The DSM doesn’t allow shrinks to diagnose an underage patient with “psychopathy.” Actually, the DSM doesn’t allow the diagnosis of “psychopathy” to people of any age. Yet, they allow kids to be diagnosed as “callous-unemotional.” So what are these kids when they grow up? Psychopaths or the DSM-preferred ASPD? Of course, there is one place where people can still be tested and diagnosed with psychopathy and that is in the penal justice system.
Robert Hare tried to keep the American Psychiatric Association from replacing “psychopathy” with “ASPD.” Perhaps the disconnect stems from the degree to which present-day psychology is dominated by behaviorists. Behaviorists famously deny the reality of such a subjective entity as a consciousness. Perhaps we do have a consciousness (DUH!) but it can’t be seen or examined “objectively” so we might as well act as if it doesn’t exist. This evokes the question of whether a psychologist is really a scientist or a philosopher. Philosophy doesn’t get much respect from scientists who claim they deal in reality and philosophers only deal in some fuzzy sort of wool gathering. Interestingly enough, behaviorism is more concerned with how to make someone behave a certain way than in understanding what makes him tick. Dr. Jordon Smoller of Harvard Medical School, said, “Researchers who were influential in developing the modern DSM argued that the diagnosis should be based mainly on observable patterns of behavior rather than psychological constructs. And so, ASPD emphasizes aggressive behavior, rule-breaking, and criminal acts. Not surprisingly, 80–90 percent of inmates in maximum security prisons meet criteria for ASPD, though only 15–20 percent qualify as psychopaths.
Illimitable Men wrote, “Consciousness remains an enigma to science, and for as long as this remains true, philosophy will remain hegemon of all things metaphysical and thereby spiritual in nature. This is precisely why philosophy exists, for it has repeatedly endured as a form of top-down investigation into the metaphysical substrate of reality for millennia, filling a vacuum of human need that religion embodies, but does not explain.”
Consciousness is something everyone experiences and knows intuitively that it is real for goodness sake. That people calling themselves “scientists” deny it only indicates that they are limiting the scope of their field to the point where it has less relevance to human lives. Only that which can be treated as an object is worthy of scientific examination. Psychiatry is properly a field in biological medicine so it can encompass both the physical and the behavioral aspects of psychopathy. Yet it is the American Psychiatric Association that created the DSM.
While psychiatrists remain firmly routed in the limiting and unproductive channel of behaviorism, it is the neuroscientists who have really moved forward in exploring this possibility. Of course, they are examining the physical and are, thereby making the study of the mind even more objective. In The Guardian, Chris Chambers wrote, “Psychopathy is of course a very real disorder and a lot more complex than portrayed on film. For many years, the gold standard for diagnosing psychopathy has been various forms of behavioural assessment. But now, Californian neuroscientist James Fallon claims he can diagnose psychopathy from a brain scan.” Neuroscientists have identified characteristic scans for various conditions including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
However, this field is still in it’s infancy. A diagnosis of psychopathy based on brain scans alone is not accepted as yet. “The flaw with this argument — as Fallon himself must know — is that there is no one-to-one mapping between activity in a given brain region and complex abilities such as empathy. There is no empathy region and there is no psychopath switch. If you think of the brain as a toolkit, these parts of the brain aren’t like hammers or screwdrivers that perform only one task.” I believe they are on the right track however. Of course, there’s another possibility no scientists seem to have considered. What if “psychiatric conditions” other than psychosis can be assessed outside of the narrow field of science. Lay people instinctively act on that assumption. How many newspaper articles have called a public figure a “psychopath” or a “narcissist?” How many people on Facebook have done the same?
Both psychiatry/psychology recognizes that children’s personalities can change before the kid becomes an adult. The brain is known to undergo significant changes as we grow up, even in one’s teens. Professionals who treat kids whose behavior indicates a likelihood of psychopathy in adults work to develop interventions while the kid is still a kid in order to prevent that from happening.
