Charlie Taylor, expert advisor to the British government on behavior, has suggested that nursery schools identify toddlers showing early signs of aggression so that they can receive specialist intervention. The Daily Mail reported: Taylor said nurseries should be able to spot children with behavioural issues and recommend them for specialist tuition to provide them with boundaries and social skills. Mr Taylor said: 'Any child can go off the rails for a bit and what we need is a system that is responsive to them and helps them to get back on the straight and narrow.' He said it was easier to tackle poor behaviour among young children because habits were less ingrained. ”˜If you ca …
Getting picky about the definition of psychopathy
After reading about the book, The Psychopath Test, Kayt Sukel, a Psychology Today blogger, wondered if psychopaths were, in fact, everywhere. So she asked Joshua Buckholtz, a neuroscientist. He said that psychopathy needed to have meaningful diagnostic boundaries. Buckholtz told her "a true psychopath is going to show high aggression, low empathy and high narcissism in all contexts." I wondered about that description. Here at Lovefraud, we know that psychopaths are capable of faking love and concern, quite convincingly, when it suits their purpose. How does the expert account for that? Read Psychopaths everywhere? on PsychologyToday.com. Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader. …
The brain of a narcissist
A researcher conducts a study that reveals just how much narcissists focus on themselves. Read: The definitive fMRI test for narcissism, on PsychologyToday.com. Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader. …
Does anything work in getting a victim away from a sociopath?
Since Lovefraud launched in 2005, I've collected 2,850 cases—people who have contacted me to tell me about their experiences with a sociopath. In nearly 100 of these cases—3.4%—the person who contacted me was not actually the victim, but was a friend or family member who was trying to pry the victim away from the sociopath. For example, here's an email that Lovefraud recently received: I have a sister-in-law who is dating a married man, who claims he will be getting a divorce, which is still yet to happen. Now she's pregnant with his kid so things are more serious. They were supposed to move out together a couple months ago, but when the day came he disappeared, then a couple weeks later s …
Does anything work in getting a victim away from a sociopath?Read More
When hope becomes malignant
By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired) What is hope? The word “hope” means a kind of “expectation of obtainment” and an emotional state of optimism, a trusting that what we want is going to come true. Here is how Wikipedia defines hope: Hope is the emotional state, the opposite of which is despair, which promotes the belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one's life. It is the "feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best" or the act of "look[ing] forward to with desire and reasonable confidence" or "feel[ing] that something desired may happen". Other definitions are "to cherish a desire with anticipation"; "to desire with expect …
BOOK REVIEW: Character Disturbance
Character Disturbance—The Phenomenon of Our Age, the new book by George K. Simon, Ph.D., does two things really well: It paints a no-nonsense picture of how people with personality disorders, including sociopaths, behave. And it explains why traditional psychotherapy, in attempting to understand these individuals, gets it so wrong. The basic problem, Simon explains, is that classic concepts in psychotherapy, like those advanced by Sigmund Freud, propose that people develop defensive strategies against a cruel, heartless world in order to protect their deep, authentic selves. This results in "neurosis," defined in Wikipedia as "a variety of mental disorders in which emotional distress or u …
Other aspects of crime and mental disorders
I read two interesting articles in the newspaper this morning. The first was about the original mass murderer, Howard Unruh, who in 1949 walked down a street in Camden, New Jersey, and killed 13 people in 20 minutes. Psychiatrists at the time tried to find out why he did it by giving him "truth serum." On Oct. 20, 1949, Camden County Court Judge Bartholomew A. Sheehan signed the final order of commitment for Unruh after a team of four psychiatrists classified him as a case of "dementia praecox, mixed type, with pronounced catatonic and paranoid coloring." In modern parlance, he was a paranoid schizophrenic, a classification that would appear again and again in Unruh's records. Read …
Woman who left U.S. with kids faces extradition
After her divorce in 1997, Eileen Clark, 54, left the United States with her three children for the United Kingdom. she now faces extradition back to the United States. It will be interesting to watch this case—so far I haven't seen any information to indicate whether this woman or her ex-husband were abusive. Read: Mother-of-three facing extradition from Britain and a trial in U.S. for kidnapping her children 15 years after fleeing an unhappy marriage, on DailyMail.co.uk. Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader. …
RESOURCE PERSPECTIVES: The Whitney Houston tragedy
Editor's note: Resource Perspectives features articles written by members of Lovefraud's Professional Resources Guide. Rebecca Potter works as a licensed mental health counselor in West Palm Beach, Florida. I'm every woman ”¦ It's all in me ”¦ By Rebecca Potter Rebecca Potter profile in the Lovefraud Professional Resources Guide Sadly, on February 11, 2012, the world lost another woman's voice when Whitney Elizabeth Houston died in her hotel room. The press talked about her drug and alcohol use, her bizarre behavior, etc. Reporters briefly mentioned her tumultuous marriage. Did we lose another beautiful woman's voice to the tragic, permanent, emotional and physical side effects of …
LETTERS TO LOVEFRAUD: The Old Me and the New Me
Editor's note: The following was sent by a long-time Lovefraud reader who posts as "Aloha Traveler." February 16, 2012 Dear LF Readers, I found this article below as I was cleaning up my computer files and thought I would submit it. I wonder if anyone else has the experience of the “Old Me and New Me.” I hope you enjoy. See below. Aloha P.S. I left the Bad Man on July 3, 2005. So the below article has been hiding in the Aloha archives. :O) * * * * * Dear LoveFraud Readers, A little over 4 years ago, I was a post Bad Man train wreck. My life was a shambles on the outside and my insides matched. Today, though I am in a much better place, I am still struggling with som …