You're listening to the Mind over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilley. My name is Kristin Dilley. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social media
manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner in
crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind of Our Murder. I'm Kristin Dilley
and I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by doctor Katherine Ramsland, author
and all around amazing person here to talk to us about psychopaths. Catherine,
thank you for joining today. I'm glad to be here as always, and
what a fun topic. Really, it's definitely an interesting and much more diverse
topic than most people realize. So what was the genesis for this article?
What made you decide, you know what, I think we need to talk
about the history of psychopaths. Toime, okay, I do teach a whole
segment of my or formerly did my forensic psychology course on the whole notion of
psychopaths. What's the history, how did the concept evolve? How do we
understand it today? It's complicated, and so my initial I'd write a lot
of blogs. I have a blog at Psychologist a Day. I've been doing
it for ten years, and often we'll touch on the psychopathy. But in
this one, I was going to write about the ten types of psychopath that
Theater as a psychologist named Theater Milan had generated that no hardly anybody knows about
because it just catch on. It's not the fashion, and all of a
sudden it just evolved into a much bigger thing because you see all these articles
making claims about psychopaths. If you drink black coffee, you're more likely to
be a psychopaths, psychopaths preferred dark chocolate, psychopaths, this and that,
and they're all really core, poorly designed supposed research pieces that they're sciencing,
essentially making it seem like psychopath is a very unified concept. And that well,
most of them will choose business majors or whatever it is, and it's
just not like that. Clinically, it's not like that at all. So
when I want to talk about it, I do want to talk about what
we know in the clinical community versus what's out there in popular culture, because
typically people would think the psychopath is a criminal and a serial killer. Most
art serial killers or murderers or even criminals. And I think a lot of
people don't get that because the concept the name psychopath is thrown amount so easily
at anyone and everyone, And it's just really simple. When most people think
of the term psychopath, who do you think they're probably picturing? Because I
have a very specific picture in my mind when I think of psychopaths, and
I think, you know who I'm talking about, because you just wrote an
article about him with Kevin Sullivan. But when I think about psychopaths, I
think of Ted Bundy, and most people are thinking fictional ones. They're thinking
Hannibal Elector and yes, and Ted Bundy is the prototype serial killer psychopath.
Yeah, is the term abused? Would you say when people are tossing around
fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter or real life characters like Bundy. Is that kind
of a one dimensional way of looking at psychopaths? Yeah, I don't know
if I use the word abused, but certainly way over simplified, superficial,
and mistaken for the most part personal. Not all serial killers, though the
majority, are not all serials of psychopaths, and as I mentioned, not
all psychopaths are criminals at all. It also gets mixed up with the concept
of a sociopath or antisocial personality disorder or the dark triad or it's a mess
and it can be difficult. So clinicians will tend to go with what we
know from the instrument that measures. It's a personality disorder that manifests a high
degree of twenty traits and behaviors that are on an instrument called the Psychopathy Checklist
revised. Clinicians are going to stick pretty closely with that. That's not the
only instrument that we use, but for example, there's none for sociopath.
We have no diagnostic instrument, so I don't even use that word. It's
an old fashioned word in the nineteen forties and fifties again also thrown out there
easily to call somebody a name. But there isn't any diagnostic instrument for it.
Antisocial personality disorder, the third of these concepts does have the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual, the DSM for that one. But in every part of this
interpretation of behavior and personality traits is up to the clinician, and you're certainly
going to get people disagreeing over who is or isn't a psychopath always. You'll
always have that, especially if they're on the border. So on this list,
let me just finish that. On this list of the twenty traits and
behaviors, each gets assigned a number in terms of how much the person manifests
those things. So from zero to two. If you're not manipulative, you'll
have a zero, but if you're highly manipulative, you'll have a two.
So the twenty traits and behaviors, the highest score is forty. If you
are between the thirty and forty, you're considered to be diagnosed as a psychopath.