There has been a lot written about callous unemotional kids lately. Most articles acknowledge what psychologist, Michael Stone, said in the documentary, Psychopath Night that “psychopathy is like diamonds — it’s forever.” These kids, despite what the profession insists, are psychopaths. They can’t be “cured” but they can be steered in a pro-social direction mainly by means of positive reinforcement. Psychopaths aren’t deterred much by threat of punishment but are very receptive to rewards. Another viewpoint has been argued in the case of Beth Thomas. A treatment called Rebirthing, nicknamed “tough love,” is supposed to have turned this very “callous unemotional” little girl into a healthy adult free of ASPD or Psychopathy. I have severe doubts about this and explore them in my blog post, Tough Love Success? The writers believed she was cured of psychopathy. I neither support that psychopathy can be “cured” nor the methods promoted.
Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center in Wisconsin has had more success in achieving happy outcomes than many (or any) others. They seem to accept the idea that psychopathy already exists in teens but can be guided in a positive direction. Author and former NPR religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty wrote, “They will never feel empathy, they will never feel guilt or remorse,” she said. “But if they can train them that, ‘Gee, my life will be better if I play by the rules,’ then they hope that these kids will turn out better.”
Links
- Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center. Wisconsin Department of Health Services
- When Your Child Is a Psychopath. The Atlantic
- Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center Shows Progress in Treating Child Psychopaths. Wisconsin Public Radio
- San Marcos Treatment Center. Home page
- Psychopathy vs. Antisocial Personality Disorder. Elements of Behavioral Health
- Tough Love “Success” Story? Cluster B by yours truly
- 6 Scary Realities of Working With Actual Psychopaths. Reblogged as Neuroscience and Psychopathy in Cluster B.
- Attachment Therapy. Child Abuse by Another Name?
“Psychopath” is the “literally” of mental illnesses, a phrase that’s tossed around frequently, but rarely used correctly. It’s become our catch-all for “dangerously crazy.” But it’s a very specific diagnosis, characterized by impulsivity, a very high drive for reward, and little to no remorse. It’s a diagnosis that neuroscientist James Fallon is both professionally and personally familiar with. We spoke to him, and Professor Kent Kiehl — who has spent years analyzing the psychopathic brain through a pioneering MRI study — as well as “Sasha,” who currently leads group-therapy sessions in a Midwestern jail. She has attempted to treat (arguably more than) her fair share of psychopaths in that correctional setting. Here’s what they told us …
In 2006, Fallon was finishing a study on Alzheimer’s. Poring over countless brain scans, including one of his own, which he’d submitted as a control subject. Fair enough; he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s. But he did know an abnormal limbic system when he saw one — and he knew that low levels of activity in the part of the brain that governs emotional life and social interaction are … less than ideal.
He refers to it as “that moment Gandalf knocks on your door,” summoning him on a great mission. He told his wife of many decades, who wasn’t surprised. Then he just let this knowledge lie for a couple years, like so many of us do when it comes to disturbing things like lingering health concerns, or recently purchased exercise equipment.
“That’s the first time I took it seriously,” Fallon says. “They didn’t know me, but they knew my biological and psychological data.” Fallon had stumbled across what Dr. Kent Kiehl already knew too well. Kiehl has spent years lugging a mobile MRI machine to prisons to analyze the brains of high-rating psychopathy, and he knew that the scans of a psychopath show much lower than normal activity in the areas of the brain responsible for impulse control and “emotional responsiveness,” among other things. Kiehl published some of the first studies showing that brain scans can predict antisocial behavior. If this sounds a little too Minority Report for you, keep in mind that it’s much more accurate than a lot of the risk equations we use today — take, for example, parole boards — to predict recidivism:
“I don’t get anxious about things, and if I’ve done something wrong, I’m challenged by somebody catching me.” He also says his pain threshold is very high, consistent with psychopathy. “I drove my dentist crazy, root canals with no anesthesia … I think it’s just a kick. The way I feed that particular monkey is being around danger.”
