Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Psycho vs. psychotic (part 2)

The reader explains what it feels like to live the life of a psychotic (which description I'd be reckless enough to call important, particularly as I have traditionally thought of psychotics as the "truly crazy" disordered, when really their worlds don't seem so much more distorted than the worlds of the rest of us).

Based upon dictionary definitions of the word everyone is "psychotic", as etymologically it describes anything related to or affected by psychological and mental processes.

Despite their best intentions mental healthcare providers are essentially tasked with turning down the volume and ensuing productivity. I recently called my boss to task for making fun of a 'crazy homeless man' who was walking around talking to, and smacking, himself. These abhorrent behaviours are two that I perform from time to time; especially during more agitated mixed states when my guard is down and my mind throws open the flood gates to every thought and sensation it can barely handle. The distinction is, of course, that I have a shower and go to work; so my psychosis (and hence burden to society) isn't as bad. 

That I identify as a psychotic is because it fits my experiences between than as a sufferer of a disorder. By choice, but often not, my daily life features conspicuous manifestations of my inner landscape. Some months back I sat on a train biting teethmarks into my right hand, just because. My job involves a lot of running up and down stairs, and when I'm descending my hands contort into talons; and I've felt wings arching out behind me before. Paranoia and the odd aggressive display (including hissing and snarling at people) are possibly less attractive -  and possibly the parts which most people associate "psychotic" with. 

Over time I've come to struggle with the notion of a disease entity afflicting me. For the most part these unusual traits have no baring on anything I'm doing. The brilliant Darian Leader once wrote of a psychiatric patient who was quite sane, bar his vocal belief in a non-existent European country. A fully functional human being was effectively quarantined for a mishap of geography. 

As I'm not a psychopath it's difficult to try and describe any distinction between "you" and "us" (especially since I don't want to speak for anyone but myself). However it is telling that '-path' is tacked on the end there: a more naked disorder classification; though psychotic is a more loaded term I feel. Psychotics are totally out of control; violent paranoid schizophrenics busying themselves with senseless murder while psychopaths (as you will of course know) are all about Debussy and fava beans. 

At a push I think its about how one enters into the world. Maybe psychotics and psychopaths are (consciously or otherwise) naturally inclined to focus on/give credence to their own inner worlds more than "normal" people. Psychotics find little or no distinction between reality, the sensory and the imagined. For us there is no cure, rather a need to determine and discover how involved we can/want to be with others; whereas normals can't even conceive of having any alternatives. 

I've actually being laying out a lot of my experiences as a psychotic out on my own website, particularly in this article: http://causecatyljan.com/2013/08/19/psukhe/.  

Monday, March 31, 2014

Psycho vs. psychotic (part 1)

I had an interesting discussion with a reader on the relationship between the psychopathic and psychotic. I was expecting to see almost no relationship, but was surprised to see at least a few parallels, particularly in that we both experience the world in a way so different than neurotypicals and consequently are treated differently for it (unless we're pretty expert at hiding it):

I greatly enjoyed and admired your book. So much that I’d be reckless enough to call it important, given how it counters the standard model of the sociopath and gives a voice to others like you. 

Thanks to your book, I’ve concluded that I am not a sociopath. The question has long been there, and maybe - were I to go into detail about my life - my conclusion could challenged. 

Some years ago I was given the diagnosis which saved my life: ‘Bipolar Affective Disorder with Cyclothymic Tendencies” and a prescription for lithium carbonate. After a whole life of depression, violent outbursts, alcohol abuse, self-harm and one potent suicide attempt; I finally had something approaching an explanation. 

I’m grateful to be high-functioning (social workers have expressed surprise at this), and to be carving niches in life and work. I’m more focussed and hugely confident (with an ego my younger self would’ve been affronted by); though increasingly analytical, cold and emotionally detached. I work in retail and relish being able to alter my environment and personality, in order to sway my superiors (or indeed by-pass them altogether) as well as manipulating the buying decisions of customers. In my somewhat kaleidoscopic wetware I love the idea of “bending their will to my own.”  

In my head I maintain an almost comic book sense of personal mythology and continuity. My life and experiences cast in the light of my “emerging powers.” The fear and doubt and servility that characterised me is long dead, and now my concerns centre wholly upon increasing my own sense of achievement, in demonstrating (to myself I must stress) how much I can do, how much I can handle and how well I continue to evolve. 

I exist in a near perpetual state of hypomania (occasionally peaking into irrational ranting/noises inside my head) entwined with a calm, centred “mixed state” where cutting out an eye or slicing open my arms will quell some internal conflict/pain or simply because...reasons. [Un]logic I call it. 

It seems to me that some of what I describe could be considered sociopathic in nature. The difference between sociopathy and sociopathic traits is intriguing to me, because I now wonder if my continued evolution is in part down to adopting (consciously or not) such characteristics. Having to step back, take longer to assess what’s happening, increase the emotional distance. Forcing myself into calculated risks and being willing to follow my gut when boundaries become too much. 

