M.E. Thomas (author of Confessions of a Sociopath) interviews WeiWei, a personality disordered individual that identifies as having characteristics of psychopathy and borderline personality disorder (BPD). They talk about feeling alien, including understanding at a young age that whatever they are naturally is repulsive to normal people and necessitates masking or pretending to be something else at a very early age just to get along. They talk about how the origin of much destructive behavior of the personality disordered comes from boredom and the boredom comes from a lack of cohesive personal narrative, which results in an existential sense of emptiness.
M.E. Thomas (author of Confessions of a Sociopath) interviews Bree Said. They talk about the military, Bree Said becoming a Japanese escort as a youngster, and boundaries, as well as talking about how to be our more authentic self more of the time.
Take a non-gendered, non sociopathic person. Are they more likely to be a murderer if we make them male or if we make them a psychopath? The answer is male.
At one person's estimate, psychopaths are an estimated 25% of murderers: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/unique-everybody-else/201812/are-murderers-unfairly-labeled-psychopaths
5058*.75 = 3793.5 male American non-psychopath murderers.
Controlled for population size:
Total male U.S. population = 151.8 million
3793.5 male non-psychopath murderers /151.8M male americans =
0.002499011% likelihood you're a murderer if you're an American male non-psychopath
Non-male psychopath murderers
For non-male psychopath murders, let's first take the number of non-male murderers: 665
665 non-male murders again at the rate of 25% of murderers are psychopaths =
665*.25 = 166 non-male American psychopath murderers
Controlled for population size.
Total non male psychopath population in the U.S. is 176.M. Approximately four percent of those are psychopaths.
176.4M*4% = 7,056,000 non-male American psychopaths.
166 non-male psychopath American murderers /7.056M non-male American psychopaths =
0.002352607% likelihood you're a murderer if you're a non-male American psychopath
***Being male makes you more likely to be a murderer than being a psychopath.****
Both are still highly unlikely, e.g. if you come across a random male or random non-male psychopath it's still very unlikely they are a murderer.
Of course these numbers are just rough estimates, but I think this quick back of the envelope calculation suggests at the very least that common intuitions regarding the dangerousness of psychopaths need to be re-examined and further research is warranted.
Hello friends! Sorry for the delay on this, I had to do some editing, which I'm bad at. Arya's ex Frances tells Arya that she's been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. We talk to Frances about her diagnosis, her disorder, and her experience with both in the world and in her relationships, including her experience that a lot of people view her diagnosis negatively and tell Frances that she doesn't actually have a personality disorder.
One analogy I thought about with regard to Frances and BPD in general is that if all personality disorders have issues with their personality and sense of identity/self, maybe one way to view them is in terms of how connected they are to their identity. For instance, psychopaths seem very disconnected from their identity. I came up with the analogy of a being pulled behind a motorboat in an inner tube (like I used to do when I was young). The boat is your identity. If you're way behind the boat, like 50 feet back, what the boat does hardly affects you at all, and for psychopaths if someone says something negative about their identity they rarely care because they're so disconnected. Other personality disorders seem more connected to their identity, which also means they're more vulnerable. I think of BPD as being like hanging off the back of the boat, where they're constantly being whipped around, but they're not close enough to actually be in the driver's seat, where people without personality disorders are.
Arya and I had just been listening to a webinar on criminal sentencing and BPD right before Frances told us about her diagnosis (Arya had no idea before). We had been talking about how terrible BPD sounds like it is for the sufferer, and that we couldn't imagine living like that and no wonder the suicide rate is so high. But also I'm glad that they at least have established treatments. Although I have heard from psychopaths that the same therapies styles have helped psychopaths, so maybe the personality disorders have more in common than meets the eye.
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