Two Lovefraud readers brought an article in the latest issue of The New Yorker magazine to my attention. It’s entitled Suffering Souls—the search for the roots of psychopathy, by John Seabrook.
The article starts off describing the work of a researcher, Dr. Kent Kiehl, who is using an fMRI machine to study the brains of prisoners in the Western New Mexico Correctional Facility, searching for physical indications of psychopathy. The author provides a brief history of the evolution of scientific understanding about this personality disorder, and describes today’s conflicting opinions about it. Seabrook reviewed the literature and interviewed experts, including Dr. Robert Hare.
All in all, the article provides an excellent summary of the state of scientific research about psychopathy. If you want to understand how the researchers think about this personality disorder, I recommend that you read it.
Never met a psychopath
Although the story is comprehensive, one of the points made me think that we at Lovefraud have a better understanding of psychopaths than researchers.
“Unlike most academic psychopathy researchers, Kiehl has spent many hours in the company of his subjects. When he meets colleagues at conferences, he told me, “they always ask, ”˜What are they like?’ These are guys who have spent twenty years studying psychopaths and never met one.” Although the number of psychopaths who are not in prisons is thought to exceed the number who are—if the one-per-cent figure is correct, there are more than a million psychopaths at large in the United States alone—they are much harder to identify in the outside world. Some are “successful psychopaths,” holding down good jobs in many types of industries. It is generally only if they commit a crime and enter the criminal-justice system that they become available for research.”
This is scary—many researchers in psychopathy never met one? We should consider ourselves better informed, because we’ve all had extremely close encounters with these predators. And we know exactly how the ones who are not in jail behave.
More information is needed about psychopaths in the community. That’s why our contributions to the study, Victimizations, coping, and social support of adult survivors of psychopaths, are so important. If you haven’t yet filled out the survey, be sure to do it.
Parents and children
According to the New Yorker article, Dr. Robert Hare does not approve of using his Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) in child custody disputes. Although I can understand where Dr. Hare is coming from—his test was designed specifically to predict recidivism among offenders—it is still the gold standard in identifying psychopaths. As we at Lovefraud know, psychopaths make terrible parents. Unfortunately, there is no scientific documentation—yet—of what we know to be true.
This points to the need for more research on psychopaths who are not in jail. First of all, we need to be able to identify them, especially in family court cases. Secondly, we need research documenting that psychopaths do, indeed, harm their children. I know this cause is very important to Dr. Liane Leedom, and we hope to contribute to more thorough understanding of these problems.
The article also touches on the issues of children with psychopathic traits. On the one hand, it states that psychologists don’t want to label children as psychopaths. On the other hand, there is some evidence that children with psychopathic traits can be helped, “if you catch it young enough.” That means they need to be identified.
It’s a circular problem. There is a very strong genetic component to this personality disorder, so it is crucial to identify psychopathic parents, because their children may be at risk of also becoming psychopaths. We also need to identify children who have inherited the dispostion to the personality disorder and are, in fact, at risk. That means diagnosing them so we can try to help them.
The issue of at-risk children is not one in which we should be squeamish or politically correct about identifying the disorder. Lives are at stake.
Mental illness?
In scanning prisoners’ brains, Dr. Kent Kiehl hopes to find a biological cause for the psychopathic personality disorder. By finding a cause, there is the chance of developing drugs to treat the disorder.
This raises philosophical and ethical questions. What if he succeeds? What if he proves that psychopathy is a form of mental illness? But what if people are diagnosed and treatment doesn’t work? If psychopathy is a mental illness, does that mean that these predators aren’t responsible for their crimes?
I don’t have the answers to these questions. But I do know that here at Lovefraud, we are building a valuable knowledge base beyond that of the scientific researchers. We know how psychopaths behave when they are free, out in the community, and doing what predators do.
Beam me up Scotty
Jesus did’nt have jetservice or internet or laptops or credit cards or even a scribe and he did’nt need them ! It is writen in our hearts or minds or souls ! It is not limited to hearing , reading ,seeing , touching ,smelling ,tasteing ,
I personally try to read as much as I can the word of God, no matter what the book is called.
Peace.
Indi, you just answered my question without reading it.
Peace.
Remember Jesus turned the water into BEER :)~
Elizabeth Conley: The grave concerns are only down on Earth … they don’t exist after we leave this plan. It is mortal thoughts.
I know what you mean, but too complex to answer in one sitting.
Again, it’s the perception of man, on Earth, living in human form.
Wini wrote:
“If anti-social personalities read the Bible, they can memorize scripture. I’ve personally seen them do this ” that doesn’t mean they ever humbled themselves to comprehend the true meaning that God wants us to receive.”
Absolutely! There’s a huge difference between “studying religion” and its tenets and actually believing in those tenets and carrying them out. My ex-S claimed to be Christian at the time we were together, but the more I got to know him, the more I realized that nothing about his life was Christian. He could tell you the history of the church and all the denominations and he’d read the Bible from cover to cover, but his was more of an academic approach to religion. Anyone can go out there and study Paganism, Buddhism, etc., but that doesn’t mean that we’re going to be Pagans or Buddhists.
“Christian” means living the way Christ lived and believing in that life. If you see someone who claims to be Christian and yet everything they seem to do is in direct conflict with their purported beliefs, they are not really Christian, IMHO.
And there’s one more component, too. I think that being Christian means acting as a Christian honestly — in other words, you’re not just following the rules because the book tells you to. You have to understand the meaning of Christ and want to follow Him. You have to aspire to be good and whole — it is that genuine aspiration that shows in true Christians.
ps
I was not saying- writing-typing- that non-Christians are more sociopathic.