If Fallon hadn’t been in that particular line of work, and if he hadn’t accidentally (perhaps hilariously? It’s a dark sitcom premise, but we’d still watch it) revealed his own disorder during the report to those Nordic doctors, the only other way he might have ever received his diagnosis is by going to jail. As Sasha explains: “People seek therapy when they’re struggling with symptoms or issues, and ‘successful’ psychopathic individuals are, by the nature of their condition, not negatively impacted or even inconvenienced by their symptoms.”
impulsivity. These traits are assessed based on the individual’s entire life and in all domains of his or her life. That is, to ‘lack empathy’ on the Psychopathy Checklist, you must have evidence of this trait in the majority of your life — at home, work, school, with family, friends, and in romantic relationships. Each of the 20 items is scored on a three-point scale: 0, the item does not apply to the individual; 1, item applies in some respects; and 2, item definitely applies in most respects to the individual. The scores range from 0 to 40, with the clinical diagnosis of a psychopath reserved for those with a score of 30 or above. The average inmate will score 22. The average North American non-incarcerated male will score 4 out of 40.”
Fallon’s personal inventory doesn’t exactly undermine this idea: “I do things that are really quite dangerous with people — with my young kids, my brothers, and I push it right to the limit,” Fallon says. “To me, I’m a thrill-seeker. Physically and socially, (I do) some dangerous things.” For example: While working at the University of Nairobi hospital, he took his son fishing at Mount 
Kenya … disregarding all the signs warning of impending lion attacks in the area. Later, a guy came into the hospital bleeding out of his nose, suffering from the Marburg virus, which has shocking similarities to Ebola. Rather than avoiding, well, the plague, Fallon says, “I found out where he had stayed … he went into the Kitum Cave, where the old elephants, the old matriarchs, bring the young ones to dig out the caves to get iodine and all the minerals. My brother came (to visit), and I said ‘I’m going to give him a thrill here.’ I knew nobody was going to the place.”
Because of rebels shooting in that area, naturally.
back.”
In retrospect, Fallon figures that he must have looked like Damien from The Omen to the adults around him. “Since I was about 13, there were always some adults — psychologists, teachers, rabbis, priests — every year, an adult saying ‘There’s something really bad about you.’ But you don’t put these things together until you have a narrative.”
“The label ‘psychopath’ is not given to anyone under the age of 18,” Kiehl says, “but there is an enormous field of research assessing what we refer to as ‘callous and unemotional traits.’ We just refer to it as ‘callous conduct disorder’ — (which includes) acting out of impulsivity, getting in trouble — easy to quantify.”
is is where Fallon’s life gets decidedly Sliding Doors.
OR
He also credits the women in his life. “Even friends growing up — not just as adults — said, ‘If it wasn’t for your girlfriend, (then) wife, you’d definitely be in jail.’ She had a very stabilizing influence on me. My mother, my aunts — the whole matriarchy kept me in line.”
behaviors, and started using alcohol and drugs and having sex at a younger age than other children.”
sports.” Often the more violent, the better. “Plus skiing and swimming. Any other time I was involved in acting. And she knew the teachers, and she as a teacher said ‘Keep this kid busy.’ When I am not busy life gets dark around me. I’m just busy all the time. It’s a good thing for the people around me.”
Psychopaths are notoriously hard to treat, and some mental health professionals even believe them to be beyond help. Psychopaths aren’t typically assigned to group therapy, but Sasha has ended up working with a couple in jail anyway. The best advice she’s received? “‘Think about how little kids learn’ — so I’ve been approaching it that way.”
As Kiehl writes: “The (Mendota) model was founded on the belief that prison deterrence and prisoners’ defiant responses can become a vicious cycle. As they cycle repeats itself, prisoners give up more and more investment in convention, and their lives become ‘compressed’ as the use of punitive and restrictive sanctions increases. Eventually … the only response left in their behavioral repertoire is violence.” Fallon agrees: “What Kent’s saying, if you try negative reinforcement on (a psychopath), the brain interprets it as abuse. Since they do not appreciate what bad behavior is, they think it’s completely unfair. To them it’s not immoral or anything.”
The program takes a minimum of about 10 to 12 months to have any effect, but you can’t argue with the results, or the rosy economic benefits — it’s all been peer-reviewed. “That’s the only program in the world that has done that,” Kiehl says, and this gives him hope for adult psychopaths, too. “(Kids are) potentially more malleable than adults, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe the program would work with an adult, it just might take two or three times as long. Once you get entrenched in your behaviors and your attitudes, changing those things can take as long a time as long as it took you to get ingrained in them.”
