Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Sociopathy & Addiction

Sociopathy & Addiction

There have been numerous studies made to understand the link between sociopathy and substance abuse addiction.

One of the problems researchers face when trying to study this problem is that often addicts with no previous history of sociopathic behavior do begin to show signs of it when something happens to make the addictive substance difficult to obtain.  This tendency could lead researchers to record "false positives" when declaring that an individual addict is also a sociopath.

What is known is that it would be wrong to think of all addicts as sociopaths, or that all sociopaths are addicts.  But there is strong evidence to suggest that substance abuse is more common among people who can be diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), more widely known as sociopathy.

Emotional control, denial, and excuses

Many people mistakenly believe that because one of the supposed signs of ASPD is that the individual has a high level of emotional control, they would be unlikely to use substances that would lead to a loss of control.  For example, by using drugs or alcohol, it is expected that the sociopath may "slip up" and reveal his or her true nature.

In fact the opposite is true.  Some sociopaths may actually crave that loss of control.  But more importantly, it must be remembered that sociopaths tend to be exceptionally self-confident, and it is unlikely that they will believe they will experience a loss of control when they first get on the path to substance abuse.

Even once they do become addicted, they may assert that they are in control of their addiction, or "could give it up if they wanted to".  For some sociopaths, being under the influence of drugs or alcohol also provides a handy excuse for their antisocial behaviors.
Addiction is always a serious problem, but it can be even more serious for sociopaths

A key difference between true sociopaths and other addicts is that whereas most normal addicts come to realize the negative effect of their addiction on others and eventually seek help, the sociopath may be left untreated until the situation has become so dire that there is absolutely no other choice but to get treated.

Sadly it is often the case that may cause serious harm to themselves or others as a result of their addictions, and sometimes they will even die or end up in prison.

Why sociopaths are so susceptible to substance abuse

What may seem like normal life to many people can be incredibly boring to a sociopath.  Sometimes they are willing to do almost anything to escape that boredom.  Sociopaths tend to be thrill-seekers by nature, and they are more likely to indulge in risky behaviors, including drug and alcohol abuse.

Something can be done

While many professionals view sociopathy as "untreatable", the sociopathic thrill-seeking tendency does not necessarily have to be destructive.  It just may never occur to the sociopath that the stimulation they crave could be obtained in more constructive ways.  Sports and physical activities, for example, could be viable alternatives. Florida Beach Rehab is just one of many facilities around the country that’s fully capable of dealing with sociopathy and other types of addiction problems.
Seeking treatment as early as possible is vital

Everyone suffering from addiction should receive treatment for it.  The tendency of sociopaths to avoid treatment places them especially at risk of serious consequences.  Without treatment the addiction will continue to get worse, and so could the destructive behavior patterns that accompany it.

Monday, April 6, 2015

New assessment tool for incarceration

The more that I studied music, the more faith I had in its timeless beauty and infinite variation and admiration for its greatest practitioners. The more I studied law, the more I realized that most of it was built on entirely unfounded assumptions. And there is an odd, awkward, and often misguided interaction between the social science findings and the legal reactions to them. This sort of blind leading the blind feature of the law is troubling, to say the least, which is why I love the empirical movement in law (and continuing expansion in social science).

That's why I was so interested to read that the Kentucky in the United States has established a new risk assessment tool to determine when a potential parolee is likely to be a reoffender based on (wait for it) -- actual verifiable and replicable data! If this surprises you that this was not the status quo or if you don't quite believe me, these quotes from the article:

"We have had a risk-assessment tool since 1976, the Vera scale. Over time, modifications were being made to factors used to determine risk that were reactionary. The indicators for determining risk were not research-based," says Klute.
***
"Good, reliable data drive good bond decisions," says Kentucky Circuit Court Judge David Tapp. "It's definitely changed the way I decide. When I was a young judge, I relied on intuition and community expectations. Now I know with verified information what is statistically likely" if the defendant is released. 
***
"It enables us to make better arguments for our clients," says Scott West, general counsel of the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. "It allows a factual argument to rebut gut instinct." 

Not everyone is a fan, including U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder:

On the PBS NewsHour with Gwen Ifill on July 31, 2014, Holder questioned the use of big data on the front end to determine detention. States are already "using that as a predictor, though, of how likely this person is going to be a recidivist. Using group data to make an individualized determination, I think, can result in fundamental unfairness."