My typing is awful. I think we find a lot ot psychos in Church, b/c the Devil loves a good game. The stories I could tell.
I think it is best to be a Christian- of course- but not that someone who isn’t is a psycho in any way shape or form.
I also think there aren’t a lot of accurate generalizations about sociopaths, but one that I believe is that sociopaths/psychopaths do what they do to get their own needs met. The need may be for attention, financial gain, social status … but whatever it is, they have adopted and evolved strategies that place their own well-being above the well-being of all others. It isn’t that you’ve done anything to deserve their behavior — it’s that YOU DO NOT MATTER. And yet, other aspects of their behavior suggests that your opinion of THEM matters very much. So that’s a puzzling inconsistency, except when you remember that their motives and their actions are entirely selfish.
This is very hard for the average empathic person to understand. So MANY people matter in my own life that I can’t imagine this way of thinking in my world.
The fact that these are learned and practiced *strategies* suggests to me that this is more nurture than nature in its origins, but I don’t see the world as only nurture and nature. When a person reaches an age at which he or she can reason and create new life strategies, we cannot look to the parents or genetics as the predictors of all behavior.
When people bump into natural consequences for their harmful actions, they may stop acting that way and redirect. Some sociopaths are smart enough to avoid natural consequences, and I think that’s what sets them on a lifelong path of inflicting pain on others. They reap rewards for their deviant nature, and they move forward in that direction until something profound gets in their way. Like prison.
Dear Peregrine,
Your comments about “prison getting in their way” I think is too simplistic…though he has been in prison for 20+ years, My son uses prison as a training ground and continues his manipulating and conning right from his prison cell.
It is almost FUNNY if it weren’t so dangerous. In some ways, prison is actually “heaven on earth” to them, they have so many rules they can violate and get by with (good adrenaline fixes there) and they have so many plots and plans that they can formulate (risk taking) so they are constantly stimulated and rewarded, either positive or negative doesn’t matter, they get some kind of adrenaline fix anyway.
They never accept responsibility for their failures (it is ALWAYS someone else’s fault) so they don’t learn from that aspect either.
The only thing prison does is to keep them off the street and give them PhDs in manipulation and new ideas for crimes.
I read a book years ago which I no longer have and can’t remember the author, but the books name was The Felon, and it was a sociological research on the thinking of prisoners (most of the subects researched I think were ps) and how they adapt to being in prison for differing periods of time.
The fantasy that the prisoner comes up with as he thinks about what life will be like when he gets out is 180 degrees away from the way it actually WILL be. The large difference between reality and his fantasy causes him to be dissatisfied with life on the outside as it really is, so he reoffends and goes back.
I have noticed the fantasy life my P-son has had in prison. Because he has been in prison his entire adult life he has no real basis in life experiences on the outside. Of course he also lies a lot too. He is quite the computer guru even in prison he has kept up with computer programming, and told me about a program he had written for a cell mate of his who had been a stock broker on the outside that was going to be the fountain of gold by picking stocks. He kept wanting to send me disks of this and have me invest $5000 in this to make a “million” and of course I would not have anything to do with this.
Fast forward a couple of years and when we were going through the paper work of the Trojan Horse Psychopath that he sent to infiltrate the family, I saw letters written by this “stock broker” super smart guy—the guy was ILLITERATE, and the “program” was one of these $495 programs you buy off of late night TV to become a “millionaire.” My son had altered it somewhat, but still that was what it was.
Now, my son is in the 99th percentile in IQ, but he had NO judgment about anything financial, he was entirely basing his opinions on the illiterate ramblings of some other convict’s stories.
As far as QUOTE “When people bump into natura consequences for their harmful actions, ,they may sto0p acting that way and redirect” I would add to that, “when NORMAL PEOPLE….” The majority of Ps I have known do not REDIRECT, they just plow on more forcefully. Though, you are correct that some are smart enough socially to cover their tracks and not get caught in the first place, and then there are ones like my son who are too arrogant to even bother covering their tracks with believeable lies.
OxDrover, I can’t imagine what it must be like to have a son like yours. It drove me nuts just dealing with my sociopath encounter for a couple of years.
Point well taken about redirection being a *normal* response to natural consequences. Part of what I was saying there is that somehow sociopaths manage to avoid natural consequences all the time, but I’m sure part of that is that they simply ignore them!
And the thing about the get-rich-quick scheme? I’m not so sure about your perspective on that, because to me there is a very clear line between what the sociopath really believes and what he/she tells us. He may not ever have believed that the program was worth anything, but if he could get SOMEBODY ELSE to believe it, maybe he’s somehow $5,000 richer. Never mind it’s you, his own mom, who’s getting conned.
An eye-opening moment for me came when my then-girlfriend told me a bold-faced lie to get me all heated up about something, and I simply turned to her and said, “So you say.” She knew then that the game was over. But then again, that’s when she started her vengeful actions because she believed she had to discredit me FIRST (she thought I would reveal her as a fraud, which wasn’t necessarily on my agenda).
And yeah, I also think arrogance is probably very characteristic of sociopaths. It doesn’t always LOOK like arrogance, and sometimes my ex-girlfriend came off as the kindest, sweetest person you’d ever meet. She’d literally sell her own daughters, though, if it came to that, because her needs and desires were paramount to everything else in her life or any other.
This stuff is so hard for us to really grasp, and you know — I think that’s just as well! If I completely understood the behavior of a sociopath, I think I’d feel a little less comfortable in my own skin.
Thanks for your insights, OxDrover. Interesting, and sad …