipating behaviour but that doesn't mean the scorecard mightn't have practical applications, i guess - altho what you do with the knowledge that Person A might commit crimes before they've committed them, well, i'm buggered if i know.

psychopathy, like paedophilia, saves a little bit of hate for the sinner but disguises it as the limits of "treatability"

this sounds about right

12% but I lied my ass off ha ha!

waaay xpost but my blurb was the same as sarahel's and roz

Absolutely stunned to find out that I'm posting to a board filled with borderline psychopaths. Had no idea until this thread

me either! i am the least psychopathic among us if this quiz is to be believed! 3%!!

Manipulative lying is probably second nature to any adult psychopath with an IQ over 85. Seems to me any test for psychopathology would have to be pretty damn clever to disguise the 'socially unacceptable' responses and lure an adult psychopath into the self-revelation.

aimless otm. i scored 56% but it was prob cuz i avoided the scale's extremities. yeah, that's the ticket.

"Oh, lawsy me! I would never dream of doing anything remotely like that!" probably correlates to zero psychopathic tendency, while "as a rational being I try to avoid absolutes, because it is impossible to foresee all the circumstances in advance" probably correlates to some higher percentage of psycho tendencies. Taking candy from a baby.

wtf is this the antebellum south?
who says "Oh, lawsy me! I would never dream of doing anything remotely like that!"

wah i do declare

who says "Oh, lawsy me!...

Psychopaths taking multiple choice tests, obviously.

http://shepherdspiehole.typepad.com/.a/6a0167621b7ded970b019103c4dba5970c-250wi

61% and i went soft tbh

did you say Lawsy me y/n

Never yet

36%

27%

But I cheated obv and my real score is like a million percent

Was King Leopold II a psychopath?

27%

Same here. Popular score this.

33%

lol people are so easy

21% http://i.imgur.com/zi7hd.gif

After careful study of these results, I note that people are never any percentage of psychopathic which is not divisible by three. I confidently conclude from this fact that it is impossible to be 100% psychopathic, but 99% is the most one can hope for.

Nonsense! Just cut at thirty-three and a third.

Hit "agree" on everything and you get 100%

which btw gives the text
"You can play hardball with the best of them! You know what you want and are not afraid to go for it – even if it means bending the rules occasionally and putting a few noses out of joint on the way. Nothing fazes you. You are decisive, self-confident and pretty much up for anything. You are a ‘means-to-an-end’ person. For you, it’s not necessarily a matter of right or wrong, but of what gets the job done. ‘Bring it on’ is your mantra, but to help those around you keep their heads, you should learn some tricks to help you temper your self-satisfying tendencies..."

you get 100%

I am sorry. These results are anomalous and must be thrown out as suspect.

Experiences have me suspecting that some of these parents might be plausibly described as psychopathic or sociopathic, or just burnt out, in denial, etc.---from Irrationally Angrier:
This deserves its own thread, but right now I'm too depressed by latest incident: parents who let their children run wild in public.

― dow, Sunday, December 29, 2013 7:01 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

With the parent a few feet away in most cases, but also those who just fucking drop them off and leave (in malls where I'm working/consuming, libraries, etc)

― dow, Sunday, December 29, 2013 7:03 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And the ones who are a few feet away may either flip put if anybody says anything, or get this really creepy smile (sometimes while leaving with kid, even). But mostly the former. A few do get seemingly sincerely apologetic and worried, like they suddenly realize what they've done, or not done. I would never ever ever say anything unless it's my job, which occasionally it has been (gently someone to take her child outside after child has puked all over store: not a good idea).

― dow, Sunday, December 29, 2013 7:08 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gently *asking* someone, that is.

― dow, Sunday, December 29, 2013 7:09 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

those ppl are not sociopaths

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/01/life-as-a-nonviolent-psychopath/282271/

he sure does self-diagnose as a lot of fucking things, im not surprised pyschopath happened to be one of em

has he taken the test for hypochondria has he

i'm interested in psychopaths like everyone else but they sure are trendy right now. "psychopathic" has basically replaced the word "selfish".

whatever happened to plain old narcissism.

the average selfish person has a lot to answer for these days

good luck getting a narcissist to own up to being 'average'

sorry, the above-average selfish person

i'm interested in psychopaths like everyone else but they sure are trendy right now

feel the same about unicorns, wonder if they have similar ontological status

I got 48%.Think I might retake and see if that's consistent. Mind on other things,

i got 12% on that test. i don't trust those kinds of surveys at all -- people don't know themselves -- but that score was in keeping with an argument i had with a friend recently where she said (more or less) that i can never relate to ordinary people because i don't understand the homicidal impulse.

