Monday, February 4, 2019

Diagnosing Logan and Jake Paul as sociopaths?

I was aware of this at the time they came out but didn't have anything to really say. But I stumbled upon this article by Self , "What Mental Health Experts Want You to Know Before Watching the Buzzy New YouTube Series ‘The Mind of Jake Paul’,: that interviewed some of our friend researchers that I thought had some good information :

Although the word pops up in everyday conversation, it is not actually a medical term, Steven Siegel, M.D., professor and chairman of psychiatry and the behavioral sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, tells SELF.

“We try to avoid the term because it just doesn’t have any formal meaning. It’s a colloquial word and it’s not used consistently,” Scott Lilienfeld, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Emory University, tells SELF.

“It has no clinical content,” Ronald Schouten, M.D., J.D., director of the Law & Psychiatry Service of the Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, tells SELF. “It’s used as an epithet.”

As Dr. Siegel explains, sociopath is generally a label that some people give someone they believe is a bad person.

Sociopathy is really an outdated, slippery term for what is known today as antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), according to the American Psychological Association (APA). As Morton notes in episode two, “The Dark Side of Jake Paul,” ASPD is the technical term most clinicians prefer to use today. (The terms are still sometimes used interchangably, according to the National Institutes of Health).

“Antisocial personality disorder is psychiatry's way of trying to classify people without using the pejorative or derogatory terms,” Dr. Siegel explains. “It’s a way of commenting on a pervasive pattern of behavior that spans someone's adult life and that may inform why they experience life the way they do.”
***
“personality disorders are notoriously difficult to diagnose,” Katherine Dixon-Gordon, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and assistant professor in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, tells SELF. “This diagnosis is a really complex thing to undertake, and requires these long interviews.”

Even having all the relevant information doesn’t always ensure a reliable diagnosis. “They are so complicated that even among psychologists and psychiatrists, we can’t agree on how to diagnose personality disorders,” Dixon-Gordon says. “Even when we undertake these incredibly complicated interviews with people, experts don't always agree.” She explains that two well-qualified clinicians could evaluate the same person and not necessarily come away with the same assessment.

In reality, the behaviors some experts may link to ASPD span a spectrum. “All of these personality disorders describe being at an extreme end of a spectrum of normal human behaviors,” Dr. Siegel says. Dixon-Gordon adds, “By definition, [personality disorders] represent maladaptive variance of normative personality functioning. So often that line between what’s adaptive and what’s maladaptive and what’s normative and non-normative is a difficult one to find.”

In episode two, Morton cites a statistic that one in 25 people is a sociopath. (This stat is arguably outdated and was derived from several studies dating back to the ‘90s.) While there are not many reliable epidemiological studies on how prevalent ASPD is—although several experts noted that figure sounds high—Lilienfeld argues that the stat is misleading for a different reason.

“Saying ‘one in 25’ implies that [people with ASPD] are different in kind, rather than in degree, from the rest of us,” Lilienfeld says. “In my view, there’s no real distinction in nature that clearly tells you [if somebody has ASPD or not]. There’s no categorical cutoff. It’s almost like asking, ‘How many people are tall?’ Depends on where you draw the cutoff for tall.”

Dixon-Gordon makes a similar argument. “In the same way that the cutoff for whether or not you have high cholesterol changes from year to year, these [diagnostic cutoffs] change,” she explains.

These complicated, nebulous aspects of personality disorders mean that attempting to diagnose them even in a professional setting requires extreme care and caution. “All of these things are reasons why diagnosis is so, so nuanced and complex and contextual,” Dixon-Gordon says, “and really requires [...] not jumping to conclusions.”

Interestingly some of the researchers quoted worry that the webseries is trying to glamourize what they describe as a "dangerous" disorder. But maybe watching were concerned about the opposite, that it was attempting to demonize and stigmatize. So much so that Shane Dawson included an apology at the beginning of episode 3:

“I do actually want to apologize because there was some backlash from people feeling offended and feeling like I was making a horror movie out of an illness or a disorder. And I 100% understand [...] to treat a person like a scary monster is like, not cool, and I shouldn’t have done that. So I apologize for that genuinely.”

14 comments:

  1. My sociofriend asked me:

    "Am I an asshole?“

    Answer:

    «You are the biggest asshole I have ever met.“

    And he replies, animated:

    «Well, if he is a dick, then I am going to be an asshole.“

    ReplyDelete
  2. North,

    You have spent countless hours analyzing you sociopathic boyfriend.

    Perhaps it is time to shine your investigative light inward.

    A few weeks back, I mentioned you may be in an abusive relationship. I will go further than that. Have you considered you might be suffering from something close to the Stockholm syndrome?

    Please spend the time to draw the parallels. You owe it to yourself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think the Stockholm syndrom is only for people that were abducted

      Delete
    2. You probably know who I am.

      What do I want? That gave me pause.

      I could lie to myself and to you and say all I want is for you to be OK. But there is more.

      What you write is very insightful. I understand and can relate to what you are saying about sociopathy. Not many people have the patience or the intellect to excavate the truth.

      I can also relate to the « love » that emanates from a very strenuous relationship. Not a bad feeling really. It is M.E. that actually uttered those words when I met her. They make sense.

