Sunday, August 17, 2014

"Feeling For You"

To file under failings of empathy (and the urge to simplify and reduce humanity into a problem that can be fixed only if you point it out often enough?), from Timothy Burke:

When the streams do cross and someone in a group or a discussion suddenly says, “Actually, I feel pretty hurt or offended by the way you folks are talking about this issue, because I’m actually the thing you’re talking about”, what happens? Sometimes people make non-apology apologies (“sorry that you’re offended”), sometimes people double-down and say, “You’re crazy, there’s nothing offensive about talking about X or Y”. A turn or two in the conversation, though, and what you’ll often hear is this: “Look, I just care about you and people like you. So I want to help.” (Or its close sibling: “Look, not to insult you personally, but people like you/behavior like that costs our society a lot of money and/or inflicts a lot of pain on other people. Don’t you think it would be better if…”)

I’d actually like to concede the sincerity of that response: that we get drawn into these discussions and the judgments they create out of concern for other people, out of concern for moral and social progress. That we feel passionately about people who let their children go to the park by themselves, about people who train their children to go hunting, about people who are overweight, about people who drive big SUVs, about people play their radios too loudly in their cars, about people who buy overly expensive salsa, about people who play video games, about people who raise backyard chickens, about people who demand accommodations for complex learning disabilities, about people who follow the fashion industry, about people who post to Instagram, about people who feed their kids fast food twice a week to save time, and so on.

I’d like to concede the sincerity but the problem is that most of these little waves of moral condemnation or judgmental concern don’t seem to be particularly compassionate or particularly committed. The folks who say, “I just want to help, because I care about you” show no signs of that compassion otherwise. They usually aren’t close friends to the person they’re commenting on, they usually have little empathy or curiosity overall. The folks who say, “Because I care about progress, about solving the bigger problem” don’t show much interest in that alleged bigger problem. The person who hates the big SUVs because they’re damaging the environment is often environmentally profligate in other ways. If the SUV-judger is consistently environmentally sensitive, some other aspect of their concern for the world, their vision of a better society, may be woefully out of synch or weakly developed.

The people I know who really care about others generally aren’t the people going on Facebook to say, “Man, I’m sick of people hiding behind claims of depression” or “If I meet another mother who thinks it’s ok to bring cupcakes to my child’s class, I’m going to go berserk”. The people I know who are really think about incremental moves to improve the world don’t get hung up on passing judgments on someone they’ve witnessed fleetingly in public.

I also liked this comment on the same post:

I think that at least part of these kinds of incidental judgements that people have and the weird fierceness of them in contrast to their weak post-hoc justifications (false compassion) comes from not having a good way to talk about non-instrumental aesthetic concerns.

We (I mean Westerners I guess) cannot really appeal to aesthetics as a justification. Think about grammar. People always justify things like lay/lie or “12 items or fewer” in terms of clarity, as though it were actually likely to confuse someone about meaning. Of course, no one is ever confused about meaning in those cases. However, for someone who has a strong aesthetic sense of which is correct, there is a moment of annoyance, a kind of disgust-related aversion to hearing the wrong one. This is actual source of the grammar pedant’s complaint, but it can’t be expressed as a valid justification because it’s not instrumental to some commonsensical social goal. So they invent concerns about clarity of language. Ditto the driver who is momentarily annoyed by a bicyclist and then concocts arguments about how not sharing in licensing fees makes riders freeloaders. The presence of an element that doesn’t fit smoothly into a mental model of how a system should work (for people like themselves) is the real problem. People do have some interest in keeping their mental model of the world well-defined, if only to lighten cognitive load. What’s problematic is the prioritization of one group’s aesthetic concerns over another’s very lives (e.g. drivers who bully cyclists on the road).

I’m a fat person, or I have been on and off, and I more or less share your take on the situation there. I’m quite sure that people aren’t expressing their real concerns when they talk about health or medical costs. (After all, runners have an extremely high rate of injury and no one thinks that they are anti-social; much to the contrary.) Although I don’t really want to sign up for some kind of identity politics of fatness either, I think it is ultimately rooted in the disgust response, much like the kinds of aesthetic judgements that go along with racism.

