Psychopaths (Adult and Otherwise)

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%