Speaker 1: You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast.
Speaker 2: 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 Dilly.
Speaker 3: My name is Kristin Dilly. 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.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Mind Ever Murder.
Speaker 2: I'm Kristin Dilly and I'm Bill Thomas, and.
Speaker 5: We're joined today by doctor Catherine Ramsland, author and all
around amazing person here to talk to us about psychopaths.
Speaker 4: Catherine, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 4: So what was the genesis for this article?
Speaker 5: What made you decide, you know what, I think we
need to talk about the history of psychopaths today.
Speaker 6: 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 but my initial I'd write a lot of blogs.
I have a blog at Psychology today. I've been doing
it for ten years, and often we'll touch on 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 vi a psychopaths, psychopaths prefer dark chocolate, psychopaths this
or that, And they're all really core, poorly designed supposed
research pieces. They're sciencing, essentially making it seem like psychopath
is a very unified concept and that 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 aren't 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.
Speaker 5: 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,
I think you know who I'm talking about, because you
just wrote an article about him with Kevin Sullivan.
Speaker 4: But when I think about psychopaths, I think of Ted Bundy.
Speaker 6: And most people are thinking fictional ones. They're thinking Hannibal
Elector and yes, and Ted Bundy is the prototype serial
killer psychopath.
Speaker 2: Yeah, is the term abused? Would you say when people
are tossing around fictional characters like Hannibal Elector or real
life characters like Bundy. Is that kind of a one
dimensional way of looking at psychopaths.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I don't know if I use the word abuse,
but certainly way over simplified, superficial, and mistaken for the
most part. First of all, not all serial killers, the majority,
are not all serious or 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.
For example, there is 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 anti social
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.
Speaker 5: 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?
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 5: And that was developed by Robert Hare, Is that right?
Speaker 6: 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.
Coleckley 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. Just a simple take your list of twenty,
sit in the bar and think about your ex Spouser's
that easy? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I found myself thinking a lot about ex girlfriends this list.
Speaker 6: People wish it were that easy and maybe treated as
if it's that easy, but it's not. As a perfect
example is a 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.
Speaker 5: 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 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 Toby reads. I won't
deal with that one.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's a pointless book.
Speaker 5: How accurate would you say the PCLR actually is that?
I know it determined, it's determined by the clinician working
with it. But how accurate would you say it is it?
Speaker 6: Actually? It depends on who you ask, because there's certainly
controversy in the psychiatric community about whether it's really the best.
There are other instruments, but it's certainly the most validated,
and it is 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, the chance
is that if you get out of prison, you will
repeat your crime. The chances are high, and the Psychopathy
Checklist is one of the key predictors for that.
Speaker 2: How long ago was that research done? So when you
talk about a number of clinicians thousands using these materials,
how long has that been around.
Speaker 6: Cleckley 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 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 it's
way too much skewed toward an incarcerated population, and also
toward males and also toward 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 checklist 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.
Speaker 5: Is psychopathy 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.
Speaker 6: That's the problem is it does skew toward men. But
that art we have women diagnosed with borderline personality disorder,
for example, who might actually be psychopaths. Instead. There was
for a while a reluctance to diagnose 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 Hare 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 to thirty nine, women more toward thirty one thirty
two thirty three, but 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 ways or
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 defenders. 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,
I don't care about anybody but myself psychopath reactive. The
secondary psychopath is more reactive and often will 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 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, cold
kind of psychopath you typically think of. So that makes
it harder because psychopathy is considered to have these two facets,
and 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 and 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 in 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 are just do what I'm saying.
Speaker 5: No totally, and keep it in mind that I haven't
had more than a rudimentary psychology class in a very
long time. I took a normal SAK in college, and
I think it's about the last time I touched it.
I guess I had never given a lot of thoughts
to the idea that psychopaths can be created. I always
thought there was this idea that you were born with psychopathy.
It hadn't occurred to me that like it can be
developed over time.
Speaker 4: So this is very interesting to me.
Speaker 6: And also some people will say, oh, 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 community 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. I saw a study
recently about 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.
Speaker 2: This almost sounds like nature versus nurture, doesn't it.