I think that not being racist and not being homophobic etc. are special cases of suppressing these extraneous aesthetic requirements with the understanding that some specific dimension of variation needs to be tolerated and integrated into the mental model of how things work — but that tolerance is the result of hard-fought gains specific to each case.

Which of the mental health categories get this type of hate the most? 

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Horrible people

From a reader:

First off, let me say that I am not an avid reader nor am I someone to write an author to discuss my fondness and respect for his or her work, but I am so glad that I stumbled across your book. Immediately, I found myself relating to you and your analyses of sociopathic behavior. Oddly enough, I do not believe that I can be considered a sociopath as I do share traits of the empath, but I think it valuable in many ways to model certain sociopathic behavior. This probably makes me seem like a horrible person, actively taking on traits of a subset of the population that cannot help but operate in particular ways, however, maybe you understand that it could also be beneficial to recognize these strengths in some situations. To get ahead in this world sometimes it is necessary to be the predator instead of the passive prey. It is imperative that I dissect every detail and weakness about those I want to be professionally or personally involved with so that when the time is right, I maintain the upper hand. Unknowingly, I certainly target people. I have a type. I have always considered my sexuality as being ambiguous and more about a person intriguing me rather than abiding by the social norms. I do what I want and attribute much of my success to utilizing motives discussed in your book. Though I do not think these admissions can describe 100% of my everyday life, this is certainly a piece of me. Maybe admitting these things categorizes me as something socially, stereotypically 'worse' than a sociopath. Ultimately, I guess I am not seeking advice or answers, but wanted to relay thanks for being brave enough to delve into this topic and recounting your experiences. It is comforting to know that, right or wrong, crazy or not crazy, I am not in the minority to have such thoughts. 

Thanks again

PS- I'm a drummer as well! Hope you still find time to play.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Criminal psychopath and the PCL-R

It must be psychopath week at NPR, because a reader sent me yet another article on psychopaths. This time the focus is on the plight of a criminal who gets diagnosed a psychopath and then is denied parole on the basis of that diagnosis, as well as the legitimacy of a three hour test that basically determines your personality/predispositions/fate -- the PCL-R. The most personally interesting part was the simple explanation of the origins of the original PCL:
"Science cannot progress without reliable and accurate measurement of what it is you are trying to study," [Dr. Robert Hare] says. "The key is measurement, simple as that."

And so Hare decided to make a way to measure: a test for psychopaths.

Hare sat down with his research assistant and together they wrote down all the personality traits they'd consistently seen in the psychopaths they'd studied. Things like lack of empathy, lack of remorse, manipulation, egocentricity, impulsivity, superficial charm, psychological lying.

For each of these qualities, Hare wrote up a description so it would be clear what he meant by, say, lack of empathy.

Psychologists using the test were supposed to ask the prisoners a series of questions to determine whether the trait was present. If it was there, the prisoner got 2 points; if it wasn't, zero; if the psychologist couldn't tell, 1 point was awarded.

The test listed 20 traits to check, and so Hare called it the Psychopath Checklist. Scores were totaled at the end — 40 was the highest score, but anything over 30 certified the test taker as a psychopath.

Hare next tested his test to make sure that it was "scientifically reliable" — that two people using the test on the same person would reach the same conclusion about whether that person was a psychopath. In research settings, the PCL-R's reliability appeared astonishingly good.

Voila! The test was born.
No magic, no revelation from God, no genetic or brain scan research validating each personality trait either, and, as mentioned many times before, the PCL-R was based exclusively on his work with psychopaths that he had identified in prison using what he believed were psychopathic traits based on his work with psychopathic prisoners that he had identified using what he believed were psychopathic based on his work with psychopathic prisoners . . . In other words, circular. So although the test proved "astonishingly" reliable, whatever that means, it does not mean at all that it is valid.