There's a big difference between not understanding it and not indulging it.

yeah, this was about me allegedly not wanting to kill people whereas most people allegedly do. it was sparked by a thing on npr where a soldier claimed that most people (himself included) join the military because they deeply want the opportunity to kill someone. i was skeptical about this and my friend thought i was being naive.

i think that test mostly measures what people want to think about themselves, which is also something that impacts their behaviors. i guess i disagree with fallon (the nonviolent psychopathic neuroscientist) because i don't think inherent brain structure is the main determinant of how selfish people allow themselves to be.

that soldier and your friend are psychopaths fyi

The soldier is. My friend is just trying to be realistic about people's interest in violence, as evidenced by entertainment etc.

I don't know if that's true any more than liking a bacon sandwich is an expression of a desire to slaughter pigs but there is something to the idea that enlistment does reveal something about your comfort level with being complicit in killing people.

yeah saying "most people want to kill people" is a mischaracterization of the discussion; the main point that was raised is that there are natural inclinations to violence that are repressed and certain people look for outlets for these inclinations, one of the most dangerous of which being the military. freud said the same thing in civilization and its discontents. there's something to it, probably, even though i personally don't feel like society has repressed any of my inclinations toward aggression. freud felt like i did on this account; certain drives are more present in certain individuals, many of whom do not exhibit antisocial behavior.

i am listening to deafheaven right now. maybe music like this is how i deal with my aggressive energy, and maybe my self-identification as a pacifistic sort of dude -- which comes from my upbringing -- makes it so i don't like to recognize this aggressive energy. see, this is why i don't trust people when they diagnose themselves with things. it's a cheesy quote but vonnegut said "we are who we pretend to be" and i think this is true.

or at least, in large part true. self-described psychopaths seem to like the idea that they are different than other people, and to value certain psychopathic traits such as cunning and worldly success over traits like empathy and caring. maybe they have this value system -- and subsequent ego ideal -- because of a malfunctioning amygdala but maybe not. probably the amygdala is just one part of the equation and we have no way of knowing how big a part it plays.

Not all violence is pathological.

this story is insane, and this guy is def a psychopath:
http://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/1993/february/the-professor-and-the-love-slave?single=1

Some follow-up on that article.

THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS

April 25, 1993, Sunday, HOME FINAL EDITION

Fugitive Cathey forged new life;
He lived life of Oklahoma woodsman

BYLINE: Pete Slover, Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 35A

LENGTH: 1234 words

DATELINE: HODGEN, Okla

One thing distinguished the well-spoken 51-year-old psychologist from the dozens of other Texas land buyers Monte Shockley had seen.

"He was probably the single most intelligent person I've ever met,' Mr. Shockley said Saturday, recalling the balding stranger he met in May.

The man had tooled five winding hours of highway to seek his corner of paradise amid the verdant rolling mountains of southeastern Oklahoma. Leaning on the bumper of his white Lincoln Continental, he handed Mr. Shockley a card stamped with his oddly alliterative name -- soon to be penned on papers closing a 20-acre sale -- Preston Primm.

But as suddenly as he appeared, Preston Primm -- or at least the fiction of Preston Primm -- disappeared, wiped out Wednesday in a shootout with local lawmen. He is jailed in lieu of $ 2 million bail on charges that he shot at officers.

His real identity, discovered after his arrest: Bill Cathey, former University of North Texas English instructor, a fugitive whose Texas charges include kidnapping and forcing a Dallas woman into sexual slavery in the summer of 1991.

In the same way that Dr. Cathey's Dallas associates reeled at his original kidnapping arrest, his Oklahoma acquaintances have watched in shock as the Preston Primm they knew melted like a carefully built snowman in a warm rain.

Last May, Dr. Cathey, as Preston Primm, answered Mr. Shockley's land ad in a Dallas newspaper. He said he was a widower, mourning his wife's recent death in a car crash, in need of a place to heal his withered psyche.

In truth, he was about to jump bond and flee Texas and faced a July trial on a kidnapping charge. After closing on the Oklahoma property in June, he bought about $ 1,400 in camping equipment and disappeared from Texas.

About that time, Mr. Shockley said, Dr. Cathey arrived to work his claim, a scenic square sandwiched between the clear-running Black Fork River and the Ouachita National Forest. Access to the plot requires a 20-minute, four-wheel-drive creep along a rocky trail, covered in spots by foot-deep streams.

The newcomer sank a well, hauled in wood and began building a cabin, the locals recalled. With a small cash down payment, he bought an adjacent 20 acres, regularly making total mortgage payments of $ 300 to Mr. Shockley for his $ 30,000 debt. Unlike other settlers, he told folks that he wasn't a hunter and couldn't shoot another living being.