I appreciate how unconcerned you seem with justifying or seeking sympathy for your sociopathy. How it is not a disorder needing a cure.  Perhaps another reader would raise an eyebrow about now, but I can only stutter from where I stand. 

He concluded with two questions: "How thin do you consider the line between psychopathic and psychotic can be? What can the “coping strategies” of one offer to the other and vice versa?" To which I replied:

I have myself often wondered about the beneficial aspects of sociopathic behaviors, particularly evolutionarily or as defense tactics against a hostile world. A lot of people that visit my site are from eastern europe. Is it because they've had to become gradually less emotional in dealing with harsh circumstances? I actually don't know that much about psychotics. So you would consider yourself a psychotic? You would probably be a better person to ask then, what is the difference?

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Conned

A reader recently suggested a reason why people are so upset to learn that someone they know is a sociopath: "The normal person figures out they have been dealing with a sociopath only after they have been screwed and they see that the person they thought they were dealing with never existed. The distaste is both for the deception and also recognition that they were "had"- never pleasant."

It reminded me of this Radio Lab episode "What's Left When You're Right," which starts off with a segment on the game show Golden Balls. The end segment to each episode ends with a classic game theory prisoner's dilemma. So the deal is that if they both choose split, they split the money. If one chooses steal, the other split, the person who steals gets the money. If they both choose steal, no one gets the money. This clip is one of the craziest versions of it:



To me, this seems like an easy choice. I would split, because unlike most prisoner's dilemmas where it is much worse to cooperate/split when the other person defects/steals (20 years in prison for you) than to both defect/steal (10 years in prison for both of you), you end up with nothing if both of you split. The game show gets to keep its money. To me, that seems like the bigger waste. I would rather ensure that someone besides the show got the money, even if it meant giving it all to another person. And I don't actually get upset when someone gets one over on me. People manipulate me all of the time. I've been led into some pretty terrible situations (seen or heard a couple of my worst media appearances?), been conned, cheated, or whatever, but it doesn't really bother me. If anything, I'm often impressed, or at least try to learn something from the situation. (Although if it was less of a one time thing and more of a continuing power struggle, I'd probably try to figure out some way to hit them back).

I don't think most people think this way, in fact the Radio Lab episode tries to explain why so many people choose split (apart from the obvious greed) by interviewing previous contestants. The interviewees seemed to suggest that their main motivation in stealing was to avoid the feeling of being conned, tricked, or otherwise taken advantage of.

The problem with that is extreme efforts to avoid being "conned" often end up hurting yourself and others. The whole Cold War was basically built on this fear. From a New Yorker review of a book about nuclear almost disasters, "Nukes of Hazard":

On  January 25, 1995, at 9:28 a.m. Moscow time, an aide handed a briefcase to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia. A small light near the handle was on, and inside was a screen displaying information indicating that a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from somewhere in the vicinity of the Norwegian Sea, and that it appeared to be headed toward Moscow. Below the screen was a row of buttons. This was the Russian “nuclear football.” By pressing the buttons, Yeltsin could launch an immediate nuclear strike against targets around the world. Russian nuclear missiles, submarines, and bombers were on full alert. Yeltsin had forty-seven hundred nuclear warheads ready to go.

The Chief of the General Staff, General Mikhail Kolesnikov, had a football, too, and he was monitoring the flight of the missile. Radar showed that stages of the rocket were falling away as it ascended, which suggested that it was an intermediate-range missile similar to the Pershing II, the missile deployed by nato across Western Europe. The launch site was also in the most likely corridor for an attack on Moscow by American submarines. Kolesnikov was put on a hot line with Yeltsin, whose prerogative it was to launch a nuclear response. Yeltsin had less than six minutes to make a decision.

The Cold War had been over for four years. Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned on December 25, 1991, and had handed over the football and the launch codes to Yeltsin. The next day, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. By 1995, though, Yeltsin’s popularity in the West was in decline; there was tension over plans to expand nato; and Russia was bogged down in a war in Chechnya. In the context of nuclear war, these were minor troubles, but there was also the fact, very much alive in Russian memory, that seven and a half years earlier, in May, 1987, a slightly kooky eighteen-year-old German named Mathias Rust had flown a rented Cessna, an airplane about the size of a Piper Cub, from Helsinki to Moscow and landed it a hundred yards from Red Square. The humiliation had led to a mini-purge of the air-defense leadership. Those people did not want to get burned twice.

After tracking the flight for several minutes, the Russians concluded that its trajectory would not take the missile into Russian territory. The briefcases were closed. It turned out that Yeltsin and his generals had been watching a weather rocket launched from Norway to study the aurora borealis. Peter Pry, who reported the story in his book “War Scare” (1999), called it “the single most dangerous moment of the nuclear missile age.” Whether it was the most dangerous moment or not, the weather-rocket scare was one of hundreds of incidents after 1945 when accident, miscommunication, human error, mechanical malfunction, or some combination of glitches nearly resulted in the detonation of nuclear weapons. 