      So I think what I want is understand myself through your words.

      Delete
    3. Yes.

      From a purely external perspective, your relationship has been what most would call abusive.

      It will take you a while to realize, I think. Years maybe. I wish you the best.

      Delete
    4. And no, I get it that he is not out to get you. But that does not make it right.

      We (using our societal norms) pardon people when they truly realize they have done something wrong.

      It is a journey, and one that a sociopath may never be able to accompmish in their life time. This is why they have personal rules. I respect that. But we also have to look after our own self.

      Delete
    5. Athena Walker, Ghost of QuoraFebruary 13, 2019 at 3:58 PM

      I don't think North's relationship is abusive, though she has abused us terribly by leaving Quora and (worst of all) depriving us of her writings. If I'd known I would've cut and paste them all her posts, to document the passage of a brilliant mind

      well, at least I recorded/recovered all our private chats :) something to remember her by

      I bet her leaving was somehow a function of that dim fellow Anon in the comment above accusing her of tolerating an abusive relationship. Where do you get off, people, depriving us of our North? Our own True North.

      Her relationship is no more abusive than a chess match is abusive. If one player happens to be better at the game, then inevs the matter looks like 'abuse' on the losing side to the outsider who knows fuck all about the game. But it is entirely and completely missing the point. it is reductive, offensive, and a little boring, actually, to reduce the entire matter to 'abuse'.

      anyway, all the losers won, and we lost us our North.

      Hope you're happy, nitwits

      Delete
    6. Athena why did you answer the same question over and over again on quora? Wasn't that really boring?

      Delete
    7. Athena Walker, Ghost of QuoraFebruary 14, 2019 at 1:43 PM

      fair question. I am actually operating at different levels of profundity, but few can pierce the level of sophistication that I operate under, since I purposefully hide it under repetitive motifs and predictable responses. Only a few adept individuals have pierced this superficial layer and really get what I'm about. We all then have a good laugh at everyone's expense.

      What I am after is sort of a meta-Quora experience, where my interaction summed to the larger interaction creates an ever-cyclical system of response, counter response, ad infinitum. A giant symphony of Psychopathic Quora, if you will.

      I also provide the structural backbone under which the whole PP site operates, something like the Basso Continuo in a Baroque piece of music. Sure, by itself, the bass can be pretty uninteresting to listen to, but without it the whole composition degrades to a cacophony of meaningless and random noises.

      But we have, as I have stated, lost one of our most precious treble parts, something that I always imagined as sounding something between a flute and a clarinet.

      I have come to bring the straying lamb back to the fold, but am gutted that it is proving so tough.

      Come on North! Whaddaya say? Still waiting for a response

      yours utterly,
      Ghost of Quora Past

      Delete
    8. Athena Walker, Ghost of QuoraFebruary 14, 2019 at 5:18 PM

      yeah I know they're a bunch of wankers on there, but i really miss talking to ya! And reading what you write. I can come on here and only get 1/2 of that accomplished.

      I also hope you saved a lot of it bc a lot of it was bloody good.

      And I was also wanting to know why you left. It seems like there must have been a specific reason

      The Slough of Despond... have you read the Pilgrim's Progress? A really interesting look at psychospiritual dynamics, from what I recall. YOu can lift away the Christian elements if they don't appeal.

      Halfway thru R D Laing. It's the longest it's taken me to read a really short book

      also got a bit into the Hyatt book but it did not appeal. I still will try to read it because I guess it's supposed to have something on there

      See ya!

      Delete
    9. yeah I went thru the same thing - took off a month or more and it really IS enjoyable not being there ... but what happens to me is I go thru a procrastinating funk and then the cesspool calls me back. It's a tar baby, that place

      i found Hyatt a little try-hard and got lost on the food analogies and I have to say I do sort of reject the fundamental premise

      I'm not certain I would consider Hyatt a psychopath - to me he seems possessed by an inescapable self-loathing which he projects onto all humankind and the psychopathic stance is posited as both a byproduct of his having bought into the myth of the supremacy of the individual (what a load of bollocks) and an innoculation against his own low self-esteem

      or maybe he's just capitalizing on others' confirmed self-loathing by promising them some Ubermensch's reward if only they'll succumb to these feelings and the obvious nihilism it creates, instead of fighting them like every other self help nostrum out there

      in that case he is most certainly a psychopath (was). And fulfilling his own dictum: "give them what they want... so they'll destroy themselves with it"

      a third view i had was that he was looking for some shock-therapy style of thing to shake said self-loathers from the shackles of self-helpism - but looking at his biography I'm not inclined to believe that

      maybe I should read it more to see if it becomes clearer

      what was it again that you got from it?

      Delete
    10. whoa, I really like that culture - read everything like you don't understand thing. I love shit like that. I'll probably keep reading then in case there's more stuff like that

      that last one is also pretty useful. I feel i kinda live my life like that alrady but i defo could use more thinking/being outside the box

      Delete
  3. They advised me one site for working on the Internet class play casino slots I tried a couple of days until everything is fine.

    ReplyDelete
  4. they just high on money and fame

    ReplyDelete

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