No doubt big data can often lead to stereotypes and covert racism, but statisticians have gotten increasingly more sophisticated about trying to filter out those tendencies (I believe), and if there is no evidence that this is what actually is happening (again from real, reliable data), then I'm not sure how non research-based risk assessment tools are any more fundamentally fair than research-based ones?

For anyone who has been worried that being tagged a sociopath would lead to their permanent incarceration should they ever be caught up in the system...

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Severus Snape

The previous post reminded me of this video, showing Harry Potter's Severus Snape's scenes in chronological order (spoilers!):




The best part are the comments, particularly those on this site. If you've ever thought that moralizing was a simple matter of doing right things at right times, you may be surprised to hear that is not enough in the black and white moral worlds of many others in which there are only good people and bad people and good people must have done bad things for a good reason and bad people were probably doing good things for selfish reasons (like romantic love?) or didn't really mean them (even though they sacrificed their life for it?) or shouldn't ever be trusted anyway because once a bad guy, always a bad guy. 

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

It could happen to you

I spoke with a friend who was recently ousted from a job based on fabricated charges. She told me that she finally understood -- for the first time -- a little bit about what it was like to be me. She told me that before this happened to her, she had always just assumed that if anyone left her previous places of employment or were fired, it must have been because there was something bad about the firee that she simply didn't know about that justified the firing. 

It's a commonly held belief (and absolutely self-serving), that if something bad happens to someone, that person must be guilty. It's so common that when an even worse thing happened to a mutual friend of ours, during what became a minor media scandal the precipitated the ouster, her co-workers were quoted as saying things like, "you think you know a person, but I guess everyone is capable of darkness." When this mutual friend was eventually exonerated by her place of employment, the employer gave her a sort of a shrug of his shoulders -- yes she was innocent, but there was no way that they could re-hire her given the salacious nature of the scandal and the delicate nature of the job. Now she has no career.

Even before my own very personal experiences with the media, one of my extended family members was an integral part of a national scandal. Although she was largely kept out of the limelight for being a minor, I was able to see how dodgy even very respectable journalistic outposts were about accurately reporting the facts. There's actually a surprising amount of inferences dot connecting reported as absolute that goes on (probably true of any area of life), and there's an odd sort of hubris and self-assurance that some journalists have that their inferences have to be right, just because that is how the journalist happens to see it. 

So Jon Ronson has his book about public shaming out. I haven't read but excerpts (see here for adapted excerpt re Justine Sacco), but obviously I am a fan of the topic, given its coverage on this blog. I've never been a fan of the empath's capacity and eagerness to form lynch mobs. And I can imagine that Ronson's book may be the least loved and most controversial of his books because there is a significant portion of the population that loves lynch mobs so much that they will defend almost every aspect of them, including the capacity and authority to judge others to the point of deciding who gets to live a normal life or not. 

For instance, in his piece that reads (at least to me) largely as a defense of his own part in the Jonah Lehrer shaming, Slates's Daniel Engber quotes the observation of a theatre professor regarding the reaction that some had in learning that Lehrer was to speak at a Midwestern university: “As soon as it became clear to certain people on the East Coast that Jonah was here, I started to get phone calls from people who had no other wish than to ruin his life.” Can you imagine hating a stranger so much that years later you are still harassing him in anyway you can?

Engber gives some obeisance to the idea that he was less knight in shining armor and more misguided Crusader: 

It seemed to me that Payne might have had a point. Am I part of this East Coast mob of angry journalists, out for nothing less than Lehrer’s blood? Ronson’s book suggests as much. In the coda to his chapters on the scandal, he cites a post of mine in Slate, in which I found signs of plagiarism (among other problems) in Lehrer’s newest book proposal. Could I be, as Ronson hints, a self-appointed fury, cruelly bent on someone else’s destruction? 

He concludes, no. Why? Because even though he has done only a bit of anecdotal fact-finding (sound familiar?), he believes that Lehrer has still not owned up to what Engber imagines is scores of misdeeds. What does he base this belief on? Not much more than the fact that Lehrer's publishers never released their reports on his other books, which naturally indicates that they have something to hide: "Houghton Mifflin never published the results of its investigation, so there’s been no full accounting of the problems in Lehrer’s work. But it’s safe to say the Dylan quotes were just the tipoff for something much worse." Is that really safe to say? In what sense of the word "safe"? Safe to say in the sense that it is convenient to assume without verifying and makes Engber's piece seemingly stronger and more compelling (again, what he accuses Lehrer of having done in making "'mistakes'" that "tend to make his stories more exciting".)