Speaker 6: 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 cored system would have to change incredibly significantly, because
if we go in and say the psychopaths, let's say
born psychopaths, primary psychopaths can't help what they 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 psychopaths
are just evil people who make bad decisions. That's the
popular notion, but that is not what the research says.
Speaker 5: 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 metal 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.
Speaker 6: They all to behave the same That's what this law
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, they'll go through all the political figures, so
and so a psychopath. Okay, I can't. Actually I don't
know because I didn't do the psychopathy checklists with them.
We're not supposed to really diagnose people from a distance
that we're 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 it 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 fray, 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.
Speaker 2: It's not and they may have never even met this person.
Speaker 6: Often have not met the person.
Speaker 2: 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 net
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. Are there people, though, Catherine, 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.
Speaker 6: Interestingly, to a raider and I have discussed this the
BTK serial killer, because he has never been diagnosed as
a psychopath. However, person psychologist who came, actually many serial
killers never have been the psychologists who came to do
the competency evaluation before what might have been 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 diagnost against a
physical manual, which isn't the same thing because that manual
realizes only on 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 child? So that was interesting And Dennis has
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 and 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 Raider
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, So there's a number of things he comes
up to zero on this list, and if you can't
get to a score of thirty, he doesn't get that diagnosis. Nevertheless,
I would say he's manipulative. He doesn't really have a
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 speaking, and probably nobody's done more
work with him than me. I have 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.
Speaker 5: When he asked you, Catherine, 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.
Speaker 6: He's a narcissist? He's really interested in having attention aimed
to write at him.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about me.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and so we looked at a few books and
oh and I remember, I love this one too. This
has to do it. There's a whole aspect of the
clinical community that thinks narcissists can do these self assessments.
And I won't say who gave me the test to
give to Raider 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.
I can figure out what what just looking for in
this test? And he did lie. For example, 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 your sensing here? And he said, I'm
talking about today.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's manipulation one oh one, isn't it?
Speaker 6: And that's in validate 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 psychopaths is so
weird to me, and yet there's all kinds of research
and using that test with offenders who supposedly want to
really know about themselves. There's such a thing as faking bad.
There's such a thing as faking good, and we have
personal 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 one.
Speaker 2: 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 Rader, was it face to face in most.
Speaker 4: Of it was not?
Speaker 6: No, because in the prison where he is in the
maxim 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 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.
Speaker 2: So you were in the same facility but not in
the same room.
Speaker 6: And even now you can't visit him that way because
they took all those rooms out during COVID and they
haven't put them back. Oh wow, because now they have video,
So I could do something like that on video, but
it's I don't think I would get anything different.
Speaker 2: Truth is, you could probably do something from across the
country now with 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.
Speaker 6: It depends on what tests you're giving them, what kinds
of exercises you're asking them to do, what's at stake,
So that's a hard question to answer. Generically.
Speaker 2: You had mentioned before some of these evaluations are 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.
Speaker 6: There's lots of malingering going on. If there's something big
at steak and they have read books about how to
fake it, they'll do that. If they are really worried,
they will bake it. Yeah, So many forensic psychologists are
trained on instruments that detect malingering. Sometimes you'll find psychologists
are going naive thinking they're really good at spotting lies.
Turns out research says no, they're not. They're not the
same as the average person. But if they believe they're
good at it, they can easily be duped, and that happens.
Speaker 5: Are there instances in which psychopathy might be a positive
trait or can benefit a person who is identified as
a psychopath.
Speaker 6: You have whole books on that. There's the 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.
Speaker 2: Right, something to look forward to the rise of the machines.
Speaker 6: They definitely have adaptation traits, not for community and connection,
but for survival. You better believe it.
Speaker 2: I think of a number of CEOs, some of whom
I've worked for.
Speaker 6: 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.
Speaker 2: Investment banking for sure.
Speaker 6: Yeah, which is not to say a writer can't be
a psychopath, because they certainly can't be, or at least.
Speaker 2: Half a psychopathes is the doctor with seventy books under
her belt.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 6: And about one in one hundred people, their chances are
pretty good that you've met somebody who's at least on
the borderline. But if they and they're not committing crimes necessarily,
but they might break 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.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 4: But I'm curious as.
Speaker 5: To how young we could detect it. I'm thinking of
that six year old school shooter here from earlier this year.