The Talented Mr. Ripley fits more cleanly into the “psychopath” category — he seduces, forges false identities, and kills for either personal gain or simple convenience — but he would likely have a secondary diagnosis of “psychosis” (a different thing!) according to this exhaustive, whimsical study of silver-screen psychopaths, which argues that Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko is a mere manipulative psychopath, while Patrick Bateman is indeed the full-blown American psychopath.
“‘Sociopathy’ was a term coined in the behaviorist era of psychology, when it was believed every human was a blank slate at birth,” Kiehl explains. “So ‘socio’ means social forces, ‘pathy’ means pathology — created by environment. We know now that psychopaths are not solely made by their environment, so that term (‘sociopathy’) is not used in academic circles anymore.” Likewise, maybe consider tossing out your copy of The Psychopath Test. Kiehl called Jon Ronson’s popular book “a work of fiction” and points out that it’s “the only book that the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy publicly opposed.”
“I just have never seen someone who scores in the top percentile of the Hare test be very successful,” Kiehl says. “The way they go about life, and go about manipulating, and the way they go about lying, basically — they’re lazy. They don’t follow through with anything. They’re not going to be a good employee.”
Fallon theorizes that genetics worked in his favor, which is a bit ironic, because, well: “We have four lines of killer in our family. That’s too many.” Lizzy Borden is a distant cousin; his great-and-then-some grandfather, Thomas Cornell, brutally murdered
One of the psychopath’s more enviable traits is that he (statistically, more of them are men) doesn’t worry all that much.
And goes on to tell us: “One of the classic definitions is that (psychopaths) are willing to engage in a wide variety of different crimes. You’ll see psychopathic — even more so than non-psychopathic — inmates who will experiment in just about any different type of criminal activity. Whatever opportunity plays by. They usually don’t develop an expertise … the types of crimes they commit are wide-ranging.”
“We’ve published studies on the types of crime psychopaths commit, and the types of aggression profiles you see. They’re more likely to obviously abuse close relatives or spouses than others … There are a lot of other types of more aggressive violent crimes (that) are perpetrated by psychopaths, but the vast majority crimes psychopaths commit are non-violent crimes.”
a robbery. Grant was quick to add that he’d also dabbled in arson, credit-card fraud, some assorted B&E’s, and a string of other murders of convenience. Grant was, of course, a serial killer.
I had just been thinking about writing a post about why I “came out.” Going through my Table of Contents, I find that I already wrote one. But the entire post only has this video by the Poison Girls, Persons Unknown. Eloquent. But, HELL! I have more to say about this than that. So I am updating this blog post.
I have considered myself a psychopath ever since my best friend told me she thought I was one when we were both teenagers. She wasn’t saying it to insult me and I didn’t take it as an insult. She told me she had described me to some psychologist who thought I fit the profile. I didn’t really know that much about psychopathy but, the minute she told me that I was one, I had this sense one gets when one hits a home run on the softball field. It just fit. I knew I had no conscience, whatever that even is. I didn’t really care about people in general. I didn’t think the things most people cared so much about made any sense. As I read about psychopathy and learned more, I saw that the shoe fit. I still didn’t consider making that a matter of common knowledge. I was already wearing a “mask.” I knew better than to share a lot of my attitudes with the world.
A few years ago, I saw an article in Cosmopolitan Magazine, by M.E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath. I read the article and then got the book of the same title. I started following her blog and joined the forum connected to the blog. (It has since separated from it.) I had never met people who identified themselves as sociopaths or psychopaths. I got to know them and saw that they were doing what M.E. did, explaining psychopathy from the point of view of the psychopath. I found that very refreshing because most of what is written about us is from the perspective of an outsider. They may be “experts,” but they don’t really know what it’s like. Many of these ‘paths used a pseudonym to protect their every day identity. That certainly made sense to me. I had a job and kept various aspects of my life a secret. I wrote about my masochism under the pseudonym of Terry Kolb. I also wrote about drug “abuse” as NAMe (pronounced enemy).
