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What It’s Like Living As a Diagnosed Psychopath

137 points by lnguyen 8y ago

ggm 8y ago
I liked this. It offers hope. Bleak hope, but hope. But I can't stop thinking .. yea but maybe she isn't. Still.. the lack of fear and addiction risk in opioids bears thinking about. It suggests some brain chemistry difference. Definitely not a sociopath either. She cares enough not to want to cause pain even if she can't always read the symptoms of emotions. So.. if you have psychopathy but care enough to work around it, do you really have it?
- kromem 8y ago
  You can not have empathy but not want your social structures crumbling around you. There are pure sociological benefits to socialization and relationships, and it may be that the effort of going out of her way to foster those relationships is evaluated as being worth the effort in the benefit it brings. But yes, that aspect of the interview was extremely interesting, and I wish the interviewer had asked about that directly (essential asked "what do you get out of your relationships"?).
  - Pica_soO 8y ago
    Its not care- its appraisal for social machinery you see yourself as future owner and user.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  It's not about not caring - it's about having fewer emotions. You can still care about things rationally.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  Why does it offer bleak hope? I really don’t get this parallel, where not feeling for someone equals wanting them to be in pain. Not caring doesn’t make you evil, it makes you indifferent. I think feeling less is an advantage if you do want to hurt others, but there is really no correlation between the two. You don’t automatically start wanting to hurt people, just because you don’t feel empathy.
  - ggm 8y ago
    Why does it offer bleak hope? I really don’t get this parallel, where not feeling for someone equals wanting them to be in pain. Thats not what I meant. its bleak, because its emotionless. its unempathetic engagement. For me, its stepped over uncanny valley, into a dialogue with somebody who has no emotional engagement with you, only rational response. For some things, thats what you want. Personally, I don't think a relationship we normally couch as an emotional one, ie friend, or best-friend, or life partner, is one which is complete if its devoid of emotion. Preferably reasonably symmetrically, but there is room for variance. One sided? Thats pretty bleak, on the giving side: nothing comes back.
knuththetruth 8y ago
>Do you think it’s something that people suspect about you? Or do you think people’s perceptions are so off that they wouldn’t really know what psychopathy looks like? >No. Psychopaths use what we call a ‘mask.’ It’s basically an entire affectation of being like everyone else. We learn at a really young age that if we respond to things the way that we naturally respond to things, people don’t like that. So you just learn how to affect the behavior and how to appear like everyone else, and that’s just what you have to do. Psychopaths always believe this to be true, and to their “credit,” it does deceive many people. But it’s also symptomatic of their narcissistic delusions. It’s been my experience that people who have had the misfortune of spending a lot of time around a psychopath can quite quickly identify others. It’s hard to describe exactly, but psychopaths are very deterministic in their behavior patterns. It’s as if the dulled emotions and fear response subtract some of the randomness that makes people without this pathology actually unpredictable. They can still be surprising in the moral thresholds and social boundaries they’ll cross without hesitation, but in terms of what they pursue (opportunities to deceive and manipulate, power over others), they’re dully predictable. So, many do actually see completely through them, it’s just that this knowledge isn’t very useful. Social hierarchies and asymmetries of power do more to preserve their capacity to cause damage than anything else, so without the opportunity to fundamentally change the context you’re navigating, there’s not much you can do. Your boss will, in most cases, still be your boss, even if they’re transparently psychopathic. And their power to harm you is inherent to their title, not the specifics of their personality. This is why if you ever read a book about dealing with psychopaths, the first thing they’ll almost all tell you is that nothing is gained by confronting them and your best recourse is to disengage as completely as possible. It’s a realpolitik approach to social dynamics, because only in rare and limited circumstances does a deep understanding of the psychopathic mind allow you to transcend them.
- kromem 8y ago
  I think the thing most interesting in the interview was the S/O and friends. What's the value in those relationships to a psychopath? I can't imagine there's the same desire for consensual validation, etc that drives so many normative relationships. I really wish the interviewer dived a bit deeper into what her need fulfillment was in her interpersonal relationships.
okket 8y ago
Similar discussion from 5 months ago about an 2014 article: "Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath (2014)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584565 (122 comments)
- Fnoord 8y ago
  I can recommend Athena Walker's (pseudonym of a psychopath) answers to Quora questions. [1] However, one must always be careful with the writings of a psychopath. These people are cunningly manipulative. [1] https://www.quora.com/profile/Athena-Walker https://www.quora.com/profile/Athena-Walker
  - obituary_latte 8y ago
    I was wondering if she was the interviewee.
    - Fnoord 8y ago
      Me too for a moment, but ultimately I don't care. You could send her a PM on Quora. I've send her PMs with questions about her and psychopathy in general in the past and she's always been helpful and informative.
deleted 8y ago
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rootw0rm 8y ago
as a psychopath I can usually spot them from a mile away. I invariably hate them a lot. my current gf is also a psychopath, if she wasn't in jail we probably would have killed each other already.
- shanghaiaway 8y ago
  How do you spot them?
  - rubatuga 8y ago
    Probably their demeanour, and if you realize that somebody is trying to use you, alarm bells would start ringing.
    - shanghaiaway 8y ago
      Can you describe a psychopaths demeanor? I'd like to be able to spot them too.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Non-psychopaths will also try to use you.
textor 8y ago
Attempts to humanize psychopaths disgust me. As do their clever attempts to derail the talk of their danger by bringing up serial killers. I don't care about serial killers. They're not a problem at all. Nobody should give a damn about serial killers. We're humans, not some pathetic herd animals who can feel placated knowing that there are no literal wolves around. It's the socially-adapted, nonviolent psychopaths like her that are the real problem. One interesting yet rarely described trait of their kind is that, for all their glib talk, the transcript ends up vacuous and incoherent. There's nothing to be learned, because for them language is not a means of communication but a tool for manipulation and control; the effort to weigh the evidence and determine which parts correspond to physical reality is incommensurate with the yield. >> When you meet new people, whether professionally or personally or whatever context, do you present them with the version of yourself that fits the situation? > Absolutely. Why tell them anything that they don’t need to know? They just need to know what they can expect of me. Well darling, what they need to know most is that you'll screw them over the instant it benefits you, so you're not convincing me here. The same is true for any attempt of harnessing psychopathic