Let's stay on the checklist for a minute, because I find that really
interesting. You'd mentioned manipulative already. What other behaviors and personality traits are going
to be found on the psychopathy checklist is? What else is it seeking to
measure, okay, So there's some that are not well known. It was
a Canadian checklist initially, so it was within the and it was developed by
a prison psychologist, so it's within the Canadian correctional system. So something like
what we would call they break their parole is one of the things, okay,
and that's not something people normally think about. But lack of remorse,
that's probably the hallmark right there, what we call the primary psychopath or perhaps
the born psychopath. Serial relationships, jumping from one to another, parasitic behavior,
deception, narcissism, such things as that. So you would have and
that list is pretty easy to find. You just look up psychopathy checklist and
you'll get all twenty of them. And that was developed by Robert Hare,
Is that right? Yeah. Robert Hare was a prison psychologist and he had
corresponded with a man named a psychiatrist, prison psychiatrist named Herbie Cleckley, who
actually did evaluate Ted Bundy at one point. Cleckly it was the first one
to really crystallize the traits and behaviors. He had a list of sixteen and
he and Hair corresponded a bit and then Hair and his colleagues took those traits
and behaviors, added a few more from based on their work in the prisons,
to come up with a standardized instrument. So it wasn't just left to
clinical opinion. It was really, here's a standardized instrument. He does a
lot of trainings so people know how to use it. It's just a simple
take your list of twenty to sit in the bar and think about your ex
spouse. They're that easy. Yeah, I found myself thinking a lot about
ex girlfriends. People wish it were that easy and maybe tweeted as if it's
that easy, but it's not. A perfect example is the guy's book,
John what's his name Ronson? I think the psychopath Test. He wrote a
really hilly, almost mocking book with a completely superficial understanding. Because he's not
a clinician, he was allowed in. I don't know why Bob Hare did
this. I would have recommended that he didn't do this, but he was
allowed in to see some of the trainings and whatnot, and then he just
made fun of it and he completely misunderstood how it was used. I had
seen that actually the other day, just perusing around through Barnes and Noble,
as I want to do. And I did notice that, and I picked
it up and I was like, no, I don't think this is going
to be worth my time. And actually, because it really did sound like
he was taking it a little more lightly than it deserves to be. Okay,
good, I'll check that one off the list of to be reds.
I won't deal with that one. Yeah, it's no pointless book. How
accurate would you say the PCLR actually is? I know that I know it
determined. It's such determined by the clinician working with it. But how accurate
would you say it is? It actually depends on who you ask, because
there's certainly controversy in the psychoact community about whether it's really the best. There
are other instruments, but it's certainly the most validated, and it has also
proven to be one of the best instruments for predicting the potential for violent behavior.
If you're already a violent person, a violent psychopath, of chances that
if you get out of prison you will repeat your cryme the chances are high,
and the psychopathy checks is one of the key predictors for that. How
long ago was that reas done? So when you talk about a number of
clinicians thousands using these materials. How long has that been around? Clickly wrote
his book in the nineteen forties with multiple editions of it. Hair and his
colleagues were working with this in nineteen seventies. I believe the initial testing was
in late seventies, early eighties, nineteen eighties, and so it has been
around that long in terms of how much they've worked with it. The problem
with it was that most of the research was done on incarcerated individuals, so
some of the claims made for psychopaths had to do with for example, impulsivity
is one of the traits. This is when I talk about in my class,
you might find high degree of impulsivity and people who have been caught and
incarcerated. But let's say there's a lot of psychopaths who are more planful,
more careful, more calculating, don't get caught, and that ends up not
coming up on the psychopathy checklist because the checklist was based on these incarcerated individuals.
So that's one of the criticisms of it is that's way too much skewed
toward and incarcerated population, and also toward males, and also towards adults.
So in maybe the last twenty years, we've done a lot more on other
races, on juveniles, even young kids. There have been some iterations of
the psychopathy checklists for kids for women, So there's more research now on other
types of populations, but the majority of the early research was really unincarcerated male
offenders who were adults. Is psychopathy is something that occurs more in men or
women or just like anything across the population, is it going to be maybe
an equal measure or does it skew more toward men. That's the problem,
is it does skew toward men, but that we have women diagnosed with borderline
personality disorder, for example, who might actually be psychopaths. Instead. There
was for a while a reluctance to diagnosed females as psychopaths because it seemed more
because there's more violence among males. But that again is a misunderstanding of psychopathy
that it's about violence, because it isn't. Bob Harre says, we have
the same distribution of psychopathy in females as in males, but the females tend
to have lower scores overall, like male psychopaths might be up in the thirty
seven, thirty eight, thirty nine women more toward thirty one, thirty two,
thirty three. But he still he says the distribution is still fairly close.
