According to new research, people who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly. Read Facebook's 'dark side': study finds link to socially aggressive narcissism, on Guardian.co.uk. Link sent by a Lovefraud reader. …
The latest psychopath cartoons
The always-creative Sarah Strudwick has created another cartoon describing the inner lives of psychopaths (NOT!). [youtube_sc url=http://youtu.be/AMeALBOUksQ] …
A sociopath claims, ‘We are the uniquely gifted’
Editor's note: A reader who identified himself as a sociopath recently posted this comment on the Lovefraud Blog, and sent it to me in an email. I am posting this piece because it provides a good description of how sociopaths view themselves, and explains why they are quite comfortable taking advantage of the rest of us. Be sure to read the question I asked him, and his response, at the end. We are uniquely gifted "Sociopath" is a misleading word: it implies a disorder, something wrong and unnatural with the person, and this couldn't be further from the truth. We, the people you refer to as sociopaths, have nothing wrong with us. We are instead, the uniquely gifted. Our gifts have been …
Self-centered, irresponsible young men
Here's another twist on dysfunctional personalities—today's young adult women are complaining that young adult men simply don't want to grow up. Read this fascinating article in Philadelphia Magazine: The sorry lives and confusing times of today's young men They don't have jobs. They're dropping out of college. They play video games all day and watch porn all night. Even their sperm counts are low. Why won't guys grow up? …
Intervention for troubled toddlers
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 …
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 …
Red Flags in the news again
By Joyce Alexander, RNP (retired) Last week I wrote an article about the captain of the sunken Italian ship who said he “fell into a life boat by accident” and that was why he got off the ship very early, not waiting for the rescue efforts. It also turned out this married man was with his lover and was drunk at the time the ship was steered, on his command, closer than normal to an island so he could show it off to the residents and his friends there, crashing it into known rocks. Even after the ship had hit the rocks and was stuck, he denied to the company and potential rescuers that anything other than an electrical “black out” occurred and delayed even issuing an “abandon ship” until …
Overcoming the hype to educate people about sociopaths
Lovefraud recently received the following email from a reader whom we'll call “Eleanor.” Thank you for your wonderful site Lovefraud! It has helped me tremendously. I am still with my sociopath husband, but am quietly and surely planning on leaving. We have a few children so it really makes it more complicated. He has now gone up to the next stage in what I've read sociopaths love to do. I'm so thankful that I read about it before he did it and know how to react and what to expect! He's started to call up my family, giving them a sob story about how broken he is and how I won't get any help (we've gone through a few counselors, with no obvious results as they've all been taken in by his a …
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Joe Paterno and ignorance of evil
Joe Paterno, the legendary Penn State football coach, has died. I can't help but wonder if the travesty of the last few months, with his former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, being charged with sexually molesting 10 young boys over 15 years, killed him. I'm not an alumna of Penn State. (I am, however, an alumna of Syracuse University, with its own scandal of an assistant basketball coach allegedly molesting boys.) Still, I hate to see the storied career of Joe Paterno forever blackened by the malevolent behavior of one man, if that proves to be the case. Some people argue that Paterno had to know what was going on. They argue that Paterno was so concerned about his legacy, the …