Psychopath help?

Question

Im studying psychopaths and I need to know the following info:
1. Is Schizophrenia the same as a personality disorder?
2. Can you name some psychopaths I can research?
3. Is Robert DeNiros' character in Hide&Seek a pyscho?
4. Are psychopaths born the way they are or does something in their life make them that way?
5. Your opinion on psychos.
6. Do you believe psychos have a conscience?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

Psychopath is not a medical or mental health term. It is media jargon. Sociopath is the term you want.

1. no, and schizophrenics can't think clearly enough to be serial killers or any real threat to society. They usually are the victims of abuse, not the perpetrators.
2. look up serial killers
3. haven't seen it, but if he killed without emotion, then the character probably was a sociopath.
4. most made that way by child abuse. There can also be brain injuries to the part of the brain that controls impulse and empathy, which is very rare. sociopathology is a personality disorder, not a biological disease like schizophrenia.
5. the amount of child abuse that goes on is much greater than most want to believe, and that the extreme can so destroys a person is tragic.
6. depends on what you mean by conscience. They may care about what they are doing, but they lack empathy and compassion about it's real impact on others.

Answer 2

how can they have a conscience?if they did they wouldnt dream of commiting a crime as they wouldnt be able to live with the guilt! I think most people have the psycopath lurking beneath the surface and then sometimes one final straw will just make them flip, and other crazy folk are just strange from the word go, yeh in hide and seek hes got like a personality disorder, he thinks hes two different people.xx

Answer 3

Try this link to the Mind website.

Understanding schizophrenia:
http://www.mind.org.uk/Information/Booklets/Understanding/Understanding+schizophrenia.htm

it is not the same as a personality disorder.

Understanding personality disorders:
http://www.mind.org.uk/Information/Booklets/Understanding/Understanding+personality+disorders.htm

Hope these help with the mental health side of things.

The best I can offer on psychopath is a link to wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopath

Also - ficitional portrayals of psychopaths:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_portrayals_of_psychopaths_in_film

Not sure if these will help, but hope so.

Answer 4

surely if you are studying this subject you will already know these answers, i know most of them and have never studied psychology.

1) yes
2)fred west, peters sutcliff, ian brady
3) dont know not seen it- but i wouldnt use a fictional character for research
4) thats a matter of opinion, some say yes, some say due to over developed part of the brain that controls the animalistic responses, some say can be due to scar tissue caused by an accident on particular part of brain, think there are published papers on such research
5) sick, need help, danger to society-but again, this is not an informed opinion
6)no, probably not from what i know, or think i know

Answer 5

If you'd like informed answers to your questions and are willing to do some research yourself (after all, it is YOUR homework)
Then you should research the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders online

Answer 6

That’s a subject I’m interested in as you seem to be, indeed. For, one member of my family is psychopath, and paranoid also (Yes, one may have both). In his case those two characteristics proved to help him getting successful in his professional life. I’m also interested in psychopaths in the field of criminality since long.


1. Is Schizophrenia the same as a personality disorder?

No, not at all and you are somewhat confused with terminology, seemingly. There are several possible types of personality disorders and antisocial personality disorder is the one you are looking for. For, psychopathy is most strongly correlated with antisocial personality disorder in the DSM-IV-TR.
For the record the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is a handbook for mental health professionals that lists different categories of mental disorder and the criteria for diagnosing them, according to the publishing organization the American Psychiatric Association. It will constitute a basis in your researches. I equally recommend you the DSM-IV Casebook, which is a gathering of patient’s interviews each and all followed by diagnostics.

There are three kinds of schizophrenia but, overall, schizophrenia can include hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, movement disorders, flat affect, social withdrawal, and cognitive deficits. It is a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disorder that affects about 1.1 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year. People with schizophrenia sometimes hear voices others don’t hear, believe that others are broadcasting their thoughts to the world, or become convinced that others are plotting to harm them. These experiences can make them fearful and withdrawn and cause difficulties when they try to have relationships with others.
Psychopathy is commonly associated with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). It is not a disabling mental disease as schizophrenia is.
However, the distinction between psychopathy and ASPD is of considerable significance to the mental health and criminal justice systems. Unfortunately, it is a distinction that is often blurred, not only in the minds of many clinicians but in the latest edition of DSM-IV.

Traditionally, affective and interpersonal traits such as:
-Egocentricity
-Deceit
-Shallow affect
-Manipulativeness
-Selfishness
-Lack of empathy
-Guilt or remorse

have played a central role in the conceptualization and diagnosis of psychopathy.