The article really paints Dr. Robert Hare in a pretty good light, as a pioneer in shining more light on a highly misunderstood disorder. I don't mean to criticize him as a person, and I do believe that his work is remarkably insightful and accurate given that it still represents the very early stages of understanding psychopathy.

I do find it odd that he personally wields so much power with regard to the subject matter -- if you haven't studied with him, if you don't use his test, you're basically nobody in some people's eyes -- which gets back to my point about the cult of experts. Thankfully, NPR also linked to a few other experts weighing in on the PCL-R. Here are some selections (all direct quotes):
  • By foregrounding intrinsic evil, [the concept of] psychopathy marginalizes social problems and excuses institutional failures at rehabilitation. We need not understand a criminal's troubled past or environmental influences. We need not reach out a hand to help him along a pathway to redemption. The psychopath is irredeemable, a dangerous outsider who must be contained or banished. Circular in its reasoning, psychopathy is nonetheless alluring in its simplicity. . . . Although modern psychopathy is more nuanced than its 19th century ancestor, diagnosing it remains an essentially subjective task.
  • Thanks to tools like the PCL-R, instead of wasting limited resources on a few bad apples, the justice system can focus those resources on the majority of offenders -- those who can profit from a second chance and are, more often than not, motivated to change.
  • [E]xperts disagree the most on the personality component of the PCL-R, perhaps because scoring it involves much more subjective judgment than does the criminal history component. Moreover, existing research suggests it is the criminal history component of the PCL-R -- not the (less reliable) personality component -- that is most helpful in identifying those likeliest to commit future crimes.
Does the PCL-R just measure the tendency of someone to re-offend by (gasp) asking them their criminal history? Very forward thinking, very groundbreaking.

Sunday, August 3, 2014

Accusations

I thought this was an interesting recent comment:

The gravest accusation against sociopaths from the "empath-world" seems to be that "aware socios" are said to be very satisfied with their mental condition; if they could remove their psychopathy by pushing a button, they would not do so. Sick folks enjoying their disease! Isn't this somehow a little unfair: how many empaths would remove "supernatural gifts" they discovered one morning: if they could read others minds or see through walls? Most likely not many. All those movies about superheroes, what are they really about? Answer: human longing to be godlike. But socios are not allowed to have that wish. Somehow they are supposed to daydream about other things.. 

I had a little bit of a similar discussion with someone recently. Specifically, they were asking me about this statement in the book "I have chosen to call myself a sociopath because of the negative connotations of psycho in the popular culture. I may have a disorder, but I am not crazy." They assumed that I thought that being thought crazy was something that was even worse than being thought sociopath. I didn't mean that at all. Crazy is just different. In fact, in some ways, I wish that my craziness was more obvious to people in a way that psychosis often is, it would certainly help them to keep more of an open mind about me. Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems that if I most people had a cousin with schizophrenia, they'd just be like -- oh, yeah, he has mental problems, this is not who he "really is." Or they might wonder where the line between mental disorder stops and he starts. Maybe they would think that it's impossible to tell who the cousin really is because it's impossible to filter out the disorder from the underlying person. And with someone who is obviously crazy, it seems like people pretty much credit anything that seems out of the ordinary to the mental problems instead of attributing it to a personality/character flaw. But with personality disorders, you get ascribed all of your disorder traits as being personality/character flaws (not altogether illogically, or course). If you are borderline, maybe you are a moody bitch. A narcissist = an egotistical control freak. A sociopath is a . . .  Well, especially if the sociopath was honest in sharing his or her worldview, a sociopath would be someone who is obviously delusionally obsessed with power, both in the micro and the macro, someone whose megalomania is only matched by his pettiness and self-involvement, etc. etc. That's who you are, or at least that is who people think you are. Because that's what you look like when you have this particular disorder. They don't really understand (or don't care? or don't care to make the distinction?) that those are just the symptoms of your disorder. 

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Quote: Akin

"Fish in the deep sea are luminous so that they can recognize one another; might not men and women also exude some kind of speechless luminescence to those akin to them?"

Angela Carter
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