Others will say, again, it depends on the research and how it's
being interpreted about. Others will say, there certainly are less fewer female psychopaths
than male, but are they being accurately diagnosed. That's a question because they
do seem to manifest things in a different way, a more manipulative, for
example, rather than narcissistic, let's say. And also, you want to
throw in one more complication, there's a difference between a primary and a secondary
psychopath. So the primary psychopath appears to be the born psychopath, the one
where we're actually finding a number of anomalies in the brain that set psychopaths apart
from other people. And so some are set apart from other offenders, some
are set apart from other violent offenders. It gets tricky. But the secondary
psychopaths apparently seem to be more reactive. So the primary psychopaths are low emotionality,
blunted emotionality, no remorse, what you typically think of as a psychopath,
but thuggish, grumpy who I'm not. I don't care about anybody but
myself. Psychopath reactive. The secondary psychopath is more reactive, and often we'll
have had abuse in their background, or neglect or starvation or something where they've
developed psychopathy as a survival tactic, and so they're going to manifest that differently.
They have a higher emotionality, for example, they will manifest it differently,
but they'll still get a high score on the Psychopathy Checklist, but just
in other dimensions than that emotional blunting, that calculated the cold kind of psychopath
you typically think of. So that makes it harder because psychopathy is considered to
have these two facets. The checklist gives us these two facets, and both
of them have two factors, So it depends on what they're manifesting. Some
are highly parasitic and so they tend to take what other people have, or
camp out on their couch three months, eat all their food, take their
money, but they're not doing other kinds of things. So the way we
understand psychopaths, it has to do with the kind behavior they're manifesting more often,
and that's why it's just not a uniform concept. Different psychopaths will manifest
different types of behaviors, but all of them would still if they come up
and at thirty to forty range and the test, they're still going to be
considered psychopaths even though they act differently. I think that's very complicated if you
understand what I'm saying, no totally, and keep it in mind that haven't
had more than a rudimentary psychology class in a very long time. I took
abnormal psych in college. I may think it's about the last time I touched
it. I guess I had never given a lot of thoughts the idea that
psychopaths can be created. I always thought there was this idea that you are
born with psychopathy. It hadn't occurred to me like it can be developed over
time. So this is very interesting to me. And also some people will
say, oh, you're when you say primary versus secondary psychopath, that's the
difference between a psychopath and a sociopath. So you'll get that whole segment of
the clinical communities saying that as well. But certainly that secondary psychopathy is or
appears to be more environmentally attuned and reactive than the primary psychopath, which appears
from what we know from brain research to have been born with an emotional disconnect,
so their emotionality has saw a study recently by how they have a hard
time with music. Their emotionality is considered fairly superficial. They're not deeply rooted
in the truth because their manipulators are going to do whatever it works to their
own advantage, and they're not going to care who gets hurt in the process,
even their own family. They're not going to care because what matters is
what they want. That's more the primary psychopath. You'll get some of that
with the secondary, but the secondary is really almost more of a response to
a difficult environment. This almost sounds like nature versus nurture, doesn't it,
except that there's no formula. There's none at all. Nature and nurture are
part of both. How much is the brain a participant in this? We
still don't know. We don't have enough. There's a lot of research going
on, but there's nothing you could say definitively. If we could, the
court system would have to change incredibly significantly, because if we go in and
say a psychopaths, let's say born psychopaths. Primary psychopaths can help what they're
what they're doing because they don't process moral information, or emotionality or caring,
so we can't really hold them accountable for the decisions they make. That's going
to be a very tough sell if that's what it comes to. Currently,
we think the psychopath are just evil people who make bad decisions. That's the
popular notion, but that is not what the research says. That actually leads
into a pretty interesting question here. What would you say are some of the
most common misunderstandings that we have as a whole about psychopaths, And you really
just iterated one of them, that all psychopaths are evil and have no sense
of fellow feeling for other people. But yeah, what are some of the
other common misunderstandings that we have about psychopathy that they all behave the same That's
what this blog was about, is how can you say somebody who prefers black
copy is more likely to be a psychopath? That doesn't even make any sense
that they all manifest the same, That they're all criminals is another one that
you hear a lot that just because someone's labeled a psychopath, they are a
psychopath. Because so many people label ignorantly, I'm often asked, is they'll
go through all the political figures with so and so a psychopath. Okay,
I can't. Actually I don't know because I didn't do these psychopathy checklist with
them. We're not supposed to really diagnose people from a distance that remember,
not really having them in any kind of clinical arena. But lots of people
do it anyway because there's enough behavior out there that's consistent across time to be
able to But the way they put is I can look at them through the
psychopathic lens. I'm not diagnosing them. I'm forming a clinical opinion based on
the behavior we do know. There's a whole book on I won't name any
names, but there's whole books on some of these political figures where you'll get
psychiatrists and psychologists into the phray all giving diagnosis of somebody they never met.