Speaker 6: 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, We
start to show that kind of around three or four,
which is not to say they are a lost cause
or not. In fact, there are some programs now for
well we don't call them psychopathic. 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 thingsbody 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. So you appeal to the narcissistic aspect
of 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. 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. You get
things like they don't yawn when other people.
Speaker 4: Yawn, which is.
Speaker 6: Ad or they use more flat words and their Twitter
tweets or dumb. But it gives people a false sense
of security that they're going to be able to spawn
a psychopath if they see this and that, And you're lost.
Speaker 4: If you like.
Speaker 6: Black coffee, dark chocolate business majors and go beyond. You're
in trouble, but you're a write off right there.
Speaker 2: Unbelievable.
Speaker 6: But the idea that you can spot a psychopath, that's
exactly At least people open to getting into relationships with
charming individuals that they think couldn't possibly be these con artists,
and then they get hurt and wonder why now.
Speaker 2: We're back to my ex girlfriends.
Speaker 4: Back from one of my ex boyfriends.
Speaker 2: For sure, I'm going to sound like Dennis Rader with
this next question, Catherine, 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.
Speaker 6: To 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 a relationship and then decide not this
isn't for me. Wow, 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 comorbid 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 just 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 a schizophrenia with psychopathy, which we
call a schizopath, ooh oh man, But it can happen
yeah where and 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.
Speaker 5: Okay, that idea of the schizopath is great to me.
I just kind of take a minute and walk back
from that one.
Speaker 6: 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 happens 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.
Speaker 5: 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 as
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 maybe I'd like to not
be a psychopath for a while. Is there a way
for their treatment options to treat psychopathy.
Speaker 6: They're working on them. There's certainly a whole camp that
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 it's usually cognitive behavioral therapy where
you're convincing them that changing their behaviors and their best
interest it's about somebody else's.
Speaker 2: It's about their best interest and not what would be
in the best interest of society as a whole. They
don't care about that, they don't care about all of us.
Speaker 6: 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 the
go places, rob Banks, Barius, little murder kits, and then
go back a year or two later and pick someone
at random. So that was his big game for himself.
But when he was caught by making a mistake like Bundy.
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 you can put notches in his belt essentially,
and yet he doesn't want his daughter to know he's
doing this.
Speaker 2: He cares about something, which is yeah, his daughter.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Now maybe it's because she's an extension of himself,
So that's still maybe very egotistical. It's possible. 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
psychopaths in studies seem to have a hard time with music.
Speaker 2: Can you expand on that you mentioned that earlier as psyche.
Speaker 6: I can't because I didn't read the study. I said, Yeah,
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 you almost have to
have an education in 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 away 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 click bait and find out
are we talking about ten people? Are we talking about
four hundred randomly chosen psycopacy? 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.
Speaker 4: I'll have to look for that.
Speaker 5: That sounds neat First of all, the big question, are
you going to be a crime con this year in Orlando.
Speaker 6: No oh, Catherine, No, I need a break from travel.
I'm so sick of it.
Speaker 4: I don't blame you.
Speaker 6: 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.
I'm doing for police that to me is more interesting
and satisfying than just going to the crowds known as
crime con. So maybe I've got to invite me the
next year.
Speaker 5: But this year is out, and so then what projects
are you working on now that you've As you've mentioned
at the top, you stopped teaching undergrads, So what are
your projects now?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 4: How are you filling your time?
Speaker 6: I'm actually writing a series of novels about a forensic
psychologist who lives in the Outer Banks. YEA and are
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
in it, and a tornado's behavior is always understood in
the wake of its damage path.
Speaker 4: Ooh, I like that.
Speaker 6: That's the metaphor of the 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. That book is coming out at the
end of August, and I'm excellent working on another book
that's similar to the Dennis Raider book, the Confession of
a serial Killer book, but it's too soon to say
who it is.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 6: I will say they changed the title of that blog
today because originally it was called Psychopaths Take Cream in
their copy too, which was to say sound like it
black but not all of them. But they changed the title. Unfortunately.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 6: Thank you, I appreciate it's fun to be here. Great questions.
Speaker 5: 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.
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Another Dog Productions.
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