Other misdeeds are that the following sentence appears in Lehrer's work and also appears in another book: "The coaches were confident that the young quarterback wouldn’t make a mistake," along with similar descriptions of what happened during a Super Bowl (probably all descriptions of the Super Bowl would be similar because they're all based on the same underlying facts of what actually happened?).  

So basically we have a menace to society on our hands in the form of Jonah Lehrer. And Engber concludes, unsurprisingly from a pitchfork wielding member of the original mob, that Jonah Lehrer should never get back into society's good graces perhaps until he acknowledges all of the mistakes that Engber thinks are mistakes, or perhaps never because how could we ever trust him again. As Engber notes himself, "there are rules to telling stories," and when we tell ourselves stories of self-justification to excuse the blood that we may have spilt in enacting justice, best to stick to the original script of -- if something bad happened to a person, they must have had it coming somehow. 

Otherwise we'd have to admit, as my friends have unfortunately had to recently, that this sort of life ruining and shaming can truly happen to anyone.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Ocean to my shark

From a reader:

I read the entire thing yesterday. It was fascinating. I'm not a sociopath or psychopath - I took the test and ridiculously low. I actually wouldn't mind being just a little bit sociopathic; I care way too much about the stuff that doesn't bother sociopaths at all, which is a big part of why I'm interested. 

Anyway, I'm really interested in atypical neurology; as I've tried to understand other people and myself, I've learned that part of the reason people are different is that their brains genuinely process things differently. So my reading brought me to Kevin Dutton's books, and then to yours. By the way, if you haven't read his more recent book, The Good Psychopath's Guide to Success, I highly recommend it. One thing I like about his books is that he acknowledges that neural atypicalness doesn't automatically doom people to evil or uncontrolled violence, that there's a lot of other factors.

This is actually important to me partly on account of fictional characters; I get probably too involved in some of my favorite fictional worlds. After Thor 2 came out last fall I got dragged into a six-month flame war on tumblr because I and a few others pointed out that the supposed villain's actual behavior isn't any worse than that of the supposed hero - actually, it's much better; he kills fewer people and with better reasons. And the way the supposed good guys in that movie treat their enemies is horrifying; a limit on how cruel you are to your enemies is supposed to be one of the distinctions between the good guys and bad guys, but a lot of the people who flamed us for this seemed to figure the whole point is that once you label someone as a bad guy, anything you want to do to them is okay. It's just like people saying that we ought to put sociopaths on islands or something. And while I'm not a sociopath, I am a misfit, and gay, and converted to Judaism a few years ago, so I am all too aware of the danger in such thinking.

We got some sympathy from some Harry Potter fans, because the fans of that series have been arguing fiercely for years about Slytherin. Are Slytherins just evil by nature, or is it just that people distrust their habits of manipulation and opportunism? And what kind of society labels a fourth of its population as evil at the age of 11 and then treats them all like dirt for the rest of their lives? And while I don't think all the Slytherin characters are sociopaths, I also think most sociopaths would be sorted into Slytherin.

As I've read these books on socipathy, I've realized that some people I've known were probably sociopaths. Most of them weren't violent, but they were skilled at manipulating and were emotionally detached from a very young age. I am terrible at manipulating people, so people who are good at it intrigue me. Some of the sociopaths I've known have harmed me, but empaths have caused me a lot more pain and damage because they couldn't or wouldn't control their emotional impulses. I'm inclined to think the world could use a few benign sociopaths, like you and some of those Kevin Dutton writes about.

I think it was really brave of you to tell your story, and I'm sorry you had to stop teaching because of it. I don't think that was right at all when you didn't do anything. I think we can hope people are starting to understand neural atypicality more and that law-abiding sociopaths won't continue to be condemned for what they are instead of what they do. Maybe.

You might like to read the novel The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten. It's a spoof of Twilight, in which Bella (Bonnie is her name in this version) is the sociopath and she seduces Edward because she likes the idea of being immortal. She's not a benign sociopath - she's killed people, for one thing - but from what I've read, the book seems to have accurately captured the sociopath way of looking at things. There's one line where she scoffs at the label "antisocial": "I love society. It's like the ocean to my shark."
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