behavior in some benign project. You have to ensure that at every moment, in every situation, they don't believe that they stand to gain a penny from backstabbing you or committing an atrocity; just as they always calculate the cost-benefit of doing so. There is no trust, no bond, not even any sort of a grace period; it's like pretending to have domesticated a crocodile. You run out of meat, you're it. Soldiers, surgeons, law professionals, CEOs, bankers. Everywhere psychopaths are a net loss and a liability, waiting for the rule enforcers to get distracted. Worst of all, many of them are quite functional. Very much so, in fact. This is why there's no treatment; psychopathy is an alternative local optimum in human mental phenotype, rather than a disability. A parasitic one that probably evolved relatively recently with the transition from family groups and small tribes to big, partially anonymized societies, which allow for unnoticeable cheating. Some say psychopathy is a scale. I claim it's just that psychometrics is not mature enough; "puerile", as Hannibal Lector would put it. There is a clear difference between a person who would not flush in a public toilet and a person who would, given reasonable guarantees of not being caught, momentarily borrow an careless "friend's" credit card and then burn through his savings. Who would cut costs diluting medication for one's patients and pocket the difference. Who would, as an attorney, conspire with the prosecution to put the client behind bars after swindling him of his money. A couples therapist who would facilitate a breakup to turn a client into a personal sex toy. All these are behaviors that stem directly from psychopathic traits. If you really, genuinely don't feel any concern at all for the well-being of other people, you'll be ready to commit crimes far greater than anyone who merely seeks to harm people for the thrill of it would. Though psychopaths like the thrill, as they get bored easily, and they do tend to amuse themselves with cruelty. I pity her partner. Slavery for 19 years, and who knows how bad it'll get. The guy sure chose poorly. Psychopathy, in my opinion, is the sole unobjectionable justification for negative eugenics, inasmuch at it's heritable. There's nothing else that's so purely devoid of excuses and detrimental for society.
Toine 8y ago
There have been many, many articles like this, and I think they have little value except the glorification of psychopaths. The term "psychopath" is fascinating to many, due to the cultural references linked to it. However psychopathy has never been clearly defined in the DSM. Maybe it's just a combination of other disorders (autism + NPD ?), maybe it's a separate disorder waiting to be discovered. Either way, nothing to be fascinated about.
- xg15 8y ago
  > The term "psychopath" is fascinating to many, due to the cultural references linked to it. Given that (in popular culture, not necessarily in reality), it's also associated with cruelty and lack of empathy, this scares me a little.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  I disagree, I think it’s interesting. But then, I’m interested in that sort of thing, I mean, I spent my entire Saturday trying to understand how the world would look if you were colourblind. So maybe I’m just weird. What’s more interesting is the comments though, there sure seem to be a lot of tabu around this topic. I wonder why that is.
- krcz 8y ago
  As far as I know psychopathy is most often connected to Antisocial Personality Disorder – up to the point of fusing these two terms – which has clear definition in DSM.
- mjfl 8y ago
  The whole concept of psychopathy depends on the premise that normal humans act with empathy towards each other, which is laughably false.
  - felix_nagaand 8y ago
    I think this is a bit more nuanced. Humans rationalize ways to absolve themselves of feeling empathy for the sufferings of others. This is not an innate human behavior. (At least ive seen no anecdotal or published evidence of such.) what I have seen is people being taught to dehumanize others, usually following percieved wrongs (see hatfields v mccoys). Look at the way homeless people are treated. They need to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, stop being mentally ill physically disabled addicts and get one of those impossible to live on jobs pushing carts at whole foods for minimum wage so we can stop being inconvenienced by their poverty and suffering on our way to our overpaid jobs or when we go shopping or out on the town. It's fascinating to juxtapose how children perceive the homeless versus how the media portrays them: Children: why is that person so dirty? Why do they ask for money and food? Why do they hurt? Why are they talking to the air? Media: https://nypost.com/2018/08/18/state-senate-candidate-launches-no-homeless-shelter-party/ https://nypost.com/2018/08/18/state-senate-candidate-launche... https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/08/18/no-end-in-sight-for-the-homeless https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/08/18/no-end-in-sight... (I cherry picked two articles from google news after searching "homeless")
piazz 8y ago
The bits of the transcript about having to wear a mask in order to function, having to internalize algorithms of human behavior that are totally unintuitive, and realizing that one’s deepest interpersonal instincts are out of sync with the rest of your kin remind me strongly of some individuals I’ve known with Aspergers/severe ADHD. Additionally, her descriptions of not feeling fear, processing emotions at a lower intensity level than others, needing constant stimulation, and having a cognitive, but not truly emotional, understanding of romantic love and empathy ring true to my experience knowing these people. I wonder if there is a legitimate grey zone at which these disorders overlap. Or, alternatively, maybe my friend is just a psychopath.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  In DSM-V (2013), asperger's is no longer being diagnosed. It is ASD ("autism") or not, and ASD is a spectrum. ADHD might very well be related to ASD (there's talks to merge the two, though I don't have an online source). People with such diagnosis are (neuro-)atypical. Someone with ASD likely has hyperfocus on certain subjects, and is oversensitive and undersensitive to certain stimulus (certain because it differs per autist). A psychopath can find common ground with an autist on the undersensitive aspects, insofar that they could be friends or that the psychopath only needs to wear the mask on (certain) oversensitive aspects. A psychopath might also very much enjoy the hyperfocus of an autist. Disclosure: I have ASD diagnosis.
- CM30 8y ago
  It's possible to be diagnosed with aspergers traits rather than aspergers, and I think I heard it was possible to have psychopathic traits without being a 'full' psychopath as well. So it definitely seems possible there could be an overlap in some cases. You could also literally have both at once, since these conditions/states/differences/whatever aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
- ramijames 8y ago
  I have these problems. I've learned to "act normal" through decades of interactions with those around me. I have a wife and kids and a normal job. My oldest daughter acts just like me and I am actively teaching her how to "act normal". It isn't a big deal.
rubatuga 8y ago
Maybe there is a good reason for psychopaths to exist. Maybe it keeps the community from becoming too trusting, and then later having one person completely take advantage over the whole community. Psychopaths could be a vaccine to keep humans wary of the negative possibilities. It also reminds me of the fact that having small amounts of disturbance (e.g. environmental) in a biological ecosystem keeps biodiversity high.
- knuththetruth 8y ago