And it's not that simple. So maybe that's the number one issue is people
think because there's a checklist, it's a simple matter from going down the list,
reading the media accounts and going down the list isn't simple. It's not
simple little and they may have never even met this person, often have not
met the person. Those articles when I read them, I'm not saying they're
not interesting. They often are, but they usually start with some sort of
caveat that you're not supposed to do this, and you're not supposed to analyze
someone that you've never anyway, now I'm going to go right ahead. And
then they proceed to apply some of these standards to these individuals and say,
I think so and so is a psychopath or whatever. Yeah, are there
people, though, Katherine, that you've met or studied in your real life,
through the work that you've done over the years, where you've said to
yourself, this person is a serious and dangerous psychopath. Interestingly, and its
raider and I have discussed this the BTK serial killer because he has never been
diagnosed as a psychopath. However, a real person psychologist who came, actually
many serial killers never have been the psychologist who came to do the competency evaluation
before what might have led into a trial, though he didn't have a trial.
On the back of his report, wrote in pencil psychopath with a big
question mark. I don't know why he wrote that, except that in the
United States, we don't tend to use the psychopathy checklist. We use the
diagnostic against a physical manual, which isn't the same thing, because that manual
realizes only in behavior, not personality traits. Maybe he was saying, I
wonder if we should bring in the psychopathy checklist. I don't know, because
he wasn't there to do an insanity evaluation. It was really competency. Is
he competent to go to chal So that was interesting and I and Dennis says
even asked me, do I think he's a psychopath? And certainly he's got
many of the traits and behaviors, but married to one person, to no
serial relationships. In fact, I think a whole group of psychologists took it
on, took him on, and they've taken on. They found ted Bundy
to be somebody who gets a high score, but some of the others not
so much. And Dennis Rader did not rise to the level of a thirty
on the Psychopathy Checklist in part because he didn't have a juvenile record and never
had a parole violation. Because he's never had parole, he married one woman
and stayed with that woman, and so there's a number of things he comes
up zero on this list. And if you can't get to a score of
thirty, he doesn't get bad diagnosis. Nevertheless, I would say he's manipulative.
He doesn't really have remorse about what he did to people. He may
care about his family, but he doesn't care about what he did to his
victims. He's not impulsive. He was very calculating, So there's a zero
on that part checklist, and certainly diminished fear and guilt response in his part.
Emotional blunting is there, but all of his traits and behaviors don't rise
to the level of giving him a score of thirty or more on the psychopathy
checklist. So people would say, to me, that's just crazy, as
serial killer is a psychopath, not clinically. He's speaking and probably nobody's done
more work with him than me. I've known it for thirteen years now.
We did a lot of testing and whatnot, and I would say he just
doesn't manifest all the things you would expect of a psychopath. When he asked
you, Katherine, do you think I'm a psychopath? Did he really seem
to want to understand more about himself and why he did all of these horrible
things. I'm just curious why the question would have come up for how was
he really interested in doing self reflection or was it just a what do you
think he's a narcissist? He's really interested in having attention aimed right at him.
Let's talk about me. Yeah, And so we looked at a few
books and oh he and I remember I love this one too. This has
to do it. There's a whole aspect of the clinical community that thinks narcissist
can do these self assessments, and I won't. They who gave me the
test to give to Rader was a prominent psychologist in the field of psychopathy research,
and he said, give Raider the self assessment psychopathy test. I said,
I think he's just gonna lie because I can figure out what just looking
for in this test. And he did lie. For example, what was
something like, has anyone ever said that you're a dishonest person? And he
put no, And I said, did you not hear the victims' families?
