Psychopaths (Adult and Otherwise)

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.