"He just seemed real, real nice,' said Danny Baxter, an exterminator from Poteau, Okla.

The woodsman's friendly face and bushy beard became known among the 8,000 residents of Poteau, the LeFlore County seat. He would sip coffee with the regulars at the new car showroom, chatting wittily about any and every subject: religion, politics, history. The man is a genius, the word got around.

"He was real likable, and I liked him,' said Sara Allen, a Poteau lawyer.

Mr. Shockley recalled that he last drank coffee with "Preston' Wednesday morning, the day of the fateful shootout. Preston said he was headed to the courthouse to check on his property taxes and inquire about getting a utility hookup.

Confrontation over car

Authorities say that about 2 p.m. that day, Dr. Cathey approached two deputies who were investigating a stolen car found abandoned near a minimum-security prison a few miles from his encampment.

After saying that he owned the car, stolen from Paris, Texas, Dr. Cathey learned that the deputies planned to tow the vehicle, deputies said.

It was then that he reportedly pulled a 9mm pistol and threatened to shoot one of the deputies. The other officer distracted Dr. Cathey, and the first deputy shot him. Dr. Cathey shot back, missing the deputies but hitting their car, deputies said.

Dr. Cathey was wearing a bulletproof vest. He was nicked on the cheek, and another bullet neatly pierced his left ear, according to a friend who visited him in jail. Another shot hit him in the chest of his protective vest, then careened into the fleshy part of his upper chest.

After two days in a Fort Smith, Ark., hospital, Dr. Cathey was moved to the LaFlore County jail Friday, where he is being held in lieu of $ 2 million bail. He has pleaded not guilty and faces up to life in prison on several felony charges stemming from the shootout.

Police speculate that Dr. Cathey parked the stolen vehicle because it could not make it through the rough road leading to his camp. When they searched his encampment, they reported finding a cache of stolen vehicles, including a pickup truck and a sedan taken from the Dallas area about the time he fled last year.

They also confiscated Dr. Cathey's dwelling, a 2-year-old motor home stolen from a Garland dealership about the same time as the other cars.

All of the vehicles had altered identification numbers, and police say they found equipment for doctoring those vehicle numbers, similar to rigs that Dallas-area police seized during their investigation of Dr. Cathey.

The contents of the cram-packed motor home, now parked at a Poteau bank, include keymaking equipment, gun silencers, a small quantity of amphetamines, evidence of 20 aliases and numerous books, including survivalist manuals and volumes on concealing identity.

A visit to Dr. Cathey's camp Saturday showed that he left behind a finished outbuilding, power tools, lumber and empty boxes of blanks for making duplicate keys. Also visible were a sturdy pumphouse, electrical generator, kerosene lanterns and an open-air toilet -- a frame of two-by-fours perched over a hole in the ground.

On the building door was a computer-generated note asking, "In case of emergency, please call Preston Primm,' with a Dallas phone number.

That number apparently was a voice-mail service, still answered by a recording of a voice resembling Dr. Cathey's.

Dr. Cathey has asked for a court-appointed lawyer, saying he cannot afford to pay one. Dallas authorities say they will wait until Oklahoma charges are disposed of to prosecute the kidnapping charge and related drug and driver's license forgery cases.

The Preston persona

It was with a mixture of puzzlement, shock and embarrassment that the LeFlore County citizenry learned the truth behind the man still commonly called by his assumed name.

"Preston' had not operated a lucrative counseling practice, as he had said. He wasn't a Vietnam veteran, a motivational weight-loss lecturer, a published author or a computer programmer. Preston, in short, wasn't Preston.

Heck, even his bald patch turned out to be fake, a shaved disguise that revealed a coating of stubble after several razorless days behind bars.

"I never would have guessed it. Never,' said Jim Kersh, who met Dr. Cathey over coffee at the local car dealership. "Preston was just a real decent guy.'

But Assistant LeFlore County District Attorney Gary Buckles offered a concise summary of Dr. Cathey's adventures in Oklahoma.

"He conned everybody,' Mr. Buckles said.

On the tip of many Poteau tongues was a tough question: Why would a fugitive, comfortably out of sight, risk his future in a confrontation over a stolen car?"Maybe he liked it here. Maybe he wanted to live here the rest of his life,' Mr. Shockley said, taking a slow glance around Dr. Cathey's rustic settlement, the shadowy woods, the bass-laden river nearby.

"Maybe he knew it could all be taken away from him, and he couldn't handle that.'