Everything changed when I retired. I no longer had to give a Frenchman’s fuck what any employer thought of me and my lifestyle. I am “out” now as a pervert and a druggie and now as a psychopath. I had already been writing about psychopathy but using the third person pronoun: “they.” I decided that, since I no longer needed to hide, I could change to the first person pronoun: “me” and “I.” I discussed this with other ‘paths and they also had gone through this kind of transformation. It feels good being openly myself.
Bruce Cannon Gibney is the author of A Generation of Sociopaths which is subtitled “How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America.” According to Gibney, Boomers couldn’t do right. In fact, as a generation, we are clinically Sociopaths, a claim Gibney tries to substantiate using the PCL-R. He claims his qualifications for propounding such a thesis are not a degree in psychology (not even a BA in the subject), nor any particular knowledge of history, but a career in “finance, first at a hedge fund and then at a venture capital firm.” Gibney’s conservative outlook is quite evident. I have discussed this book already in the blogpost, 
It’s not that Gibney doesn’t think aging Boomers deserve social safety nets like Social Security. We just can’t afford it. Selfish Boomers are starving the younger generations by forcing them to support us. Why aren’t we willing to just work until we drop like earlier generations did in the blessed gilded age? Theodore Roszak, The Making of an Elder Culture, describes life in that golden age.
Initially and for the next century or more, the new industrial economies took an especially savage toll among older workers., The men burned out early at the heavy and dangerous work they did in the factories and mines, on the railroads, and in the oil and timber fields. The women grew old before their time in the sweatshops and mills. Even if older workers kept their health and strength, industrial accidents, for which there was no compensation or adequate medical care, might cut them down at any moment. During the early generations of the industrial revolution, the aged, unless they belonged to the propertied classes, ordinarily ended lives of hard labor assimilated to the status of the poor. Even if they had worked all their lives, they were expected to die as paupers. The workhouse and county home were little better than concentration camps for the elderly. They were fed on gruel and bedded down at night on straw or bare wood.
Conservatives find the idea of supporting people who can’t work and add to the wealth of the upper classes repugnant. Unable to sell their mean-spirited values, “the right-wing opposition presents its hostility to Social Security, not as a matter of ideology or ethics, but as pure mathematics.” Gibney’s approach is nothing new. Sadly, many Americans are drinking the cool aide and fatalistically chanting that Social Security is over and won’t be there when they retire. 
But how did Boomers become such losers in the first place? Gibney blames it on our upbringing. We were spoiled as children, you see. “Permissive” child-rearing is an anomaly according to Gibney. Kids never used to be coddled. “Like factory workers and farm animals, children were not to be indulged—they were to be managed…. Children were to be formed according to their parents’ wishes and society’s needs, with parenting a matter of coercing useful behaviors, instead of catering to childish whims.” Gibney longs for the good old days when children and elders knew their place.
At the root of all this catering to the useless eaters is the liberal/romantic view of human nature as basically good. Children don’t need to be beaten to become good people. Raise them with kindness and understanding and their natural goodness will blossom. Gibney thinks it is not only wrong, it is the cause of most of society’s problems. This view not only damns human nature. It damns nature, itself.
Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae, goes to the very root of the matter. She looks at the two diametrically opposed views of human nature in terms of the opinions of two writers, Jean Jacque Rousseau and the Marquis (
Sade’s view that nature (including human) is dark. We don’t suppress sexual expression because of the damned Puritans. Sex is intrinsically dark. She wrote, “Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges. I called it an intersection. This intersection is the uncanny crossroads of Hecate, where all things return in the night. Eroticism is a realm stalked by ghosts. It is the place beyond the pale, both cursed and enchanted.”
For years, witchcraft was likened to devil worship by our Christian society. Recently, it has been rehabilitated as WICCA, a form of Pagan nature worship. Never-the-less, there has always been a hint of darkness in neo-paganism and/or Wicca which (in my opinion) makes it more interesting. It’s generally agreed that nature, Wicca and paganism are likened to the 
“The Moon, partaking as she does of the highest and the lowest, and filling all the space between, is the most universal of the Planets. In her higher aspect, she occupies the place of the Link between the human and divine, as shown in Atu II. In this Trump, her lowest avatar, she joins the earthy spear of Netzach with Malkuth, the culmination in matter of all superior forms. This is the waning moon, the moon of witchcraft and abominable deeds. She is the poisoned darkness which is the condition of the rebirth of light…..She is uncleanliness and sorcery. Upon the hills are the black towers of nameless mystery, of horror and of fear. All prejudice, all superstition, dead tradition and ancestral loathing, all combine to darken her face before the eyes of men. It needs unconquerable courage to begin to tread this path.”