  I understand that you’re just using analogies, but since psychopathy appears to biologically instantiated and heritable, I’m not sure they’re very useful. More concretely, it’s a neurological variation that is “fit enough” to survive within human populations at a low threshold, so it persists. There’s no “guiding hand” beneath it all.
- textor 8y ago
  I have a similar hypothesis (which I don't believe, but still). Suppose there are no psychopaths. As is well known, people's choices of leaders are heavily influenced by biological biases such as height, social dominance and other "alpha male" traits. If there is no need to suspect malice, communities could suffer a runaway effect of increasingly biological selection of leadership, the same way it seems to happen in most herd/pack animals (where a smaller male basically can never become a leader, even though the correlation of size and intelligence is less than 1). But psychopaths can "supersignal" beyond even the most impressive neurotypicals. With some bad apples, we feel the need to check if signals correspond at all to the substance, and correct for personal behavior and long-term ability to deliver on promises.
goatlover 8y ago
Makes me wonder if a society of 100% psychopaths could function or would fall apart. In that society, there would be no reason to wear a mask and pretend. Everyone feels (or fails to feel) basically the same way. If you knew that anyone would take advantage of you given the opportunity, then how does society function? Kind of like how the Dark Mirror Universe in Star Trek managed to get so far.
- xenadu02 8y ago
  > If you knew that anyone would take advantage of you given the opportunity, then how does society function That’s the opposite of what she was saying. From what I could gather, she does trust people, but simply by measuring their actions. I suspect such a society would work the same way: people who demonstrate they can be trusted would receive positive responses. Taking advantage of others would quickly lead to a form of ostracism.
  - goatlover 8y ago
    > Taking advantage of others would quickly lead to a form of ostracism. But why would this be the case if everyone in society mostly felt it was okay to take advantage as long as you could get away with it?
- icebraining 8y ago
  Seems rather like interacting with corporations. I trust them insofar as I trust reputational and legal mechanisms to provide them the incentive to keep their part of the bargain.
  - goatlover 8y ago
    Corporations often behave like psychopaths on a large scale. That's the problem with the bottom line being the only thing that really matters to a business.
    - salawat 8y ago
placebo 8y ago
I find the concept of not being able to feel fear quite interesting. I've always seen fear/anxiety as an emotion that is automatically bundled with the ability to imagine a possibly bad outcome for a given situation someone is in. If that is true, then not being able to feel fear would mean not being able to imagine this outcome, or not caring about the outcome - neither of which seem to be the case for psychopaths. The outcomes they want might be totally different than what might be considered normal, but they still desire them - why doesn't the thought of not being able to get what they want generate at least some degree of fear? It could be that I'm totally mistaken about the origins of the emotion of fear, in which case it would be refreshing to view another take on it.
- textor 8y ago
  You're going too far generalizing from your experience. They can imagine just fine, as their cognition is unimpaired. But humans are learning and planning largely on emotional basis. Their amygdala is less functional, so their imagination is decoupled from negative emotion: when they imagine some bad outcome, they process it in the detached way most people process heat death of the Universe or hunger in Africa, i.e. something that is maybe significant but has little bearing on actual choices. It doesn't generate aversion. What does generate it, though, is deprivation of positive stimulus, so when "bad outcome" means "being put in a small concrete cage with no entertainment and bland food", they'll strategize rationally and do their best to avoid being caught. When it means merely being shunned, reviled, disowned, demoted, physically hurt, it doesn't affect the strategy very much. They don't want being hurt in the present moment, theoretically, but they can't feel enough to factor this into their planning. It's kind of like how overeating people struggle to curb their craving now with thoughts of seeing their weight increase later. Some succeed, and some can't do it at all. They'll feel negative emotions when they look at the scales, not when they get the ice cream and imagine the numbers. Except psychopaths don't even want to fight this tendency of theirs. To be fair, positive reinforcement works for them about as well as for others.
perakojotgenije 8y ago
> I have no comprehenion of why people enjoy opioids. We also can’t get addicted to things because of the way our brain works. There are psychopaths that use drugs, but you can cut them off cold turkey and they will not have any withdrawal. They don’t have any cravings, and they can just go on with their day like it was nothing. This is the first time I've seen it explained by someone else but it's how I feel all the time. Makes me wonder...
- SpecialistEMT 8y ago
  To me it sounds like an addicted user talking on a manic day
ashildr 8y ago
So even a person who only has very tuned down emotions, does not mirror other people’s emotions and mostly reacts very rational comes to prefer the same kind of relationships neurotypicals do. That’s interesting. I had a “commander Data” Moment while reading this.
ivoras 8y ago
Judging by how many people in this comment thread identify with the traits described in the article, it probably just shows that those traits are pretty ordinary, just a facet of the normal diversity of humanity, and have probably been with us forever. The true problems of recent societies might in fact be overdiagnosis and Hollywood-style oversimplifications, not the traits themselves. Not everyone needs to be hyper emphatic (though we probably need a great number of such individual to keep our societies cohesive). In other words, don't judge, do live and let live, defend yourself and people around you if attacked. Don't watch TV.
- philipov 8y ago
  I think people imagine that mental pathologies are differences of kind, but they're actually differences of degree. Every mental pathology exists in a less intense form as a personality disorder, and even weaker as non-pathological personality traits. When we stop demonizing mental illness, it's easy to see those traits in ourselves, but the difference is in how intensely those traits negatively affect our lives. Many people get anxious, and this causes them to look at people with anxiety disorders and think "That's like what I've got. Why don't you just pull yourself out of it?" but what they don't consider is that the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
  - RobertRoberts 8y ago
    >"When we stop demonizing mental illness, it's easy to see those traits in ourselves, but the difference is in how intensely those traits negatively affect our lives." Are all mental traits that affect our lives negatively mental illness? I think it's quite a leap to say that just because you have negative effect in your life from a mental perspective/problem/limitation/etc... doesn't mean it's "illness" that requires a cure. Sometimes it really is "just get over it", if not, then every person I know needs emergency therapy and drugs right now cause they are all ill. If you want to say it's a matter of degree, sure, a valid a argument, but who lets who decide what the degree is? What if the person that says "pull yourself out of it" was affected many hundreds of times worse than the person hearing that advice? Now is degrees a purely personal and relative matter? How many people have heard stories of spoiled rich brats scream bloody murder and acted like they were dying because they didn't get the exact color they wanted in their designer luggage? (replace in the nouns for different scenarios) And conversely, the poor child with nothing, is happy and grateful just to have a little more food at mealtime? "Just get over it" _is_ the answer to the rich brat who wants to wallow when you put it in perspective of others. But from their own perspective, it's the end of the world. (lots of personal experience seeing both sides of this issue)