Finally, Radio Lab discusses a contestant who comes up with a strategy that successfully avoids people's fear of being conned:



So I guess this explains why the people I've told myself about my diagnosis take it drastically better than the people that hear it from other sources? They feel like I've conned them? Here's the trick, though. You start indiscriminately telling people you're a sociopath and see if they still treat you well. 

Saturday, March 29, 2014

Memento

A lot of socios have been asking me recently about how they can get themselves to do things or stop doing things. Today I'll address doing things. I'll address how to stop doing things in another post.

First, acknowledge your strengths in this area. Sociopaths are natural doers. More than most people we are able to act without thinking. This decisiveness can mean good things, like efficient execution of what needs to get done in a professional setting, but it can also mean bad things like food poisoning or a black eye from an ill-considered risk.

What are your weaknesses? We're naturally worse at planning ahead than other people. We may want to do great things like climb the corporate ladder, become a crime lord, or otherwise acquire a position of power and influence, but when it comes down to it, a lot of times we just can't be bothered. We'd rather keep sleeping on our parent's couch, bumming off our friends, or otherwise staying under the radar.

How do we do things that are actually worth doing? I think the key is playing to our strengths. In AA they say you can't think of sobriety in terms of never taking a drink again, you have to think of it in terms of, "I'm not going to have a drink today." If you break up whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish in little tasks and rely on your decisiveness to actually execute those tasks, you can trick yourself into accomplishing long term goals.

A good example for me is saving for my retirement. I have always loved money, and it seemed like a good idea to have money to retire with, just in case everyone hates me by the time I'm old, or I've been fired multiple times from multiple different jobs, or I end up becoming disabled somehow and I don't feel like becoming a ward of the state. Most people would think that a sociopath would never be able to accomplish the amount of deferred gratification necessary to save for retirement, but I did. I fully funded my retirement by the time I was 30 because every time I even thought of retirement, I would transfer as much money as I had in my checking account into a retirement account, an account that I set up so that I can't withdraw money without going through a lengthy process. Losing that money feels bad, but like everything else, it only hurts for a moment and then I quickly move on to other things. And of course I never have the patience to try to withdraw the money. It's like my own socio financial version of Chinese fingercuffs.

The process is similar to what happens in the movie Memento. In Memento, the protagonist suffers from acute amnesia, where every 10 minutes or so his short term memory is lost. He doesn't remember anything from after the brain injury that he suffered when his wife was murdered, but he is determined to find her killer despite his condition. His workaround is to write himself notes, even tattooing certain pieces of information on his body. If he reads a note in his own handwriting telling himself to do something, he does it without question. Spoiler alert, but as we continue to watch him in the movie, we realize that he is not always honest with his future forgetful self. He will intentionally mislead himself, knowing that his future self will unquestionably follow orders, and he does all of this for one purpose -- not to find his wife's killer, it turns out, but just to be happy, to give his otherwise empty life meaning. It's a movie and it's not an exact analogy, but it's the same idea -- use your foreshortened vision to force yourself to do things that you otherwise would not, to do things that other people cannot.

Friday, March 28, 2014

A sociopath's intimate

I liked this comment from a past post:

I had a friend who was a sociopath... learning about sociopathy in general was one of the most fascinating experiences. This person was incredibly perceptive, with a piercing intellect and spontaneous creativity, and seemed to excel at all he turned his hand to. However, life was ultimately unfulfilling for him because he felt so surrounded by idiots and imbeciles, and was himself so free of emotional inhibitions that he knew he could do more or less whatever he wanted. I always appreciated his complete and utter disdain for social norms, and the ways we would become each other's mutual psych experiment, even if it was difficult to learn that not one iota of his interest in me was emotional in nature. Sociopaths may be bereft of the empathic emotionality that constitutes the core of the neurotypical human experience, but I also feel there is much in the plight of the sociopath that is mirrored in 'normal' people, too; in essence, it is like gazing into a looking glass, seeing our basest, most ugly and unrestrained desires staring us back in our faces.

However, I feel so deeply sorry for people who had been in intimate relationships with these people. Honestly, I harbour no malice towards the sociopaths because they don't operate on the same emotional paradigm of most of humanity. Their actions are not 'evil' insofar as they are not malicious in intention, merely selfish, as they cannot be anything else. However, there is even an inherent selfishness to the most deeply emotional and sentimental of people - that we are not lied to, that we are never deceived or manipulated, that our feelings are viscerally understood and reciprocated. The sociopath, by nature of their very being, is unable to fulfil this requirement. I have no doubt that they do 'love' in their way, but never the twain shall meet. My heart goes out to everyone who has been unwittingly hurt by these people. Ultimately, I can't say that I hate them, as in many cases they are fascinating, beguiling and seductive existences, however I am quite content to watch that brilliant, chaotic maelström from a safe distance, never becoming swept up in its immediate vicinity. 
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