Reading the newspaper on Saturday, two terrible articles jumped off the page. A New Jersey man accused of abandoning his infant daughter at a gas station in Delaware has been charged with killing the toddler's mother, whose burning body was found in an upstate New York park. Read more. A man apparently infatuated with a special-education teacher shot and killed her as she walked into her elementary school Friday, shortly before students began arriving. Read more. These were stories of domestic violence with the worst possible endings. Dr. Liane Leedom has written previously on Lovefraud that, “studies of male perpetrators of domestic violence reveal that 50% are sociopaths and …
ASK DR. LEEDOM: What is dissociation?
A reader asked the following question this week: Recently, I've started doing more research into sociopaths and have run into a condition with which I'm unfamiliar: dissociation. Do you know if sociopaths/psychopaths have been considered to have this disorder, or if it is part of what makes them who they are? The term dissociation has two distinct meanings in psychology. These two uses of the same word do not necessarily reflect a similar process operating in each. The first kind of dissociation is a response to stress, and peritraumatic dissociation (dissociation during a traumatic event) appears to be a risk factor for stress-related illness. Symptoms of this kind of dissociation …
How Sociopaths Think
When reflecting on the sociopath's style, I often find myself thinking metaphorically. For instance, in an early LoveFraud article (Sociopaths' Cat and Mouse Game) I explored the mind of the sociopath via the metaphor of the cat toying with the mouse. In this article, I probe a different metaphor: the small child abusing the captured insect. But a caveat's in order: Just as I wasn't impugning cats as literally sociopathic in my earlier piece, I'm not suggesting here that all children, including bug torturers, are developing sociopaths (anymore than in my last LoveFraud article I was suggesting that all practical jokers are sociopaths). On the other hand, I am suggesting that there …
Tell the experts about your experience with a sociopath
Lovefraud invites you to complete a survey about your experience with a sociopath/psychopath/narcissist in order to help professionals diagnose this disorder properly. Two days ago, the American Psychiatric Association released a draft of the fifth edition its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5). This book is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health and other professionals. The revision has been underway for a decade. A work group of 11 doctors and psychologists focused on the section about personality and personality disorders. They have recommended significant changes to the description of antisocial personality …
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Stolen Valor v. First Amendment
The Stolen Valor Act declared war on military phonies. Signed into law in 2006, the federal law made it illegal for any unauthorized person to wear, manufacture, sell, barter or claim any military decoration or medal. Phonies are rampant. An organization called AuthentiSEALS, which worked to expose men who falsely claimed to be members of the elite SEAL teams, estimated that there were 300 impostors for each real SEAL. AuthentiSEALs disbanded in 2005 because its members were exhausted from checking out all the liars. We've certainly seen the phenomenon here at Lovefraud. My ex-husband, James Montgomery, was one of those who falsely claimed to be a Special Forces operative. He also …
Civil commitment of sociopaths
I recently read an interesting discussion of the civil commitment of sex offenders in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law by Shoba Sreenivasan, Ph.D. and colleagues. I had some thoughts about the article I'd like to share with you. Many states in the United States now have laws that allow for a sexually violent predator (SVP) or a sexually dangerous person (SDP) to be committed to a mental hospital or forced into outpatient supervision once they have completed their prison sentence. In these states, mental health professionals are asked to evaluate potentially dangerous sociopaths and decide whether there is enough risk to society to warrant either inpatient or …
The sociopath’s imperturbability
The sociopath's imperturbability has been widely noted. However, this is a generalization, not true of all sociopaths in all situations. A sociopath around whom the net is closing, who recognizes that he's played his last card and finds, alas, that the game is ending and that he faces inescapable consequences—sociopaths in this circumstance may feel forms of perturbability, like anxiety and worry. But in situations where he perceives his security (however unrealistically) to be relatively unthreatened—especially where his grandiosity and sense of omnipotence remain relatively intact—the sociopath can be curiously imperturbable. Imperturbable, that is, in the commission of his …
Game theory and the sociopath
Shock. Total disbelief. Utter incomprehension. That's what we feel upon finally realizing that when the sociopath cheated on us, blew through our money, twisted our emotions and messed with our minds, to him or her it was all just a sick, depraved game. Sociopaths do not form emotional connections with other human beings. They do not experience love. They do not feel honor, altruism or concern for others. The words they speak and the actions they take have only one objective: getting what they want. To them, life is a game, and they want to win. Game theory is a field of study that, according to Wikipedia, “attempts to mathematically capture behavior in strategic situations, in which …
Forgiveness, sociopathy and choice
Although it has been many years and there is a new relationship, a friend of mine still wishes every day that the sociopath that preyed on her will “drop dead.” Wishing and hoping that some horrible end will come for the sociopath takes up time and energy in my friend's life; as she searches for evidence that something bad has indeed happened to the sociopath and then is disappointed. Recently, I discussed the topic of forgiving psychopaths with a psychopathy researcher who is not a clinician. He said he received a letter from someone complaining that friends were pressuring the victim to forgive. It was the psychopathy researcher's opinion that people should NOT be told they have to …
The Story of David Pecard
Recently, I watched an old 48-Hours segment on the conman David Michael Pecard, which proved to be a most fascinating, educational case study of a textbook sociopath. Pecard is the kind of sociopath (or psychopath) psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley, MD, so brilliantly grappled with in his classic, “The Mask of Sanity—”that is, he was glib, persuasive (could sell you the Brooklyn Bridge today and tender a convincing deed of sale); charmingly disarming, imperturbable, thrill-seeking, audacious, deceptive, emotionally superficial and indifferent to the suffering he caused others. Peter Van Zandt investigates, and offers compelling interview footage with Pecard, who was free as the segment …