limeblack 8y ago
The book "The Psychopath Test" goes into how common some attributes are in society and being cautious giving out such labels with out thoroughly understanding the person. It gives a specific example about Tony being held in a mental hospital for years against his own will.
tzakrajs 8y ago
Today I "learned" psychopaths cannot become addicted to any drug.
- zafka 8y ago
  Yes, I would call bullshit on that one too.
mindgam3 8y ago
Yet another article with misleading information about “psychopathy” (“sociopathy”, “antisocial personality disorder”, etc). The fundamental pattern these terms are all trying to address is the same: antisocial behavior, or a consistent pattern of behavior that harms others. Do we all have it in us to act selfishly sometimes? Yes. Just like we all have it in us to act altruistically. Psychopathy is a spectrum with Mother Theresa on one end and Hitler on the other. (I realize Mother Theresa may not have actually been all that saintly in real life, but bear with me for the sake of argument.) The major flaw in the article is how it focuses on someone who was eventually diagnosed as a psychopath after seeking treatment. The issue here is that the people who are actually dangerous, i.e. very high on the Hare psychopathy checklist, i.e. true psychopaths, are never going to voluntarily be diagnosed. Real psychopaths don’t seek treatment to change their behavior. If they get caught, they try to destroy whoever exposed them, and if that doesn’t work, they move on to new targets and start over. My point is that we need a consistent way to refer to people who are dangerous social predators. It doesn’t matter what the term is, sociopath, psychopath, ASPD, whatever. What matters is that the term doesn’t get watered down or confused with other so-called personality disorders which don’t share this aspect of harm to others. For example, aspergers/autism has absolutely nothing to do with psychopathy. If the term “psychopath” becomes meaningless, then it becomes harder to talk about and expose the real predators in our midst. In other words, the psychopaths win.
- dnomad 8y ago
  You may actually be confusing and conflating several different "disorders." Certainly it's not clear that psychopaths, sociopaths and ASPD are all just "dangerous social predators." Some would consider psychopaths and sociopaths to be polar opposites. This comment lays it out pretty well [1]. > 1. Psychopaths do not have a conscience (e.g., they do not feel guilt) and do not bond or love like most people. Sociopaths do have a conscience, albeit a weak one, so they are able to feel some degree of guilt in certain situations. However, they usually quickly deflect that guilt and place blame on others for causing to do whatever they feel guilty about. Sociopaths are capable of love but it is usually a very dysfunctional form of love/bonding. > 2. Psychopaths tend to not take a lot things personally. They don't care if you don't like them. They are usually egotistical, though, so if you attack them personally, they will feel anger but not other forms of emotional hurt/wounding. Sociopaths will feel both and tend to take everything very personally, even stuff that isn't meant to be. > 3. High-functioning psychopaths tend to think things through and plan their actions/steps in a logical manner without emotions coming into play. Their thinking is very organized and it is about reaching whatever goal they have. If they hurt you in the process, well, that is because you were most likely an obstacle and you got run over for being in the way, but not because it was personal. Psychopaths typically inflict pain because it's a means to an end, not because they enjoy it. > 4. Sociopaths are basically the opposite: they tend to be very disorganized in their thinking and planning because they are much more subject to certain emotions such as vanity/narcissism, anger and jealously. If you get in their way, they will inflict pain to eliminate you, but will also likely enjoy it. Sociopaths will often seek to inflict pain because they enjoy inflicting it (psychopaths don't get that kind of rush) but will often feel mixed with their anger or violence a tinge of guilt, which their narcissism will require them to deflect as being caused by others (think of the killer who does something to their victims to show regret or respect, such as posing them in a certain manner. It doesn't mean they regret their actions, only that they regret that they were forced by someone or society to kill). > 5. Most sociopaths end up in jail and have lower than average IQs. Most high functioning psychopaths don't and end up in jobs that require turning down one's emotional reactions, such as a trauma surgeon, butcher or CEO. [1] https://www.thecut.com/_pages/cjkmuv88b00500xy6u0morj7n@published.html?commentId=5f3287c1-dbb9-4d23-9436-7a2db3dcd0f7#comments https://www.thecut.com/_pages/cjkmuv88b00500xy6u0morj7n@publ...
didibus 8y ago
> Even people who are 16, 17, 18 on the PCL-R are nasty sons of bitches. Do they meet the diagnostic threshold of what we would call meeting a diagnosis of psychopathy? No.” So apparently the PCL-R is a scale to measure how nasty a son of b one his. I just don't get it. What happens at the 30 mark in the scale that makes it an illness versus you just being a terrible human being?
didibus 8y ago
> they’re convinced their ex is a psychopath, when really their ex was just a toxic, awful person. There are millions of those, and they’re everywhere, and they come from every neurotype. That's the most interesting quote I find. It poses a paradox. What makes a person awful and toxic? Are there common personality traits to this? Are there biological causes? Do we need a new pathology for this? Toxipath? She later mentions this: > I think it’s important to hold people responsible for their actions, not brain formation. People make choices. Psychopathy is not an excuse, and it’s definitely not a reason why someone does bad things. So what are those reasons then? And what are those bad things? And what mechanism governs one's choices? It does seem to me like psychopaths, by definition, lack all natural controls which would allow them to know what the bad things are and that they shouldn't choose to do them. Thus, they need social controls instead. Like, society has to make it easier to achieve her goals through good means, and make it very hard to do so through bad means. Otherwise she has no means of containment. She does not fear, she does not rejoice. She does not regret or feel guilt. She does not hope and dream. That said, what are her goals? What drives a psychopath? Adrenaline rush alone? That's what she hints at. Finally, I noticed the quoted doctor goes out of his way to mention a spectrum. And that he'd only classify of psychopath the more extreme cases, at the far end of it. For those, he says all four traits must be clearly demonstrated. And those by definition mention: > take pleasure in hurting others > are physically aggressive Which are arguably at the top of the list for "bad things". So purely from the quoted doctor, if she does not have those traits, she's probably not high enough on the spectrum to be labeled a psychopath. At least not based on the quoted doctor's diagnostic model.
serversytem 8y ago
I think an equal attention should be paid to the self defeating personality disorder spectrum which seems to be the opposite of psychopathy, if the goal is betterment of society.

