Defense attorneys for Jerry Sandusky, the former assistant football coach at Penn State who is accused of molesting 10 boys, may argue that the man suffers from histrionic personality disorder. So what is it? Lovefraud readers sent links to articles that explain:
What is histrionic personality disorder? on CNN.com.
What is histrionic personality disorder? on Health.Yahoo.net.
Annie, yea, true, but I don’t think there is a snow balls chance in hell that Sandusky will get off on this one….or I will eat my hat and send pictures to LF so you can see it. LOL
Re: “histrionic disorder”
I think this is another one of those convenient terms, just like BPD, that has been applied with far too broad a brush, and generally serves to lump victims into the same category as perpetrators, and to shame and silence them into submission so they won’t ask for any services.
It’s so common that it’s become accepted wisdom that child abuse survivors, who use up far more medical services than the average, when they go to doctors with vague symptoms are not sick but are being histrionic – meaning that they are faking physical illnesses in order to get attention and are wasting resources. And yet, if you look at the results of the CDC ACE pyramid study, the results are completely the opposite (and shocking): the more adverse childhood experiences someone has, the odds are exponentially increased that they will not only get conventional diseases like cancer and heart disease, but that they have MUCH shorter lifespans – by up to 20 years.
So many of these psychological labels seem to be terms of convenience, that can mean pretty much anything to anyone. They can be used to deny needed services to legitimate child abuse survivors, but also to try to get off scumbag pedophiles. No wonder there is a push to drop this category in the DSM.
@Oxy,
Well, that would be a funny picture, but not so good for your diet (but I seem to remember you may have had a funny story or two along similar lines from your living history events.?!?!)
Let’s hope for everyone’s sake that the jury gets it right this time.
That’s a really strange defense. The poeple I know who have been diagnosed with HPD are endlessly self-dramatizing and seeking attention. If there’s a ruthless quality in it, it’s about being so needy and obsessed with their own problems that there’s no space left for anyone else to have issues.
The old definition of histrionic was related to imagining things, or having false health issues, or being over-emotional because of hormonal imbalances. But I think that the definition has evolved since then to basically being desperate for attention, and manufacturing immense dramas to get it. It’s another personality disorder that comes out of a deficit in parenting, but this one is more related to emotional abandonment, often by mentally ill parents.
At least that’s the way I understand it.
The histrionic pd doesn’t seem to be a defense, so much as it seems to be a way of twisting reality. They are using it to say that the boys misinterpreted the grooming behavior. They’re saying it was just a style of inter-relating because of HPD, not because he’s a grooming pedo.
It would be useless as a defense since PD’s are not the same as insanity and can’t be used as an excuse.
I think it’s interesting that the defense lawyers are using the same reality-twisting mechanisms in court, that cluster b’s use in their own lives. Be prepared for more of the same.
This brings to mind a funny video I saw, of a man who said he uses NLP techniques to pick up women. He says that the female mind can’t comprehend big words, so if you throw out some multi-syllable words she’ll be putty in your hands because her brain is busy trying to comprehend the word.
It’s meant to be a comedy and a spoof on PUA videos.
It seems like the defense team is using that strategy here. By using terms that most people aren’t familiar with, they think they can distract the jury from the facts of the case, while they are trying to wrap their heads around the term “histrionic”.
OK. I apologize to anyone who took offense with what I said, but at the same time, I have never appointed myself LF monitor or whatever you want to call it. I also don’t need to be told to take my own inventory, which sounds like monitoring to me.
I will say that last night I had just returned from six hours in the ER with my son who got a very bad sprain playing basketball that evening. So, when it comes to practicing program, yeah, I get HALT. I was exhausted and after three weeks of bad news medically, I had reached my limit. On the positive side, I got permission to take this week off as vacation.
I am very aware of families re-writing history and planting lies. That is exactly what the Ps in my family did to me, but coupled with that was their abuse as well as their invalidations that my memories were false. Most of us here should know about Ps invalidating what they have put others through. There is also “gaslighting.” So, there are multiple points of views and experiences on this issue. There are also authors who argue for “memory implanting” to throw people off and make things muddier. In other words, they do so invalidate the truth as in, “You’re just making that stuff up.”
The written word can be interpretted more than one way. All of the above is why I said that I was struggling.
Moving on, I found this article about Sandusky a little while about the defense using a histrionic defense.
http://vitals.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/06/15/12242582-does-it-matter-if-sandusky-has-a-personality-disorder?lite
The expert quoted in this piece says, “So what if he does in fact have histrionic disorder. There is no correlation between that and pedeophilia.”
Grace,
that’s why I do take what I’m reading with a grain of salt.
The book is very, very good. It does address abusers and even mentioned psychopaths once, even though psychopathy is not the topic. It tries to address the entire gamut of experience with cog/diss.