You're sensing here? He said, I'm talking about today. Oh, it's
manipulation one oh one, isn't it? And that's invalidate his score right off
the back, because he was angling for what does this mean? How do
I make myself look good? Blah blah blah. So the idea of the
self analysis by his psychopath is so weird to me. And yet there's all
kinds of research using that test with offenders who supposedly want to really know about
themselves. There's such a thing as faking bad, is such a thing as
faking good. And we have a personnel of tests that catch that, but
that one doesn't catch it. And I had to give the test back to
this psychologist and say it's just is not going to work. He's going to
give the answer he thinks he should give, and not necessarily an honest him.
You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be right back after this word
from our sponsors. We're back here at Mind over Murder. The testing and
the work that you did with Dennis Raider, was it face to face?
In most of it was not? No, because in the prison where he
is in it's a maximum security prisons. I was in one booth, he
was in another booth, and it was through a video thing. Some of
them are a pencil and paper tests, and he could just send them back
to me. Some of them we did over the phone, but there wasn't.
You don't get to be in face to face unless you're in there with
his attorney, and at the time he doesn't have an attorney, so you
were in the same facility but not in the same room. And even now
you can't visit him that way because they took all those rooms out during COVID
and they haven't put him back. Oh wow, is it how they have
video? So I could do something like that on video, but it's I
don't think I would get anything different. Truth is, you could probably do
something from across the country now with your technology being Do you feel like the
reliability of the information that you received would be as good as if you were
in adjoining rooms using a video system. It depends on what tests you're giving
them, all kinds of exercises you're asking them to do. What's at stake,
So that's a hard question to answer. Generically. You had mentioned before
some of these evaluations or to determine whether someone's competent to stand trial and things
like that. So they in some cases know that there's a lot writing on
the outcome. There's lots of malingering going on. If there's something big at
stake and they have read books about how to fake it, they'll do that.
If they are really worried. They will bake it. Yeah, and
so many forensic psychologists are trained on instruments that detect malingering. Sometimes you find
psychologists who are going naive thinking they're really good at spotting lies. Turns out
research says no, they're not. They're about the same as the average person.
But if they believe they're good at it, they can easily be duped,
and that happens. Are there instances in which psychopathy might be a positive
trait or can benefit a person who is identified as a psychopath. You have
a whole books on that. There's a successful psychopath, almost a psychopath.
Yeah, there's a number of books about psychopaths being evolutionarily superior. In fact,
somebody recently asked me when I was at the Writer's Police Academy, could
psychopaths adaptively go past all the rest of us? And I said, when
AI figures out a way to destroy the human race, the psychopaths will emerge
as the victors. Something to look forward to, the rise of the machines.
Yeah, they definitely have adaptation traits, not for community and connection,
but for survival. You better believe it. I think of a number of
CEOs, some of whom I've worked for the psychopaths are attracted to positions of
power, where money is handled, where interesting careers, because they're sensation seekers.
They don't like boredom. They move into places where they can manipulate other
people and get things for themselves and have power, that's why. And they're
very attracted to politics, banking, CEO, so lots of business majors.
Definitely investment banking for sure. Yeah, which is not to say a writer
can't be a psychopath, because they certainly can't be, or at least half
a psychopath. The doctor with seventy books under her velve. So it's actually
entirely possible that most of us, at least once and probably more than once
in our lives, have encountered someone who meets the criteria for psychopathy, and
about one in one hundred people, those chances are pretty good that you've met
somebody who's at least on the border line. But if they've they're not committing
crimes necessarily, but they might great promises. They might might tell you they're
going to do something and then they undermine you with it, They triangulate,
they set you up to be punished by somebody else, so you don't think
it was them that did it that in relationships, they tend to be very
narcissistic and cold calculating, so they're not necessarily breaking any laws, but they're
breaking hearts for sure. There's a lot of psychopathy survivor groups. I can
definitely see where that would be something that you would need or want to have
around. And I'm really interested in what you said earlier about the fact that
it's possible to detect it in children. Of course, as a teacher,
I found that very interesting. I think by the time I get them as
high schoolers, it's probably on its way to being developed. But I'm curious
as to how young we could detect it. I'm thinking of that six year
old school shooter here from earlier this year. I'm wondering if that had other
issues though as far as I know from media reports. But three or four
years old is when you start to see kids bullying for no reason, lying
for no reason, stealing, doing property damage, showing that these narcissistic trends,
the lack of remorse, They start to show that kind of around three
or four, which is not to say they're a loss clause or not,
but there are some programs now for well, we don't call them psychopathical.