137 points by lnguyen 8y ago

ggm 8y ago

I liked this. It offers hope. Bleak hope, but hope. But I can't stop thinking .. yea but maybe she isn't. Still.. the lack of fear and addiction risk in opioids bears thinking about. It suggests some brain chemistry difference. Definitely not a sociopath either. She cares enough not to want to cause pain even if she can't always read the symptoms of emotions. So.. if you have psychopathy but care enough to work around it, do you really have it?

kromem 8y ago
You can not have empathy but not want your social structures crumbling around you. There are pure sociological benefits to socialization and relationships, and it may be that the effort of going out of her way to foster those relationships is evaluated as being worth the effort in the benefit it brings. But yes, that aspect of the interview was extremely interesting, and I wish the interviewer had asked about that directly (essential asked "what do you get out of your relationships"?).
- Pica_soO 8y ago
  Its not care- its appraisal for social machinery you see yourself as future owner and user.
akvadrako 8y ago
It's not about not caring - it's about having fewer emotions. You can still care about things rationally.
eksemplar 8y ago
Why does it offer bleak hope? I really don’t get this parallel, where not feeling for someone equals wanting them to be in pain. Not caring doesn’t make you evil, it makes you indifferent. I think feeling less is an advantage if you do want to hurt others, but there is really no correlation between the two. You don’t automatically start wanting to hurt people, just because you don’t feel empathy.
- ggm 8y ago
  Why does it offer bleak hope? I really don’t get this parallel, where not feeling for someone equals wanting them to be in pain. Thats not what I meant. its bleak, because its emotionless. its unempathetic engagement. For me, its stepped over uncanny valley, into a dialogue with somebody who has no emotional engagement with you, only rational response. For some things, thats what you want. Personally, I don't think a relationship we normally couch as an emotional one, ie friend, or best-friend, or life partner, is one which is complete if its devoid of emotion. Preferably reasonably symmetrically, but there is room for variance. One sided? Thats pretty bleak, on the giving side: nothing comes back.

knuththetruth 8y ago

>Do you think it’s something that people suspect about you? Or do you think people’s perceptions are so off that they wouldn’t really know what psychopathy looks like? >No. Psychopaths use what we call a ‘mask.’ It’s basically an entire affectation of being like everyone else. We learn at a really young age that if we respond to things the way that we naturally respond to things, people don’t like that. So you just learn how to affect the behavior and how to appear like everyone else, and that’s just what you have to do. Psychopaths always believe this to be true, and to their “credit,” it does deceive many people. But it’s also symptomatic of their narcissistic delusions. It’s been my experience that people who have had the misfortune of spending a lot of time around a psychopath can quite quickly identify others. It’s hard to describe exactly, but psychopaths are very deterministic in their behavior patterns. It’s as if the dulled emotions and fear response subtract some of the randomness that makes people without this pathology actually unpredictable. They can still be surprising in the moral thresholds and social boundaries they’ll cross without hesitation, but in terms of what they pursue (opportunities to deceive and manipulate, power over others), they’re dully predictable. So, many do actually see completely through them, it’s just that this knowledge isn’t very useful. Social hierarchies and asymmetries of power do more to preserve their capacity to cause damage than anything else, so without the opportunity to fundamentally change the context you’re navigating, there’s not much you can do. Your boss will, in most cases, still be your boss, even if they’re transparently psychopathic. And their power to harm you is inherent to their title, not the specifics of their personality. This is why if you ever read a book about dealing with psychopaths, the first thing they’ll almost all tell you is that nothing is gained by confronting them and your best recourse is to disengage as completely as possible. It’s a realpolitik approach to social dynamics, because only in rare and limited circumstances does a deep understanding of the psychopathic mind allow you to transcend them.

kromem 8y ago
I think the thing most interesting in the interview was the S/O and friends. What's the value in those relationships to a psychopath? I can't imagine there's the same desire for consensual validation, etc that drives so many normative relationships. I really wish the interviewer dived a bit deeper into what her need fulfillment was in her interpersonal relationships.

okket 8y ago

Similar discussion from 5 months ago about an 2014 article: "Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath (2014)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584565 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584565 (122 comments)

Fnoord 8y ago
I can recommend Athena Walker's (pseudonym of a psychopath) answers to Quora questions. [1] However, one must always be careful with the writings of a psychopath. These people are cunningly manipulative. [1] https://www.quora.com/profile/Athena-Walker https://www.quora.com/profile/Athena-Walker
- obituary_latte 8y ago
  I was wondering if she was the interviewee.
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    Me too for a moment, but ultimately I don't care. You could send her a PM on Quora. I've send her PMs with questions about her and psychopathy in general in the past and she's always been helpful and informative.

deleted 8y ago

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rootw0rm 8y ago

as a psychopath I can usually spot them from a mile away. I invariably hate them a lot. my current gf is also a psychopath, if she wasn't in jail we probably would have killed each other already.

shanghaiaway 8y ago
How do you spot them?
- rubatuga 8y ago
  Probably their demeanour, and if you realize that somebody is trying to use you, alarm bells would start ringing.
  - shanghaiaway 8y ago
    Can you describe a psychopaths demeanor? I'd like to be able to spot them too.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Non-psychopaths will also try to use you.