BUT…as someone who understands the hidden mechanism of abuse, intimately, I have to wonder if scientific data isn’t being skewed by psychopaths who come across as being “normal”.
In People of the Lie, Dr. Scott Peck describes a couple who bring their son in for therapy. They seemed like fine upstanding members of the community — until he figures out that they are evil and they were preying on their sons, trying to get them to commit suicide (one did).
People just can’t imagine how MANY of these creatures are out there. And they don’t WANT to. I do believe that the science on false memories is good, but it needs to bring in the psychopath factor, to be better.
It’s one of the red flags of spaths when they re-write history. My spath did this ALL the time. He knew I had named all my animals with much thought and research. I like giving them unusual names, with specific meanings. Before I met him, he had a dog — which he named Dog. 🙁
Eventually, he started to say that he had named all the animals.
“BUT”as someone who understands the hidden mechanism of abuse, intimately, I have to wonder if scientific data isn’t being skewed by psychopaths who come across as being “normal”. “
I couldn’t agree more. Also, by their minions and pawns.
Linking this back to the use/misuse of the label ‘histrionic’, which is a label commonly applied to people with complicated, unusual or as yet unexplained medical problems (far more than to pedophiles, which is an association I’ve never heard before), I have to wonder about the complete lack of follow-through by the medical community to Dr. Felitti and Anda’s CDC study. I don’t know of any other way to characterize the lack of response by Kaiser Permanente to the conclusions, which are overwhelming:
http://www.healthycal.org/archives/8887/print/
http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/33662/InTech-Childhood_sexual_abuse_and_adult_physical_and_dental_health_outcomes.pdf
Almost every single person I’ve met with an ‘unorthodox’ major medical disorder: lupus, carcinoid cancer, MS, etc… has spent months to years being told that they are manufacturing symptoms and imagining things – particularly those with a documented history of child abuse – and this is almost uniformly used as the reason to justify not following up medically. And yet, the study (which followed approx. 17K patients for >10 yrs, says pretty much the opposite:
“The ACE study reveals a powerful relationship between our emotional experiences as children and our physical and mental health as adults, as well as the major cause of adult mortality in the United States. It documents the conversion of traumatic emotional experiences in childhood into organic disease later in life (p. 245).
In addition, the more adverse experiences one reported, the more likely one was to develop severe, life-threatening health outcomes such as heart disease, skeletal fractures, stroke, diabetes, and cancer (Filetti, Anda, Nordenberg et al, 1998; van der Kolk, 2005).”
Annie,
Thanks for those links. It’s very good information. I’m so glad that Dr. Felitti is doing what he can to teach this to other doctors.
The problem is still that abuse is so covert in appearance. One question, in his questionaire, wouldn’t have brought an accurate response from me, because I wouldn’t have understood the question, until 3 years ago.
I didn’t know what emotional abuse was. To me, emotional abuse was just normal everyday relationshits.
Sky,
You’re familiar with my story. I actually asked a therapist if I had been abused by my family because I was like you, I thought what they did was normal. Seriously, I had no clue that it was abuse, although I did get tired of being the scapegoat for everything.
I think there is also an element of the experts wanting to make names for themselves. I believe some of them have egos big enough to want to be viewed as the ultimate authorities on certain subjects.
Very little in the world is straightforward. If you start bringing up certain incidents or pointing out exceptions or deviations from the experts’ theories, then they cannot have all the answers anymore. It reminds me of statistics-statistics can be presented to support almost anything.
Sometimes I feel the information is presented in such a narrow, limited fashion so the points can’t be challenged. Some diet books, for example, tout the wonderful success of their diet methods but there won’t be a peep about how this might impact somebody with cancer or gout. (I know. I’ve looked.) The subjects are ignored entirely. Why would a diet ignore health conditions that are so heavily impacted by diet?
Anyway, I’d be open to hearing from experts if they could own up to the limitations of whatever they are pushing. Ignoring something entirely detracts from their creditability. Not all of them do this, so that can’t be said for them all.
Annie, the things you brought up point to why it is so hard for some people to take care of themselves, which Oxy urged in her article.
I envision the negatives of what happens to us, especially as children, as downward spirals to a poor quality of life (however that manifests in body, mind, and spirit.)
It takes a lot to throw the brakes on and begin spiraling upwards to “I matter” and “I deserve good.”
To me it’s a spiral staircase. Everything little gain is another step upwards and every negative is a step down.
Oxy is right about the importance of taking care of one’s body. There is a lot of stinkin’ thinkin’ that we incorporate from the ugly messages we get throughout our lives. We can push back and overcome them, although sometimes it takes a lot of hard work.
I wonder if society is going to reach a breaking point with the BS that the lawyers spin about why perps should be understood and forgiven? Will there be a collective snap where we just won’t put up with the BS anymore and start demanding reality?
Something has to change.