Depression hurts

From a reader:

I've loved reading your blog. I stumbled across it 6 months ago and now I read it every week. It really is fascinating to me, even though I know I'm not a sociopath. I'm empathetic to a pathetic degree most days. I feel deeply, remorse is my middle name and I can't manipulate people very well.  

However, I've found an interesting side-effect of my depression is a distinct lack of feeling. Most people that I've known when they say they feel depressed they feel melancholy for no reason. I'm not in that category at all. 

When I get depressed, I feel numb, as in nearly nothing at all. It becomes harder for me to tolerate people, so I put on this mask to pretend that I'm alright. I keep it firmly in place, saying all the right things and making all the right facial expressions, but really I'm just trying to bide my time until my emotions "come back on," as it were. 

I know that my depression can be the dangerous kind. When I get too deep, as in too far away from my emotions, I start contemplating things with a more distant mind from morality. I've thought more than once that I could definitely murder someone in cold blood and not feel a thing. People closest to me notice the difference and say I get "colder." I act more selfish, in the sense that I'm putting myself before others which goes against my normal behavior. A close friend also mentioned that I am more honest, but in a mean way, that my filter kind of somehow dies with my emotions. 

When I was a teenager, I used to fall into depression more often than I do now. I would make a game out of it, sometimes kind of willing myself to stay numb for weeks because I knew it would give me an edge during certain periods of my life. But the game nearly made me kill myself once, so I never did it again.   

I'm strangely lucky that my depression is a minor form usually brought about by stress, so if I'm careful I can manage to keep my emotions. However, when I lose them, it's strangely liberating. I've often wondered if maybe there's going to come a day when I go numb and never get my emotions back. I know logically that's not how it works, but it's a strange dream/nightmare I've had since I was about fifteen or so. 

Every time I read about sociopaths and you share your experiences, I wonder if maybe I could've been one given the right trigger at some point in my childhood, or that I might become one if given the right circumstances. It's interesting and a little scary to contemplate, but your articles make me feel at ease with the idea more and more. 

I also think you're really brave for coming out and talking for sociopaths. I've met one self-aware sociopath a long time ago who told me that he didn't want to get killed for being what he was, but he knew if people found out about him they'd destroy him. I wish there was a bigger conversation about sociopathy, ASPD, and so on. I think that actually empaths and sociopaths could benefit from talking about it, since in the end we are all human but nobody is technically "normal." 

Please keep writing and keep the conversation going. I look forward to reading more soon. 

M.E. This is actually pretty interesting. Over the past year or so I have been sort of trying to do the opposite, to really try to amplify my feelings by concentrating on them and really indulging the "feel" of them -- like an emotional hearing aide. So I am more aware of my own emotions, even if I'm still don't necessarily experience other people's emotions via empathy. But if I get sick or otherwise overloaded, I also shut down the emotions and feel numb for a while. And I agree, it feels really great. My therapist doesn't allow me to stay there for long, he says it's counterproductive to what we're trying to ultimately accomplish, but it certainly is very useful for almost anything of practical importance, at least in my life.

Do you feel like your depression is actual depression? Or is it a byproduct of some other issue, like stress or prolonged frustration, boredom, etc.?

Reader:

My depression has been diagnosed, so it's real, but it gets worse under certain periods of stress. Even good stress, like weddings and traveling, can hit me so hard and knock me into a numb state. I'm always aware it's there, though, like a nagging itch under my skin.

I understand that a lot of people suffer from depression and just depression and the depression is not a side effect of other issues or feelings, but I do wonder how often diagnosing someone with depression is like diagnosing someone with a runny nose (symptom), without really looking at the cause. 

And in terms of sociopaths, which of these depressions could they feel? The meaningless depression? The chemical depression? Other types

Corporate psychopath

From an NPR "review" of Jon Ronson's book "The Psychopath Test" (not really so much about psychopaths, more about psychological tests in general, unfortunately):

"Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, ... recently announced that you're four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor's office," journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.
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Picture a psychopath and you might think of Norman Bates. But Ronson says successful businessmen can also score high on the checklist. While researching his book, Ronson visited the Florida home of Al Dunlap — known as "Chainsaw Al" — who as CEO of appliance maker Sunbeam was notorious for his gleeful fondness for firing people and shutting down factories.

"So I turned up at his house, and it was full of sculptures of predatory animals," Ronson says. "And he immediately started to talk about how he believed in the predatory spirit, which was word for word what Bob Hare writes about in the checklist: Look out for their belief in the predatory spirit."

But Dunlap managed to turn the psychopath test on its head, Ronson says.

"He admitted to many, many items on the checklist, but redefined them as leadership positives," he says. "So 'manipulation' was another way of saying 'leadership.' 'Grandiose sense of self worth' — which would have been a hard one for him to deny because he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself — was, you know, 'You've got to like yourself if you're going to be a success.'"