textor 8y ago

Attempts to humanize psychopaths disgust me. As do their clever attempts to derail the talk of their danger by bringing up serial killers. I don't care about serial killers. They're not a problem at all. Nobody should give a damn about serial killers. We're humans, not some pathetic herd animals who can feel placated knowing that there are no literal wolves around. It's the socially-adapted, nonviolent psychopaths like her that are the real problem. One interesting yet rarely described trait of their kind is that, for all their glib talk, the transcript ends up vacuous and incoherent. There's nothing to be learned, because for them language is not a means of communication but a tool for manipulation and control; the effort to weigh the evidence and determine which parts correspond to physical reality is incommensurate with the yield. >> When you meet new people, whether professionally or personally or whatever context, do you present them with the version of yourself that fits the situation? > Absolutely. Why tell them anything that they don’t need to know? They just need to know what they can expect of me. Well darling, what they need to know most is that you'll screw them over the instant it benefits you, so you're not convincing me here. The same is true for any attempt of harnessing psychopathic behavior in some benign project. You have to ensure that at every moment, in every situation, they don't believe that they stand to gain a penny from backstabbing you or committing an atrocity; just as they always calculate the cost-benefit of doing so. There is no trust, no bond, not even any sort of a grace period; it's like pretending to have domesticated a crocodile. You run out of meat, you're it. Soldiers, surgeons, law professionals, CEOs, bankers. Everywhere psychopaths are a net loss and a liability, waiting for the rule enforcers to get distracted. Worst of all, many of them are quite functional. Very much so, in fact. This is why there's no treatment; psychopathy is an alternative local optimum in human mental phenotype, rather than a disability. A parasitic one that probably evolved relatively recently with the transition from family groups and small tribes to big, partially anonymized societies, which allow for unnoticeable cheating. Some say psychopathy is a scale. I claim it's just that psychometrics is not mature enough; "puerile", as Hannibal Lector would put it. There is a clear difference between a person who would not flush in a public toilet and a person who would, given reasonable guarantees of not being caught, momentarily borrow an careless "friend's" credit card and then burn through his savings. Who would cut costs diluting medication for one's patients and pocket the difference. Who would, as an attorney, conspire with the prosecution to put the client behind bars after swindling him of his money. A couples therapist who would facilitate a breakup to turn a client into a personal sex toy. All these are behaviors that stem directly from psychopathic traits. If you really, genuinely don't feel any concern at all for the well-being of other people, you'll be ready to commit crimes far greater than anyone who merely seeks to harm people for the thrill of it would. Though psychopaths like the thrill, as they get bored easily, and they do tend to amuse themselves with cruelty. I pity her partner. Slavery for 19 years, and who knows how bad it'll get. The guy sure chose poorly. Psychopathy, in my opinion, is the sole unobjectionable justification for negative eugenics, inasmuch at it's heritable. There's nothing else that's so purely devoid of excuses and detrimental for society.

Toine 8y ago

There have been many, many articles like this, and I think they have little value except the glorification of psychopaths. The term "psychopath" is fascinating to many, due to the cultural references linked to it. However psychopathy has never been clearly defined in the DSM. Maybe it's just a combination of other disorders (autism + NPD ?), maybe it's a separate disorder waiting to be discovered. Either way, nothing to be fascinated about.

xg15 8y ago
> The term "psychopath" is fascinating to many, due to the cultural references linked to it. Given that (in popular culture, not necessarily in reality), it's also associated with cruelty and lack of empathy, this scares me a little.
eksemplar 8y ago
I disagree, I think it’s interesting. But then, I’m interested in that sort of thing, I mean, I spent my entire Saturday trying to understand how the world would look if you were colourblind. So maybe I’m just weird. What’s more interesting is the comments though, there sure seem to be a lot of tabu around this topic. I wonder why that is.
krcz 8y ago
As far as I know psychopathy is most often connected to Antisocial Personality Disorder – up to the point of fusing these two terms – which has clear definition in DSM.
mjfl 8y ago
The whole concept of psychopathy depends on the premise that normal humans act with empathy towards each other, which is laughably false.
- felix_nagaand 8y ago
  I think this is a bit more nuanced. Humans rationalize ways to absolve themselves of feeling empathy for the sufferings of others. This is not an innate human behavior. (At least ive seen no anecdotal or published evidence of such.) what I have seen is people being taught to dehumanize others, usually following percieved wrongs (see hatfields v mccoys). Look at the way homeless people are treated. They need to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, stop being mentally ill physically disabled addicts and get one of those impossible to live on jobs pushing carts at whole foods for minimum wage so we can stop being inconvenienced by their poverty and suffering on our way to our overpaid jobs or when we go shopping or out on the town. It's fascinating to juxtapose how children perceive the homeless versus how the media portrays them: Children: why is that person so dirty? Why do they ask for money and food? Why do they hurt? Why are they talking to the air? Media: https://nypost.com/2018/08/18/state-senate-candidate-launches-no-homeless-shelter-party/ https://nypost.com/2018/08/18/state-senate-candidate-launche... https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/08/18/no-end-in-sight-for-the-homeless https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/08/18/no-end-in-sight... (I cherry picked two articles from google news after searching "homeless")

piazz 8y ago

The bits of the transcript about having to wear a mask in order to function, having to internalize algorithms of human behavior that are totally unintuitive, and realizing that one’s deepest interpersonal instincts are out of sync with the rest of your kin remind me strongly of some individuals I’ve known with Aspergers/severe ADHD. Additionally, her descriptions of not feeling fear, processing emotions at a lower intensity level than others, needing constant stimulation, and having a cognitive, but not truly emotional, understanding of romantic love and empathy ring true to my experience knowing these people. I wonder if there is a legitimate grey zone at which these disorders overlap. Or, alternatively, maybe my friend is just a psychopath.

Fnoord 8y ago
In DSM-V (2013), asperger's is no longer being diagnosed. It is ASD ("autism") or not, and ASD is a spectrum. ADHD might very well be related to ASD (there's talks to merge the two, though I don't have an online source). People with such diagnosis are (neuro-)atypical. Someone with ASD likely has hyperfocus on certain subjects, and is oversensitive and undersensitive to certain stimulus (certain because it differs per autist). A psychopath can find common ground with an autist on the undersensitive aspects, insofar that they could be friends or that the psychopath only needs to wear the mask on (certain) oversensitive aspects. A psychopath might also very much enjoy the hyperfocus of an autist. Disclosure: I have ASD diagnosis.
CM30 8y ago
It's possible to be diagnosed with aspergers traits rather than aspergers, and I think I heard it was possible to have psychopathic traits without being a 'full' psychopath as well. So it definitely seems possible there could be an overlap in some cases. You could also literally have both at once, since these conditions/states/differences/whatever aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
ramijames 8y ago
I have these problems. I've learned to "act normal" through decades of interactions with those around me. I have a wife and kids and a normal job. My oldest daughter acts just like me and I am actively teaching her how to "act normal". It isn't a big deal.

rubatuga 8y ago

Maybe there is a good reason for psychopaths to exist. Maybe it keeps the community from becoming too trusting, and then later having one person completely take advantage over the whole community. Psychopaths could be a vaccine to keep humans wary of the negative possibilities. It also reminds me of the fact that having small amounts of disturbance (e.g. environmental) in a biological ecosystem keeps biodiversity high.

