Monday, October 24, 2011

Managing mental illness

This is an interesting NY Times article about managing Schizoaffective disorder that questions the typical advice of taking it easy. Particularly, it suggests that people with that particular disorder do better when they have a very busy, demanding job or otherwise keep busy with obligations:

She travels a lot to conferences, and when she is back in California she keeps her schedule as full as possible. Her mind runs on high, and without fuel — without work — it seems to want to feed on itself. Her elbows usually tingle when that is about to happen, she said, and she will often play number games in her head. If she needs to, she will make a quick phone call.
I remember being happiest in my childhood during the school year. Once the summer came around, it was very easy for me to get cripplingly bored and generally dissatisfied with life. When I was a teenager, I would actually have symptoms of depression in the summer--feelings of malaise and general mental unrest that would always quickly disappear once school started again. During the school years I had every hour of my life scheduled because I liked it that way. One time I got appendicitis and went for 10 days with it perforated without seeking medical attention--I just had so many things I was caught up with. Right now I am in a similar situation of possibly overdoing it. I'm sleep deprived and may be developing an ulcer, but at least my mind isn't eating itself.

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Guest song: Wandering star

This song's lyrics have always made me think of someone who has been hurt by a socio, possibly by discovering his true nature.
It leaves her untrusting, but still yearning for closeness.

"Please could you stay awhile to share my grief
For its such a lovely day
To have to always feel this way
And the time that I will suffer less
Is when I never have to wake"

"Those who have seen the needles eye, now tread
Like a husk, from which all that was, now has fled
And the masks, that the monsters wear
To feed, upon their prey"

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Top page Google

I mentioned a while ago that if the site got to the first page of google search results for the word "sociopath" then we should celebrate with a question and answer session. I noticed a couple days ago that I was trending around 7th-9th ranked on the first page, but it's not consistent and by the time you read this, it may already be back to page two. Regardless, I thought it would be fun to memorialize this joyous occasion because life is fleeting.

I never reply in comments, but for the next 16-24 hours or so, I will try to reply in a timely manner to anything people want to ask me. I should be reasonably available, but have to bathe, eat, and do a few other things, so be patient if I don't seem to be around--I will get around to responding.

Friday, October 21, 2011

Facebook stalker

As a public service announcement for people who use this site and have an online trail of personal details, this article discusses a new site that shows what it is like to be the victim of a violent Facebook stalker. Under the title Anti-Social Media: "'Take This Lollipop' Is Your Facebook Profile Through A Psychopath's Eyes":

After allowing the site access to your profile, users click on a blue lollipop which thrusts them into the familiar mise en scene of a horror movie. The camera floats languidly down a dank hallway to the static-punctured strains of a 1950s song about candy shops. In a room at the end of the hall, there’s a man in a sooty undershirt hunched over a computer. He looks like a malnourished Daniel Craig, and he doesn’t seem happy at all. As the mystery man’s dirty fingernails pound against the keys, it becomes clear what’s on the screen: a Facebook profile. Not just any profile, though; it’s the viewer’s very own.

The interactivity is seamless; the stalker’s reflection is clearly visible, glaring off the pictures on the screen. As the creepy erstwhile James Bond scrolls along, becoming increasingly agitated with what he sees, users will recognize their old status updates and messages from friends. The next reveal arrives with shrieking keyboard stabs--the stalker has found the user’s location and is now looking at driving instructions. Slowly he reaches up and starts caressing the profile picture displayed onscreen. As the soundtrack swells ever higher, he turns his head to face the viewer and a fiendish smile spreads across his face.

The stalker is suddenly inside a car, racing down the road. Hyper jump cuts show his tortured screams behind the wheel before cutting back to his intensely focused driving face. The project was directed by Jason Zada out of production company Tool of North America.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Tracking psychopath's language patterns online

The following is going to sound absurd to some of you, and very promising to others. Cornell professor Jeff Hancock University of Critish Columbia professors Michael T. Woodworth and Stephen Porter have come up with a text analysis system that they believe may be able to pick out sociopaths in something as short as a 140 character "tweet." As reported by the NY Daily news:

A New York professor who studied the tell-tale speech patterns of psycho killers is broadening his research to see if tweets, texts and emails reveal similar tendencies.

That could help detectives identify murder suspects through their social media and online postings - and develop strategies for grilling them in the interrogation room.

"I do think some of these tools will be used by law enforcement," Cornell's Jeffrey Hancock said at a briefing Monday about his research.

The core of the study involves interviews with 56 convicted killers in a maximum security Canadian prison - including 18 who were certified psychopaths.

Hancock and co-author Michael Woodworth of the University of British Columbia used linguistics analysis to parse the transcripts. They noticed several trends. The psychopaths used the past tense more often than the others, suggesting a higher degree of detachment from the crime - a hallmark of the disorder. They also peppered their speech with verbal stumbles like "uh" and "um," showing it was difficult for them to talk about an emotional event. The researchers knew that psychopaths often view their killings as a means to an end - not an emotional reaction - and that was borne out in their language. They used cause-and-effect words like "so" and "because" more often than non-psychopaths - and focused on material needs instead of social needs like love and family. "Psychopaths talked a lot about what they ate that day [of the murder]," Hancock said. "They talked about money more often."

As a followup, the profs are now having student volunteers submit their online communications and fill out a survey that measures their psychopathic tendencies. They hope the exercise will determine if the language patterns used in social media can show whether a person is a psychopath. That could be a valuable tool for investigators because much of language is unconscious - and less likely to be manipulated by psychopaths, who can be incredibly cunning. "You can spend two or three hours with a psychopath and come out of there feeling like you've been hypnotized," he said. "It's definitely time for a glass of wine and a shower."
Or from the Daily News:

Psychopaths also used more subordinating conjunctions like ‘because’ which is explained by their interest in cause and effect.

The report says: ‘This pattern suggested that psychopaths were more likely to view the crime as the logical outcome of a plan (something that 'had' to be done to achieve a goal)’.
Uh, that reminds me of last night when I spent so much money on dinner because I was starving and I was wearing coveralls, since I was worried about the blood.

18 certified psychopaths? Even if you took large language samples from each of these prisoners (emphasis on prisoner), I imagine that it would be very difficult to show that these similarities were actually correlated to the isolated variable "psychopath." Law of large numbers, anyone? Also, the language was taken from having people describe their crimes. Luckily I don't ever talk about mine on Twitter so I should be fine...
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