I'm kids at risk of developing psychopathy, and there are programs now for early
intervention that have shown that you can turn them around. And I don't mean
in the Dexter way. In my opinion, I think that whole concept that
he has to be concerned about. I don't feel things the way everybody else
does. That's not a psychopath. They don't care about that. So it's
about trying to show them why pro social behavior is in their best interest,
to appeal to the narcissistic aspect to them to at least try to connect with
other people and take care of them, even if you don't feel it deeply.
It's tough, and especially if this is in fact an inborn thing.
It's not like you can just change that easily. But yeah, we have
programs and we have all kinds of early alert now. But I want to
say this because a lot of people think you can spot a psychopath, thanks
in part to some of these articles. Here's how you spot a psychopath.
Do you get things like they don't yawn when other people yawn, which is
or they use more flat words and their Twitter tweets, or that is so
dumb, But it gives people a false sense of security that they're going to
be able to spot a psychopath if they see this and that, and you're
lost. If you like black coffee, dark chocolate, business majors, I
don't beyond you're in trouble. You're a write off right there. Unbelievable,
But the idea that you can spot a psychopath, that's exactly at least people
open to hitting into relationships with charming individuals that they think couldn't possibly be these
con artists, and then they get hurt and wonder why now we're back to
my ex girlfriends, back one of my ex boyfriends. For sure, I'm
going to sound like Dennis Rader with this next question, Katherine, Am I
making these people psychopaths? Or did they make themselves psychopaths? I'm being serious
here. All of us interact thousands of times with our fellow human beings.
Are our behaviors impacting other people in a way that moves them closer to capathy
if we're talking about the secondary form of psychopathy, Yeah, because if they're
already from a situation where they've been abused or seriously severely neglected, and then
you come in and maybe start up relationship and then decide that this isn't for
me. Well suddenly there's that abandonment thing and horrible treatment by somebody. Yeah,
so it could be. But often you'll get with any personality disorder,
you might get what we call co morbid so other disorders too, Which is
what I wanted to say about the six year old. I wouldn't in any
way call him a kid at risk for being a psychopath, because I don't
know enough about him, but had enough of the disorder where parents were supposed
to be with him and that was the problem that they neglected that particular duty.
But usually psychopaths will have some other thing happening at the same time.
So if you have schizophrenia with psychopathy, which we call a schizopath, oh
oh, but it can happen, yeah, where then they'll develop these maybe
delusions and now and delusions with cold, callous, calculating, manipulative behavior that
can lead to a lot of bad things too. Okay, that idea of
this getsopath is brightening to me. Just kind of take a minute to walk
back from that one. Yeah, it's rare, but it certainly can happen.
Or psychopaths with delusional disorders where they have they listen to enough conspiracy freaks
and start getting afraid and going I need to do something about this, and
start getting armed. And then if you add in the layer, I don't
care what happits to other people. Now you have the makings of somebody who
is more likely than not to be violent because they don't have that moral inhibition
factor. We are finding that appears to be a brain part missing. It's
just not they're not making that connection with moral processing because I think the narcissism
sometimes is too strong. It's all about me, It's all about what I
need for myself. You'd mentioned those early intervention strategies for young children who may
be at risk for becoming psychopaths. Is there any way to treat psychopathy?
And I know maybe treat is the wrong word. Is there any way to
intervene with adults who are considered psychopaths who maybe are looking at their behavior and
going, I think I'd like to do a little bit better, Like I
maybe I'd like to not be a psychopath for a while. Is there a
way or their treatment options to treat psychopathy they're working on them. There's certainly
a whole camp. This is they're untreatable in part because they don't care that
much and it's hard to inject care into them. What you have to do
is is usually be cognitive behavioral therapy, where you are convincing them that changing
their behaviors in their best interests right, it's about somebody else's it's about their
best interest to not what would be in the best interest of society as a
whole lot. They don't care about that, they don't care about all of
us. You have to appeal to what they care about. And if you
think of narcissism as an arrested development, almost infantile because it's very me centered,
really just doesn't extend beyond the boundary of their own egos, that would
make sense that they haven't matured enough to connect with community and want to care
for others. Not saying they don't care, because certainly I've seen where a
really psychopathic individual still has concern for someone close to them. Let's say Israel
Keys was a good one. Israel Keys, a serial killer from Alaska,
wanted to not make the mistakes that Ted Bundy made, so he decided to
kill people randomly to go places. Rob Banks various little murder kits and then
go back a year or two later and pick someone at random. So that
was his big game with himself. But when he was caught by making a
mistake like Bunny, he was caught, he wanted He said he would give
up the names of his eight other victims that they didn't know about if they
would keep this out of the paper, because he worried about his daughter.