knuththetruth 8y ago
I understand that you’re just using analogies, but since psychopathy appears to biologically instantiated and heritable, I’m not sure they’re very useful. More concretely, it’s a neurological variation that is “fit enough” to survive within human populations at a low threshold, so it persists. There’s no “guiding hand” beneath it all.
textor 8y ago
I have a similar hypothesis (which I don't believe, but still). Suppose there are no psychopaths. As is well known, people's choices of leaders are heavily influenced by biological biases such as height, social dominance and other "alpha male" traits. If there is no need to suspect malice, communities could suffer a runaway effect of increasingly biological selection of leadership, the same way it seems to happen in most herd/pack animals (where a smaller male basically can never become a leader, even though the correlation of size and intelligence is less than 1). But psychopaths can "supersignal" beyond even the most impressive neurotypicals. With some bad apples, we feel the need to check if signals correspond at all to the substance, and correct for personal behavior and long-term ability to deliver on promises.

goatlover 8y ago

Makes me wonder if a society of 100% psychopaths could function or would fall apart. In that society, there would be no reason to wear a mask and pretend. Everyone feels (or fails to feel) basically the same way. If you knew that anyone would take advantage of you given the opportunity, then how does society function? Kind of like how the Dark Mirror Universe in Star Trek managed to get so far.

xenadu02 8y ago
> If you knew that anyone would take advantage of you given the opportunity, then how does society function That’s the opposite of what she was saying. From what I could gather, she does trust people, but simply by measuring their actions. I suspect such a society would work the same way: people who demonstrate they can be trusted would receive positive responses. Taking advantage of others would quickly lead to a form of ostracism.
- goatlover 8y ago
  > Taking advantage of others would quickly lead to a form of ostracism. But why would this be the case if everyone in society mostly felt it was okay to take advantage as long as you could get away with it?
icebraining 8y ago
Seems rather like interacting with corporations. I trust them insofar as I trust reputational and legal mechanisms to provide them the incentive to keep their part of the bargain.
- goatlover 8y ago
  Corporations often behave like psychopaths on a large scale. That's the problem with the bottom line being the only thing that really matters to a business.
  - salawat 8y ago

placebo 8y ago

I find the concept of not being able to feel fear quite interesting. I've always seen fear/anxiety as an emotion that is automatically bundled with the ability to imagine a possibly bad outcome for a given situation someone is in. If that is true, then not being able to feel fear would mean not being able to imagine this outcome, or not caring about the outcome - neither of which seem to be the case for psychopaths. The outcomes they want might be totally different than what might be considered normal, but they still desire them - why doesn't the thought of not being able to get what they want generate at least some degree of fear? It could be that I'm totally mistaken about the origins of the emotion of fear, in which case it would be refreshing to view another take on it.

textor 8y ago
You're going too far generalizing from your experience. They can imagine just fine, as their cognition is unimpaired. But humans are learning and planning largely on emotional basis. Their amygdala is less functional, so their imagination is decoupled from negative emotion: when they imagine some bad outcome, they process it in the detached way most people process heat death of the Universe or hunger in Africa, i.e. something that is maybe significant but has little bearing on actual choices. It doesn't generate aversion. What does generate it, though, is deprivation of positive stimulus, so when "bad outcome" means "being put in a small concrete cage with no entertainment and bland food", they'll strategize rationally and do their best to avoid being caught. When it means merely being shunned, reviled, disowned, demoted, physically hurt, it doesn't affect the strategy very much. They don't want being hurt in the present moment, theoretically, but they can't feel enough to factor this into their planning. It's kind of like how overeating people struggle to curb their craving now with thoughts of seeing their weight increase later. Some succeed, and some can't do it at all. They'll feel negative emotions when they look at the scales, not when they get the ice cream and imagine the numbers. Except psychopaths don't even want to fight this tendency of theirs. To be fair, positive reinforcement works for them about as well as for others.

perakojotgenije 8y ago

> I have no comprehenion of why people enjoy opioids. We also can’t get addicted to things because of the way our brain works. There are psychopaths that use drugs, but you can cut them off cold turkey and they will not have any withdrawal. They don’t have any cravings, and they can just go on with their day like it was nothing. This is the first time I've seen it explained by someone else but it's how I feel all the time. Makes me wonder...

SpecialistEMT 8y ago
To me it sounds like an addicted user talking on a manic day

ashildr 8y ago

So even a person who only has very tuned down emotions, does not mirror other people’s emotions and mostly reacts very rational comes to prefer the same kind of relationships neurotypicals do. That’s interesting. I had a “commander Data” Moment while reading this.

ivoras 8y ago

Judging by how many people in this comment thread identify with the traits described in the article, it probably just shows that those traits are pretty ordinary, just a facet of the normal diversity of humanity, and have probably been with us forever. The true problems of recent societies might in fact be overdiagnosis and Hollywood-style oversimplifications, not the traits themselves. Not everyone needs to be hyper emphatic (though we probably need a great number of such individual to keep our societies cohesive). In other words, don't judge, do live and let live, defend yourself and people around you if attacked. Don't watch TV.

philipov 8y ago
I think people imagine that mental pathologies are differences of kind, but they're actually differences of degree. Every mental pathology exists in a less intense form as a personality disorder, and even weaker as non-pathological personality traits. When we stop demonizing mental illness, it's easy to see those traits in ourselves, but the difference is in how intensely those traits negatively affect our lives. Many people get anxious, and this causes them to look at people with anxiety disorders and think "That's like what I've got. Why don't you just pull yourself out of it?" but what they don't consider is that the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
- RobertRoberts 8y ago
  >"When we stop demonizing mental illness, it's easy to see those traits in ourselves, but the difference is in how intensely those traits negatively affect our lives." Are all mental traits that affect our lives negatively mental illness? I think it's quite a leap to say that just because you have negative effect in your life from a mental perspective/problem/limitation/etc... doesn't mean it's "illness" that requires a cure. Sometimes it really is "just get over it", if not, then every person I know needs emergency therapy and drugs right now cause they are all ill. If you want to say it's a matter of degree, sure, a valid a argument, but who lets who decide what the degree is? What if the person that says "pull yourself out of it" was affected many hundreds of times worse than the person hearing that advice? Now is degrees a purely personal and relative matter? How many people have heard stories of spoiled rich brats scream bloody murder and acted like they were dying because they didn't get the exact color they wanted in their designer luggage? (replace in the nouns for different scenarios) And conversely, the poor child with nothing, is happy and grateful just to have a little more food at mealtime? "Just get over it" _is_ the answer to the rich brat who wants to wallow when you put it in perspective of others. But from their own perspective, it's the end of the world. (lots of personal experience seeing both sides of this issue)

limeblack 8y ago

The book "The Psychopath Test" goes into how common some attributes are in society and being cautious giving out such labels with out thoroughly understanding the person. It gives a specific example about Tony being held in a mental hospital for years against his own will.

