I’m a psychopath. The word, though baggage laden, was a sense of freedom for me. I would assume that most people don’t understand what it really means; I certainly did not. So, what is a psychopath? Common usage and television would have you believe that a psychopath is a cold blooded killer, one who murders for no reason and gets some demonic satisfaction from it. The problem is that it isn’t true, but it’s not completely wrong. Some of the worst serial killers were also psychopaths. In some studies, it is shown as the most correlated factor associated with recidivism outside of sexual crimes.
Psychopathy is a set of personality traits that many people have to some extent, but are set at extreme levels. I suppose that is the case for any personality disorder. So, what are the traits? The most widely accepted list was created by a Canadian psychologist Robert Hare who was the first to create a common definition and methodology for testing psychopathy. Criminal history is only a small indicator and is a symptom of some of the other traits, such as impulsivity, lack of remorse or guilt, a need for control as well as callousness, and high tolerance for punishment.
There is a lot of debate on the level of empathy that psychopaths have. While some claim that no empathy is present, I find that Professor K Dutton is the closest to describing me. He breaks empathy into two subdivisions.
‘You've got it. Now, one of the interesting things there, I always remember interviewing a psychopath a few years back, and he said, "You know, what you don't need to have color vision in order to know how a traffic light works." OK? You don't need to see the red, or the green. All you need to do is know which bits are lit up, and then you can act accordingly. Now what we know about psychopaths is, there's two different kinds of empathy, Steve. You've got what's called a cold empathy, and you've got a hot empathy. Now, cold empathy has to do with reasoning and rational thought. Hot empathy I describe as the feeling of feeling what another person is feeling. OK? So psychopaths, it's true, don't have the hot empathy. They don't feel what you're feeling, but they have a cold empathy. They are very, very good at cognitively and dispassionately gauging what you might be feeling. And that allows them to be able to push the psychological buttons that really kind of get the rest of us going with relative impunity. And that's what makes them very, very good persuaders.’
Dutton -http://www.ttbook.org/book/transcript/transcript-kevin-dutton-wisdom-psychopaths
In this respect, it is, as I understand it, the opposite of autism on the scale of empathy. Where they have high hot empathy and low cold empathy.
I never knew why I was different than everybody I know, but I always had the definitive deep down certainty that I was different. I cannot understand how people work, but I know the cues and the responses that I can get. It’s never caused me great emotional distress, but nothing has. There have been times where I’ve worked myself into crying because I wanted to know what it feels like. I don’t feel sad or necessarily happy as the way I see other people act. I’m focused on the here and now, almost mechanically.
Professionally, I do programming because from the day I saw it, I understood it. Computers work the same way my brain does. Break a problem down to the most elemental points and you have a series of true/false or yes/no questions that will decide the path to the result.
I did not set out to find out my condition. I was simply reading an article about psychopathy and I started noticing the similarities of the symptoms. The more the article explained what it was, the more it explained who I was. It caused me to find a copy of the psychopathy checklist online to take because I was certainly curious. I scored high in most elements and was “at risk”, though it showed I was well above the threshold for a positive diagnosis and suggested I get officially tested. The only risk areas that I did not score high on was impulse control. As I suddenly became very interested in the condition and started to look at what this was and what it meant for me, I discovered some other interesting tidbits.
According to Dutton, our understanding of the number of people that are psychopathic was probably much higher than most in the psychology world believes. Almost all the studies and testing done are on the prison population and is likely the reason for the association. If you have low empathy and low impulse control and you happen to have an aggressive personality, there is a higher probability of violence.
But what of those that don’t have low impulse control? The western world plays to our strengths. The same characteristics that defines our condition also make us good in business. CEO’s and Lawyers, Surgeons and Programmers as well as a host of others value non-emotional, cold rationality.
There is no treatment or cure. Brain scans show that we work differently. It's not something that can be turned off and no indication that the gaps between our brain functionality and that of the general populace can be bridged. In fact, in prison populations, therapy only increases the chances of recidivism; likely, it teaches the criminal psychopath new tools to understand and prey on his targets.
As an introduction, this was mostly about what psychopathy is and is not and how I came to know about it. If I have the time and the motivation, I'll go more into how it effects me personally.
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