So here is a guy doing this bizarre game where people's lives are taken so
he can put notches in his belt essentially, and yet he doesn't want his
daughter to know where he's doing this. He cares about something, which is
yeah, yeah, his daughter. Yeah. Now maybe it's because she's an
extension of himself. So that's still maybe very egotistical, current responsible. We
don't know. But I'm not going to say psychopaths care about nobody, because
I find that there is often somebody that they might care about. But how
deep does it go? Bob Hare would say, they know the words,
not the music, And in fact, we are finding they have a hard
psychopath in studies seem to have a hard time with music. Can you expand
on that? You mentioned that earlier as I can't because I didn't read the
study. Something I saw about not even a week ago and didn't have time
to read the whole study. I would because I wouldn't say unless I could
see how they picked the participants, because so many studies are not well designed
that I would want to see how did they actually get their participants? How
did they interpret this? Before I would want to say that, But it's
out there. I think, it's not hard to look up. So are
the chocolate studies and coffee studies and to you almost have to have an education
and research and statistics before you can know that these studies are poorly designed,
because they do get into professional journals. They shouldn't be, but they do
get in there. And I myself am constantly asked to value studies and proposals,
and I think, how did this even get past the first line of
editors? It's so bad, So you have to always evaluate how go past
the headlines which are clickbait? Find out are we talking about ten people?
Are we talking about four hundred randomly chosen psychopathic? I don't know, but
i'd have to see that before I could tell you much more about that study.
I found it intriguing. You didn't have time to read it. I'll
have to look for that. That sounds neat first of all, the big
question, are you going to be a crime con this year in Orlando?
No? Oh, Catherine, No, I need a break from traveling so
sick of it. I don't blame you right now. The only travel I'm
doing is for trainings. Had they asked me to come to speak, I
probably would have, but they didn't, so I have other places to go
to do. I'm doing trainings for a hospital facility and doing for police.
That to me is more interesting and satisfying than just going to the crowds known
as grime con. So maybe I invite me the next year. But this
year is out, And so then what projects are you working on now that
you've as you mentioned at the top, you've stopped teaching undergrads. So what
are your projects now? Like? How are you filling your time? I'm
actually writing a series of novels about a forensic psychologist who lives in the Outer
Banks and or on the Outer Banks, and she runs a team. She
owns a PI agency and runs a team. And I take actual twisty,
weird crimes and put them into my fiction. So the second one. The
first one came out last year. It's called ice Cream Man. The second
one's coming out. It's called in the Damage Path. And in a way
it's about what we're talking about, because there's a tornado and the tornado's behavior
is always understood in the wake of its damage path. I like that that's
the metaphor of a serial killer. That's exactly how we understand the serial killer
as well, so the metaphor of the tornado that happens in this particular book,
which hits a prison. So that book is coming out at the end
of August. Excellent. Working on another book that's similar to the Dennis writ
book, the Confession of a serial Killer book, but it's too soon to
say who it is. Okay, very interesting, We're intrigued. We will
make sure that we put links to your Psychology Today article why It's so Hard
to Predict Psychopathy from May twenty second of this year up in our show notes.
And of course we would love to have you back to talk about your
book once it comes out. I will say they change the title of that
blog, oh do say? Because originally it was called Psychopaths Take Cream in
their copy too, and which was to say, so I get black,
but not all of them, but they change the title unfortunately. We'll make
sure that we put a link up to that. I think that's going to
do it for this episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for
joining us, Catherine. As always, it's a pleasure to have you on.
Thank you, I appreciate you spun to be here, great questions.
That's going to do it for this episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you
so much for listening. We'll see you next time. Mind Over Murder is
a production of Absolute Zero and Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are Bill
Thomas and Kristin Dewey. Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois. Our theme
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Thank you for listening to mind Over Murder.