Psychopath and psychopathy

What is psychopathy?

Everybody knows the term and typically when I mention it …people smile.

For some reason psychopath is now a word which induces positive reaction in at least some people. Interesting.

When you open the DSM – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or Mental Diseases, you won’t even find the term psychopathy there. Psychopathy is no longer recognized as a medical condition or disease. The closest in terms of symptoms to what we call psychopathy is Antisocial Personality Disorder (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder)

So what do people actually think it means?

According to randomly chosen people we asked on the streets of New York, psychopaths are crazy, maniacs, insane killers, people like Charles Manson.

Still not sure what’s so funny about that.

Is that a sign of how cynical have we all become? Maybe not.

Maybe we are not quite so cynical but we can smile at the word because we associate it with something unreal. Maybe we don’t really take the word seriously. Maybe what happened over time is that we see psychopaths so completely and utterly over the top bad, that we don’t really fear them. We don’t fear them because they only exist in movies.

We are not the only ones here believing that psychopathy has been kidnapped by the entertainment industry and stripped of its real feel. Once it was a serious medical condition but now who cares.

Actually there are few people who care and there is one individual who has
done a lot of work to bring psychopathy back where it belongs – back in serious psychiatric and neuro-scientific research:

Professor Robert Hare.


We share some of his ideas and credit him for being one of the biggest inspirations for
“So, should we really fear psychopaths?”


BLOG 3

When you read the description of the characteristics of psychopathy and then you read the New York Times, you don’t have to be a scientist for your light bulb to go on. There are some weird similarities.

ENRON
KOZLOWSKI
Goldman-Sachs


“The world is run by psychopaths.”

You may have heard somebody say this and maybe you thought it yourself. For most of us it is an expression of exasperation when we don’t understand why decision which are made for us don’t make any sense. Or at least they don’t make any sense for us.

But what if it is true and what if we can prove it?

Well, that was our Initial idea for the film. We got a lot of chuckles imaging how we will combine serious interviews and outrageous ideas together and “prove” that
We liked our idea so much that we dove into the research.

So, why did we not do the film we set out to do in the beginning

Blog 3

Whether you believe in G-d or statistics roughly one out of every 100 men is a full blown psychopath. Which is actually a pretty large number, when you consider, how many times a day you come across a group of 100 people or more.

There has been so little money spent on the research of psychopathy that there is a lot of basic things we do NOT know about the condition. We don’t know if it is hereditary – meaning if there are people around us – YOU – who carry the genes for the condition and so. There probably is some heredity and there probably are some are factors involved as well.

It would help to know what causes the condition and even there we have much more we don’t know that what we do.


Robert Hare worked as a prison psychologist and so he used to meet psychopaths daily and has more than a few amazing stories to tell by the way. He is a very good observer and he is also very organized which makes him a good emipirist. Due to the lack of existing scientific data on the condition he had to make notes and in order for him to organize his research he created the Checklist.

Only after the checklist was tested and validated at a number of other facilities around the world it came to the crosshairs of neuro-scientists who coincidentaly had a new toy: the functional MRI.

Unlike MRI, fMRI

When a number of


BLOG 4

So why didn’t we do the film we initially set out to do?

For couple of reasons:

• We respect the work of people like Robert Hare and Paul Babiak and we don’t want to jeopardize the seriousness of what they are doing by presenting it a mocking half-serious way.
• The by far more important reason (I guess we are not so nice after all) was the fact that regardless why psychopaths live among us they are not and cannot be the real problem. They are the problem of course, but not the main problem. The main problem is: WHY have we not done anything about it and why are we not doing anything even now. In other words, however fantastic and unbeliaveble are the details of their doings and shenagnogans, we the normal majority are always more important.

We are still very much interested in presenting the proble and if our film could in any way help with raising awareness about the condition and lead to more focus and resources to be directed at the this research – we would be very pleased. As people we are more into other people – we want to know what it would take for them to do something.

The problem of psychopathy, however real and serious has become in a way a methaphor about the real

Maybe that’s why we have psychoaths here – to get us of our asses and every now and then do something good.


So why are psychopaths here in the first place?

Maybe they are just a statistical mistake, maybe they are just a fluke. Maybe we need them to do the dirty work that nobody else would do. But what is the dirty work? And do we need to have it done at all. Do they exist so that the rest of us can pretend that we don’t do the

Are they here so that we get tempted to do something bad – to play with the psychopath inside? Do we need that bad example to grow?

OR is there something on the opition of some developmental psychologists who say that psychopaths are the new kind of man. In the future societies we will no longer need empathy or other feelings and psychopaths are going to better equipped to interface with computers.

We don’t really know for sure.

Robert Hare and Paul Babiak repeatedly claim that we don’t need them. Maybe they played a role in the past. They made good soldiers and typically were killed before they were able to get too big.

We did though let a few of the famous psychopaths get big in the past. I am sure that you can remember few of these names (Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao…)

How much better are we in determining who they are and keeping them at bay?

What mechanisms do we have in place which limit their possibilities to once again usurp power to themselves and carry us – nice, normal people into a war or crisis?

OK, so now we will pay more attention to them. Almost everybody we talked to could tell us of at least one person they know, who are psychopats.

No system of control will be able to protect us unless we all constantly limit their possibilities and make it harder for them to get all the way to the top.

Watch the film and spread the word!