I wish the Hare Psychopathy checklist list had been available when I was in my twenties and dating. It might – I hope it would – have stopped me in my tracks, preventing me from making one of the more serious mistakes of my young life.
Still, I am relieved that when I took the test last week I did not qualify as a psychopath, which is apparently true for most women. For whatever reasons, psychopathic behaviour – not to be confused with antisocial personality disorder – generally misses us.
I was initially directed to an article – “The Making of a Psychopath: Why They Don’t Care: They Can’t” – in the September/October issue of Scientific American Mind (page 22), ISBN 70989 38530. I have long been worried about someone I know, and wanted to see – well, no, I didn’t want to see, but sometimes confirmation is necessary. The only way a person can help is to become knowledgeable.
Here, in the article, I was to discover that 0.5-1% (250,000 Americans, 25,000 Canadians) of the general male population are afflicted, many of them working alongside of us, sharing an occasional meal with us, or sleeping in bed beside us at night. (To clarify: Don was as far from psychopathy as I am from slim.)
The highest possible test score (0-2 points on 20 criteria) is 40, anyone with a score of 30 or more being considered psychopathic. According to statistics, the average score is 4, and many people make it into the teens and 20s, the magazine citing these individuals as, among other types, “the bullying boss, the drifter, the irresponsible guy who is always milking the generosity of friends and lovers.”
Here then, is the checklist, which is divided into three categories:
Antisocial Behaviour:
- need for stimulation and proneness to boredom
- parasitic lifestyle [taking without giving; at the expense of the host; often poisonous]
- poor behavioural control
- sexual promiscuity
- lack of realistic long-term goals
- impulsivity
- irresponsibility
- early behaviour problems
- juvenile delinquency
- parole or parole violations [of course, you have to be caught first, and the psychopath, charming by nature, often eludes the law]
Emotional/Interpersonal Traits:
- glibness and superficial charm
- grandiose sense of self-worth
- pathological lying
- conning and manipulativeness
- lack of remorse or guilt
- shallow affect [defined as a tendency for genuine emotion to be short lived and egocentric, with an overall cold demeanour that can be covered by affected charm]
- callousness and lack of empathy
- failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions
Other Factors:
- committing a wide variety of crimes
- having many short-term marital [or marital-like] relationships
There are other traits that psychopaths share, as the article clearly outlines. But what I found heartening in all of this is the current belief that there is help. One-on-one therapy called decompression is one approach that psychotherapists are using on delinquent teens, whereby the cycle of negative behaviour/punishment/negative behaviour is being eradicated. Brain and genetic studies are also on-going, and a person can only imagine what modern science has yet to uncover.
In fact, sometime within the past month or so, I watched a documentary on this subject – I think the key figure was either a neurologist or psychologist, but oh, my memory! – whose pre-frontal lobe and DNA testing, as it turned out, highlighted him as the lone sociopath in his immediate family. [He had had a C-T Scan, which had shown the characteristic blue-coloured trouble spot in the front of his brain, and so he had investigated further.]
When he examined what made him different from other sociopaths, he found that throughout his young life he had been surrounded by a loving, stable, and positive family where he had been appreciated, encouraged, and attended to in ways that many of us only dream of. In turn, he had married, most happily, and is now raising a loving family of his own. Clearly, something circumvented that part of his brain that would otherwise have left him in psychological peril.
I suppose, in the end, I do not quite understand why we expect people who have these sorts of monumental glitches (which are blamed on genetics in about 50% of the cases) to behave in ways that most of us understand as human: compassionately, honestly, with integrity. I understand the frustration that comes with knowing and having to live with and suffer at the hands of a pathological charmer, not being able to make any headway or help them become happier and healthier. But it’s that thing my mother taught me: those who know better, do better.
Trying to make a psychopath humane is like asking a tiger to change its stripes. Without decades of investigation and years of persistence and uncompromised love (and perhaps not even then), someone whose brain is malfunctioning is not going to change just because we ask it – ask them – to. I know, because I did everything within my power (which never felt close to enough) and nothing, absolutely nothing, worked.