The DSM-IV, defines antisocial personality disorder as a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:
-Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest
-Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure
-Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead
-Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults
reckless disregard for safety of self or others
-Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain steady work or honor financial obligations
-Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

The manual lists the following additional necessary criteria:

There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.
The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or a manic episode.

This “tradition” was broken with the publication of DSM-III (the previous edition of the DSM). Psychopathy- renamed antisocial personality disorder- was now defined by persistent violations of social norms, including :

-Lying
-Stealing
-Truancy
-Inconsistent work behavior and traffic arrests

Among the reasons given for this dramatic shift away from the use of clinical inferences were that personality traits are difficult to measure reliably, and that it is easier to agree on the behaviors that typify a disorder than on the reasons why they occur. The result was a diagnostic category with good reliability but dubious validity, a category that lacked congruence with other, well-established conceptions of psychopathy. This “construct drift” was not intentional but rather the unforeseen result of reliance on a fixed set of behavioral indicators that simply did not provide adequate coverage of the construct they were designed to measure.
However, an important distinction has been lost by including both sociopathy and psychopathy together under ASPD and things may get still more confusing when International Classification of Diseases (ICD) speaks of “disocial personality disorder” (DPS).

So, ICD proposes another definition of ASPD and calls it DPS, whose set of criteria for diagnosing the related construct of dissocial personality disorder are somewhat differents.
Dissocial Personality Disorder, usually coming to a gross disparity between behavior and the prevailing social norms, and characterized by:
-callous unconcern for the feelings of others;
-gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations;
-incapacity to maintain enduring relationships, though having no difficulty in establishing them;
-very low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence;
-incapacity to experience guilt or to profit from experience, particularly punishment;
-marked proneness to blame others, or to offer plausible rationalizations, for the behavior that has brought the patient into conflict with society.

There may also be persistent irritability as an associated feature. Conduct disorder during childhood and adolescence, though not invariably present, may further support the diagnosis.

Overall, common characteristics of people with antisocial personality disorder include:
-Rersistent lying or stealing
-Recurring difficulties with the law
-Tendency to violate the rights of others (property, physical, sexual, emotional, legal)
-Substance abuse
-Aggressive, often violent behavior; prone to getting involved in fights
-Inability to keep a job
-A persistent agitated or depressed feeling (dysphoria)
-Inability to tolerate boredom
-Disregard for the safety of self or others.

Below is a childhood diagnosis of conduct disorders
-Lack of remorse for hurting others
-Superficial charm
-Impulsiveness
-A sense of extreme entitlement
-Inability to make or keep friends
-Lack of guilt
-Recklessness, impulsivity

People who have antisocial personality disorder often experience difficulties with authority figures. But, all criteria mentioned above are not necessarily met by people with ASPD.
Although antisocial personality disorder cannot be formally diagnosed before age 18, three markers for the disorder, known as the MacDonald Triad, can be found in some children. These are, a longer-than-usual period of bedwetting, cruelty to animals, and pyromania.

ASPD is not a mental disease in the sense we understand it and it is hard to detect for the non-initiated. We all have met, talked with at work or else, individuals with ASPD. Those persons are representative of the social fabric. They may be the average person, stupid or very smart. Those who are smarter than the average are more able to adapt and to simulate other’s feelings, to meme them, and to “play” with them, at other’s expense often, since a recurrent characteristic of ASPD is lack of empathy. Wholesome, I conclude that people with ASPD are predators.

From personal experience with people with ASPD, whom I am relatively able to spot within a short lapse of time, I noticed that those persons have certain difficulty in tolerating other’s criticism and reproaches and that there is a specific way to “deal” with them; though it is very difficult to entertain a long term relationship with them, anyways. They’ll break the relationship within a relatively short period using any kind of invented or unjustified pretext; say three months to one year, wholesome.

