And clowns.
Well, insane clowns anyway.
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So - psychologists and psychiatrists don’t know what manic episodes are?
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In other news, the personality trait that correlates most with trollish behaviour online is everyday sadism:
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I’d rephrase it to “people see what they want/expect to see, even and perhaps especially when those people are experts in a specific concept.” I think the worst thing the field has done (and we’ve done a lot of bad shit) is act like mental health diagnosis and classification is as clear cut and objective as medical diagnosis.
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It’s projection and personal bias, all the way down…
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Well! This rather depends on which psychiatrists and which psychologists. Researchers have noticed stark differences between the results found in carefully controlled studies and ‘in the field’ by criminal psychologists, social workers, and other people with carceral associations.
For one, the carceral results of evaluations of the same person correlate rather poorly. There are numerous sources of bias including both racism and classism. And, indeed, one particularly pernicious source of bias, given that in the United States prison has been asked to do the job of mental health, is other mental health conditions. Someone looking to tag someone as ‘evil’ will interpret self-aggrandizing assertiveness and a seeming lack of fear in a different way than someone in a clinical research setting. Given that the carceral-practice specifically recommends against treatment for anyone labelled as a psychopath, this leads to outright immoral outcomes.
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Historically, bipolar disorder has been misdiagnosed as schizophrenia, and vice versa. Americans favoured one diagnosis, europeans the other.
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4.5%?
What are the odds that I managed to date 6 of them in a row?
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That’s the thing about having a mind: no matter how hard we study it, we’re still beholden to the same distortions we point out in others! I can’t tell you how many shrinks I know who are just completely blind to their own biases. I mean, not me…I’m very well-adjusted.
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I know on the clinical practice side that was basically forced upon the field because insurance doesn’t want to hear anything that isn’t considered as clear cut and objective as medical diagnosis.
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According to the paper cited, the studies that used the PCL-R as the diagnostic instrument showed a psychopath rate of just 1.2% in the general population. It was use of other instruments and self-reporting that resulted in the headline-grabbing 4.5%
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For every one certifiable psychopath, there are always going to be ten people who are just plain assholes.
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Absolutely. It’s a necessity for practice and I diagnose regularly, while also acknowledging that it’s a flawed system. But lots of people buy into it as gospel when it’s clear that there’s a lot of grey area in our grey matter, so to speak.
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Their first act was to steal their name from libertarian-socialists, so it wouldn’t be surprising.
“Lawyers and Police” covers Keir Starmer too (What is the head of the CPS if they aren’t a police lawyer?)
Britain is fucked, isn’t it?
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I’m not so much interested in public figures, but the psychopath next door.
Having spent the better part of the last decade spending much of my discretional time with and providing free labor to a sociopath / psychopath without realizing it, I’m glad to learn
- they are all around me, and not the once-in-a-century sort of way we saw on TV
- they can look like the nicest people you’ve ever met, and/or married to the truly nicest people that keep you hooked in
- they also know how to use the language of self-awareness and humility but still be anything but
- it wasn’t my fault
- they really don’t feel remorse, as impossible as that seems
- they won’t change, and I’m not responsible for their change
- just get away from them
- report them if they are harming others
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But I thought that was the definition of a sociopath? A normal person who has aquired the traits of a psycopath? In order to carry out an ideology, win financial reward, for mere survival, etc.
Not really. In terms of core definitions, both the psychopath and the sociopath share the common traits of having extreme difficulty empathising with others, an inner inability to distinguish between right and wrong, a degree of narcissism, and a lack of impulse control.
Where the two differ is that the sociopath has a stunted conscience (where a psychopath has none) and also tends not to have a psychopath’s masking abilities (e.g. charm, performative expressions of empathy, manipulative talent, strategic acting out on impulses). The sociopath is thus easier to identify to the casual observer.
@Shuck is correct that someone without those traits can be trained to behave as if they are a sociopath or psychopath. As I noted above, an ideology like capital-L Libertarianism that’s premised on concepts like “greed is good”, “altruism is for suckers”, “there’s no such thing as society”, and “the individual is the only thing thing that counts” applied as the default or baseline in an institution* or country will naturally encourage the kind of behaviours that come naturally to born psychopaths and sociopaths.
[* it’s been posited that, if one (like Mitt Romney) accepts the idea that corporations are more than fictional persons but “are people too, my friend”, they exhibit the characteristics of a psychopathic human.]
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I’d posit that self-aggrandizing assertiveness and a seeming lack of fear are also very useful survival traits to have, or appear to have, if you’re in prison, too. Which would presumably skew interpretation.
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I think the important thing about such studies is to recognize that people who are diagnosed with psychopathy often don’t know they’re psychopaths until adulthood or adolescence at the earliest. Partly, this is due to them not really getting any kind of help for their condition. I think this interview with someone who’s been diagnosed with psychopathy and bipolar disorder is a great starting point to understand them: An Interview with a Sociopath (Antisocial Personality Disorder and Bipolar) - YouTube They’re not these big scary monsters like how they’re portrayed in fiction. They can be manipulative and abusive but if they get help they can be just like the rest of humanity.
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