tzakrajs 8y ago

Today I "learned" psychopaths cannot become addicted to any drug.

zafka 8y ago
Yes, I would call bullshit on that one too.

mindgam3 8y ago

Yet another article with misleading information about “psychopathy” (“sociopathy”, “antisocial personality disorder”, etc). The fundamental pattern these terms are all trying to address is the same: antisocial behavior, or a consistent pattern of behavior that harms others. Do we all have it in us to act selfishly sometimes? Yes. Just like we all have it in us to act altruistically. Psychopathy is a spectrum with Mother Theresa on one end and Hitler on the other. (I realize Mother Theresa may not have actually been all that saintly in real life, but bear with me for the sake of argument.) The major flaw in the article is how it focuses on someone who was eventually diagnosed as a psychopath after seeking treatment. The issue here is that the people who are actually dangerous, i.e. very high on the Hare psychopathy checklist, i.e. true psychopaths, are never going to voluntarily be diagnosed. Real psychopaths don’t seek treatment to change their behavior. If they get caught, they try to destroy whoever exposed them, and if that doesn’t work, they move on to new targets and start over. My point is that we need a consistent way to refer to people who are dangerous social predators. It doesn’t matter what the term is, sociopath, psychopath, ASPD, whatever. What matters is that the term doesn’t get watered down or confused with other so-called personality disorders which don’t share this aspect of harm to others. For example, aspergers/autism has absolutely nothing to do with psychopathy. If the term “psychopath” becomes meaningless, then it becomes harder to talk about and expose the real predators in our midst. In other words, the psychopaths win.

dnomad 8y ago
You may actually be confusing and conflating several different "disorders." Certainly it's not clear that psychopaths, sociopaths and ASPD are all just "dangerous social predators." Some would consider psychopaths and sociopaths to be polar opposites. This comment lays it out pretty well [1]. > 1. Psychopaths do not have a conscience (e.g., they do not feel guilt) and do not bond or love like most people. Sociopaths do have a conscience, albeit a weak one, so they are able to feel some degree of guilt in certain situations. However, they usually quickly deflect that guilt and place blame on others for causing to do whatever they feel guilty about. Sociopaths are capable of love but it is usually a very dysfunctional form of love/bonding. > 2. Psychopaths tend to not take a lot things personally. They don't care if you don't like them. They are usually egotistical, though, so if you attack them personally, they will feel anger but not other forms of emotional hurt/wounding. Sociopaths will feel both and tend to take everything very personally, even stuff that isn't meant to be. > 3. High-functioning psychopaths tend to think things through and plan their actions/steps in a logical manner without emotions coming into play. Their thinking is very organized and it is about reaching whatever goal they have. If they hurt you in the process, well, that is because you were most likely an obstacle and you got run over for being in the way, but not because it was personal. Psychopaths typically inflict pain because it's a means to an end, not because they enjoy it. > 4. Sociopaths are basically the opposite: they tend to be very disorganized in their thinking and planning because they are much more subject to certain emotions such as vanity/narcissism, anger and jealously. If you get in their way, they will inflict pain to eliminate you, but will also likely enjoy it. Sociopaths will often seek to inflict pain because they enjoy inflicting it (psychopaths don't get that kind of rush) but will often feel mixed with their anger or violence a tinge of guilt, which their narcissism will require them to deflect as being caused by others (think of the killer who does something to their victims to show regret or respect, such as posing them in a certain manner. It doesn't mean they regret their actions, only that they regret that they were forced by someone or society to kill). > 5. Most sociopaths end up in jail and have lower than average IQs. Most high functioning psychopaths don't and end up in jobs that require turning down one's emotional reactions, such as a trauma surgeon, butcher or CEO. [1] https://www.thecut.com/_pages/cjkmuv88b00500xy6u0morj7n@published.html?commentId=5f3287c1-dbb9-4d23-9436-7a2db3dcd0f7#comments https://www.thecut.com/_pages/cjkmuv88b00500xy6u0morj7n@publ...

didibus 8y ago

> Even people who are 16, 17, 18 on the PCL-R are nasty sons of bitches. Do they meet the diagnostic threshold of what we would call meeting a diagnosis of psychopathy? No.” So apparently the PCL-R is a scale to measure how nasty a son of b one his. I just don't get it. What happens at the 30 mark in the scale that makes it an illness versus you just being a terrible human being?

didibus 8y ago

> they’re convinced their ex is a psychopath, when really their ex was just a toxic, awful person. There are millions of those, and they’re everywhere, and they come from every neurotype. That's the most interesting quote I find. It poses a paradox. What makes a person awful and toxic? Are there common personality traits to this? Are there biological causes? Do we need a new pathology for this? Toxipath? She later mentions this: > I think it’s important to hold people responsible for their actions, not brain formation. People make choices. Psychopathy is not an excuse, and it’s definitely not a reason why someone does bad things. So what are those reasons then? And what are those bad things? And what mechanism governs one's choices? It does seem to me like psychopaths, by definition, lack all natural controls which would allow them to know what the bad things are and that they shouldn't choose to do them. Thus, they need social controls instead. Like, society has to make it easier to achieve her goals through good means, and make it very hard to do so through bad means. Otherwise she has no means of containment. She does not fear, she does not rejoice. She does not regret or feel guilt. She does not hope and dream. That said, what are her goals? What drives a psychopath? Adrenaline rush alone? That's what she hints at. Finally, I noticed the quoted doctor goes out of his way to mention a spectrum. And that he'd only classify of psychopath the more extreme cases, at the far end of it. For those, he says all four traits must be clearly demonstrated. And those by definition mention: > take pleasure in hurting others > are physically aggressive Which are arguably at the top of the list for "bad things". So purely from the quoted doctor, if she does not have those traits, she's probably not high enough on the spectrum to be labeled a psychopath. At least not based on the quoted doctor's diagnostic model.

serversytem 8y ago

I think an equal attention should be paid to the self defeating personality disorder spectrum which seems to be the opposite of psychopathy, if the goal is betterment of society.