I see this rather frequently, accusing sociopaths of trying to twist bad behavior to look like good, flaws to look like superhero traits, and damaged brains to look superior. People who make these accusations must believe that sociopaths are villains by definition, but that's not an entirely consistent or defensible position to take. Neither are some of the other assertions I see most frequently:

• Either we're 4 times more likely to be at the top of the corporate ladder than be the janitor (and so presumably resourceful enough to get those jobs), or we're so impulsive and evil to the point that we are all leeches on productive society.
• Either 1 in 25 people (technically Americans) are sociopaths, so presumably some of them are your normal seeming co-workers or neighbors, or the only people who could properly be classified sociopaths are serial killers, people you would never meet, particularly not writing or commenting on a blog.
• Either we're very talented chameleons who are able to hide in plain sight, or we're so obvious that anyone we date can immediately and successfully diagnose us.

There are many others, of course, but this post is already getting long. I don't mind people believing one thing or the other and broadcasting that belief loudly and frequently, I just ask for a little bit of rationality and consistency in those professed beliefs.

The Black Prince: Empathy and ego

I've been reading The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch. I thought this was an interesting reflection from the protagonist on having helped out his sister, whom he does not like, but feels that he must “do what one has to do,” and how that is motivated ultimately by a self-love:

That human beings can acquire a small area of unquestioned obligations may be one of the few things that saves them: saves them from the bestiality and thoughtless night which lies only a millimeter away from the most civilized of our specimens. However if one examines closely some such case of ‘duty’, the petty achievement of some ordinary individual, it turns out to be no glorious thing, not the turning back by reason or godhead of the flood of natural evil, but simply a special operation of self-love, devised perhaps even by Nature herself who has, or she could not survive in her polycephalic creation, many different and even incompatible moods. We care absolutely about that which we can identify ourselves. A saint would identify himself with everything. Only there are, so my wise friend tells me, no saints.

And one more about ego, the nature of being "good," and the role of "morality" (or at least "duty" or "habit") in a functioning society:

The natural tendency of the human soul is towards the protection of the ego. The Niagara-force of this tendency can be readily recognized by introspection, and its results are everywhere on public show. We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else. I say 'apparently' because the average man while he covets real wealth, normally covets only apparent good. The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives. Of course very occasionally and for an instant even the worst of men may wish for goodness. Anyone who is an artist can feel its magnetism. I use the word 'good' here as a veil. What it veils can be known, but not further named. Most of us are saved from finding self-destruction in a chaos of brutal childish egoism, not by the magnetism of that mystery, but by what is called grandly 'duty' and more accurately 'habit'. Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life-long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage.

Identifying as a sociopath

This is a thoughtful article about, inter alia, M.E. The most "relevant" portions below:

Nevertheless, it is an interesting topic so I went looking for a sociopath and found one. Sociopath World: Inside the Mind of a Sociopath is a blog written by an anonymous self-proclaimed sociopath. Though it’s possibly a work of fiction, I believe that the person writing it truly does identify with the sociopathic condition. The blog has been active since 2008 and there are hundreds of posts. I have only read a few articles but what I have read has been well written. I can’t really characterize the author but there is an uncanny intellectualism and rationality to his or her writing. I would definitely recommend the blog as the autoethnography of a sociopath.

The self-identified sociopath does raise a few questions.

First, I want to say that I do not believe in black or white conditions. If I were a psychiatrist, I would hand out labels very sparingly. Probably all people experience schizotypal symptoms in their life and many have schizotypal tendencies but it’s insufficient to label them schizophrenic. Likewise, I believe sociopathy must exist on a gradient spectrum. What shade of gray makes you a full-blown sociopath?

I am ultimately wondering what the consequences of self-identification are? Labels are a way of making sense of the world so I suppose self-identification helps one come to terms with their self. Interestingly the comments on Sociopath World sometimes read like a support group for sociopaths. The idea that sociopaths (feel as if they) suffer from their condition is somewhat counterintuitive.
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Of course, one need not identify as a sociopath to be one. I am only curious as to what the benefits of self-identification are. That said, I believe many people possess varying degrees of innate potential to be a sociopath.

We see a remarkable ratio of people willing to commit atrocities in obedience to authority in both life and in experimentation. In accord with activity theory, I believe there is a threshold in doing where we internalize our actions. The Milgram experiment combined with the Stanford prison experiment only demonstrates that normal people can be pushed beyond that threshold. Social influence needs not be that dramatic. The author of Sociopath World makes an astute observation of his or her own condition, writing…

“After spending time with my family recently, I am more convinced that nurture had a significant role to play in my development into a sociopath. When people ask me whether I had a bad childhood, I tell them that it was actually relatively unremarkable, however I can see how the antisocial behaviors and mental posturing that now define me were incentivized when I was growing up — how my independent emotional world was stifled and how understanding and respect for the emotional world of others died away. Still I don’t think I was “made” into a sociopath, nor was I born one. I feel like I was born with that predisposition, that I made a relatively conscious decision to rely on those skills instead of developing others, and that the decision was made in direct response to my environment and how I could best survive and even thrive in that environment.”

Worse than a psychopath?

From a reader:

I thought you'd appreciate this video.


The gist of it is that psychopaths are capable of more contribution to society because our self-centeredness is so efficient that "just for the sheer fucking hell of it, make other people's lives better."