"The Professor & the Love Slave" sounds like an early-90s Flaming Lips track

He got life plus fifty in Oklahoma and was never sent back to Texas to be tried for the kidnapping.

xp: LOOOOOL

well, that was totally horrifying!

yeah i couldn't read it, and i have a near-bottomless appetite for horrific things

Some utterly chilling bystander effect documented in there.

holy crap, that guy sounds like both of my parents. they tried to turn me into a mindless slave growing up and waxed romantic about slavery in general. both came from established, well-respected upper middle class backgrounds. real swell sorts. everyone loved 'em! most perfect people in the world.

there are some truly fucked up people out there, and there's way more of 'em than you might think (cue spine chills).

Good god.

they were more like evil hippies from dragnet than tweedy professor wannabes. last birthday my dad tracked me down and sent me a copy of Steal This Book for my birthday, which pretty much sums up his philosophy on life. anywho.

The fact that he had to track you down suggests that you're not in regular contact with them, I hope? Phew. I'm sorry.

nah, now that i'm finally making sense of things i don't see how i could ever talk to my family again. or why i'd even want to. the whole relationship was built on lies and trickery, with nothing behind it all except their own screwed up, self-serving desires. none of which makes a lick of sense to me.

putting myself into contact with them gives them a chance to tinker around with my head again. so in short, no. might not ever talk to anyone in my family again for the sheer pointlessness of it, and for my own mental well-being. i made it this far in life alone, so it's not like i need a family like that hanging around.

A wise and excellent choice.

My mother and I are pretty sure at this point that my 47-year-old sister is an actual sociopath. Since she was about 10, she's always had a tendency to lie about basically everything, to blatantly deny wrongdoing when caught, to steal, to be superficially charming if it benefits her, to desire attention and approval, etc. Her behavior over the years has varied from the casually amoral to the outright bad, but I found something out this weekend that pretty much clinches it for me.

Three years ago my mother was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Since mom doesn't make a lot of money and doesn't have the greatest insurance, we decided to hold a fundraiser for her. My sister organized it, and she got a local bar/restaurant to host it and provide food and drink, got people to donate literally dozens of raffle prizes, got tons and tons of people to attend, and we ended up raising several thousand dollars. People were amazingly generous, donating raffle items as expensive as new bicycles and a weeklong stay in a Florida condo. There was also a 50/50 raffle with a sizeable pot, and the winner donated it back.

I found out yesterday that my sister stole every single penny of that money.

After the fundraiser, an interest-bearing account was set up with four signatories: My mother, her boyfriend, my aunt and my sister. (She was handling a lot of the insurance interaction for my mom at the time.) Little by little, over the course of the next several months, my sister took out $250 at a time. When my mother called the bank to ask them something about the account, she was told there was only $750 in it. My mother's boyfriend called my sister, and she resorted to a tactic she's been using since she was 12 years old and has never worked: "I don't know what you're talking about." By the time he hung up the phone and went to the bank, she had taken the rest of the money.

A person who would stand there and collect praise for raising money for her sick mother, who would go sit at chemotherapy sessions with her, who would handle talking to her insurance company, who would take donations from friends (many of whom were needy themselves, esp. the 50/50 raffle winner), and then turn around and betray all their trust like that . . . how can they not be an actual sociopath? My mother decided to just let it go. She's resigned herself to never seeing or speaking to her daughter again, and said, "If I had pursued it, I'd have given her power over me again, and I'm never letting that happen again."

(I also found out that she put her soon-to-be-ex husband, on whom she walked out two years ago, abandoning her two minor children, in danger of losing their house. She apparently did not make a single payment on it for two years, and managed to intercept every bank statement and notification so that he would not know.)

What the fuuuuck
this is awful (obv). Has your mum not needed the money yet or was she able to use any of it? Such a betrayal at the worst time.

Has she any more history of weird money-related behaviour?

Tons. About 20 years ago there was an episode where she was stealing checks from my mother's boyfriend's checkbook, faking his signature and cashing them. She also stole some of my mother's jewelry and pawned it. Then she took a car from them, went to Florida, stayed several months and left the car behind.

Five years ago, she was (ostensibly) thinking of buying her husband an acoustic bass guitar, and asked if he could borrow mine to see if he likes it. (Mine was a Breedlove Acoustics and cost quite a bit, and was an anniversary gift from my wife.) I loaned it to her and never saw it again. I asked for it over and over, and after she left her husband I asked him if it was in the house, and he claimed to have no knowledge of it. I'm pretty sure now it went from my hands to hers to the pawn shop.

But no, my mother never got any use from the money. And she had knee replacement surgery last year, missing three weeks of work unpaid, and could have really used whatever was left.

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!