When particularly smart, people with ASPD may be considered as “socially dangerous,” meaning, they get quickly manipulative and exploitative regardless of the suffering experienced by their victims. Often, this lack of empathy and remorse allows them to succeed in life easier than the average. Those are CEO, Chief of Department within a company or similar. In the movie Spiderman, the actor J.K. Simmons plays the role of J. Jonah Jameson, the publisher and editor-in-chief of the Daily Bugle, a fictional New York newspaper, and a typical successful person with ASPD. A 1992 FBI report stated that almost half of the killers of law enforcement officers met the criteria for antisocial personality. The killers' characteristics referred to as antisocial personality in the FBI report were as follows:
-Sense of entitlement
-Unremorseful
-Apathetic to others
-Unconscionable
-Blameful of others
-Manipulative and conning
-Affectively cold
-Disparate understanding of behavior and socially acceptable behavior
-Disregardful of social obligations
-Nonconforming to social norms
-Irresponsible.

These killers were not simply persistently antisocial individuals who met DSM-IV criteria for ASPD; they were psychopaths- remorseless predators who use charm, intimidation and, if necessary, impulsive and cold-blooded violence to attain their ends.


2. Can you name some psychopaths I can research?

One among the best known in our modern time has been the Mafia hit-man Richard Kuklinski, aka Iceman. You’ll be certainly interested in watching one the numerous interviews of him in the Trenton state prison, New Jersey.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kuklinski

Interview Part 1:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5740692213665972395&q=mafia+hit+man&total=287&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1

Interview Part 2:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5116812489134120077

Adolf Hitler was a person with ASPD, according to psychiatrist Walter C. Langer who did a report on him during WWII at the demand of Colonel William Donovan of the U.S. OSS. In 1972, this report was declassified and publicly released as a book titled The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report.

Dean Corll was an American serial killer who, together with two younger accomplices named David Brooks and Elmer Wayne Henley, committed the Houston Mass Murders in Houston, Texas. The trio is believed to be responsible for the murders of at least 27 boys, the crimes only coming to light when Corll was shot and killed by his accomplice Henley.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Corll

Marcel André Henri Félix Petiot was a French doctor who was convicted of multiple murders after the discovery of the remains of twenty six people in his home in Paris after World War II. He is suspected of killing more than sixty victims during his life.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Petiot

Henri Désiré Landru was a notorious French serial killer and real-life Bluebeard.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_D%C3%A9sir%C3%A9_Landru

Jacques Mesrine was a French criminal who also briefly active in the United States and Canada.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Mesrine

Saddam Hussein was certainly a person with ASPD, in my own opinion.


3. Is Robert DeNiros' character in Hide&Seek a pyscho?

I don’t think so. In this case we are dealing with a case of multiple personalities, known in the field of psychiatry as “dissociative identity disorder.”


4. Are psychopaths born the way they are (….)(?)

There is still a controversy about that.

(….) or does something in their life make them that way?

Yes, absolutely, during childhood. The problem relates mostly with bad relationship with careless mother and father and violent treatment.


5. Your opinion on psychos.

Their study is fascinating because there are hard to spot and go unnoticed as psychopaths by most of the population. Looking for them is like, say, “looking for a criminal BEFORE he acts.” I may surprise you but, in the frame of this interest, I like to interact with them (when possible) so as to try new ways of dealing socially with them and to see whether it works or not. What is especially fascinating is when you deal with a smart psychopath who appears to most people as a charming and kind person (which is not, truly!). Somehow, I would willingly compare the study of psychopaths to this of the extent of the universe; meaning, it is intellectually very challenging, not to say impossible, to figure out how their mind works deep inside, as it is when trying to figure out whether the universe has an end or not, and what it might be, in the affirmative.

You certainly know or knew a psychopath and you just don’t know it. The National Comorbidity Survey, which used DSM-III-R criteria, found that 5.8% of males and 1.2% of females showed evidence of a lifetime risk for the disorder.
In penitentiaries , the percentage is estimated to be as high as 75%. Prevalence estimates within clinical settings have varied from 3% to 30%, depending on the predominant characteristics of the populations being sampled. Perhaps not surprisingly, the prevalence of the disorder is even higher in selected populations, such as people in prisons (who include many violent offenders). Similarly, the prevalence of ASPD is higher among patients in alcohol or other drug (AOD) abuse treatment programs than in the general population, suggesting a link between ASPD and alcohol and drugs abuse and dependence. But don’t take it as a reliable clue. Richard Kuklinski didn’t drink and didn’t use drugs; whereas this member of my family I made allusion to drinks heavily.


6. Do you believe psychos have a conscience?

In the sense you seem to suggest, no. And that’s what makes psychos interesting persons to study (but dangerous, at some point). Maybe a better and easier way would consist in comparing them with reptiles, crocodiles, etc. They are animal-like predators hiding under the appearance of human beings.