In my opinion, both of these views of the feminine, the human and nature are beautiful and true. Nature is probably the most wholesome phenomenon on earth. The perception of darkness probably comes from our fear. Perhaps it is the masculine side of our natures that make the feminine side so threatening. Both sides make a whole. The masculine, rational, conscious and partaking of the sun and daylight, is what built civilization and science. The tension between each side makes life interesting. As Camille Paglia wrote,
No more Pollyanna. Life is more complicated, more terrible, if you will, than the cliche-ridden cooing, “There’s no such thing as a bad boy, only a sick boy.” The pagan religions which so many people idealize recognized the dual nature of reality, both the light and the darkness. Goddesses like Kali and Hecate attest to that. Nature is both beautiful and terrible. Paglia has a word that represents the very fearfulness of birth. The vagina, the gateway to life, and, therefore, mortality. It is “chthonian.”
In a pluralistic society such as ours, philosophy and religion are considered the realm of the individual. That is simply because people can’t agree. We learned from hard and bitter experience that when a society tries to enforce one view of religion on everyone is a society that, the result is war. Just look at the history of Europe. Most European nations have adopted the neutral position of religious tolerance as is encoded in the US Constitution.
Sometimes someone comes along who wants to find some sort of objective basis for what is really the province of philosophy. I just became aware of a book called Political Ponerology, subtitled 
The first word in the definition is “theology,” in other words, religion. Wikipedia defines theology as: 
In 
Can this ever be the subject of science? Dictionary.com defines it as:
If science is a study of the physical or material world gained through observation and experimentation, how can it include study of “a supernatural power or deity?” How can it be about “apparitions, visions, prophecies, etc.?” Now, how about “evil?” Most definitions I found were tautological. The defined “evil” with the use of synonyms like “bad” or “immoral.” Dictionary.com defined it in the past tense.
Biblically, evil is anything that contradicts the holy nature of God (see Psalm 51:4).
In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris’s goal is to show how moral truth can be backed by “science”, or more specifically, empirical knowledge, critical thinking, philosophy, but most controversially, the scientific
Mr. Harris makes a claim that is interestingly similar to a claim made by B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist. When questioned about questions of value in the making of his fictional utopia, Skinner said that basically we all know what is “the good.” No point even discussing it. Harris also seems to believe that. In my opinion, these claims are a cop-out by someone too intellectually lazy to acknowledge the ambiguities of human values. Even if most people agree about what is “the good,” consensus has no more business dictating morality than does an established church.
A look at Harris’ credentials brought up the surprising fact that he has a PhD in Philosophy as well as in Neuroscience. He is an atheist who seems to be trying to find a better ground for values than faith. But, examining his impressive output of books, I note he has a book denying the existence of free-will. How can we talk about morality, about how we should live if we don’t have free-will?
Another book claiming to scientifically examine human evil, People of the Lie, is written by M. Scott Peck. Dr. Peck is a psychiatrist. B.F. Skinner, of course, is a psychologist who is a leading voice for Behaviorial Psychology. I don’t think it’s coincidental that these advocates of a science of morality are all in the field of psychology or psychiatry. This field is seen by many as “soft” science as opposed to physics or geology or even medicine. Sam Vaknin among others has suggested psychology might be better placed among the fields of philosophy. That might be preferable to trying to make morality into an adjunct of science.
Andrew M. Lobaczewski
Reading what Amazon.com allows us to see of the book (which is a whole lot), I note that I was unable to find a definition of “evil” anywhere. The author seems to assume we all know what “evil” is and agree. This assumption annihilates philosophy and is as totalitarian as the Communist regimes he damns. The only thing I could glean from my reading is that “evil” is the same thing as “psychopathy.” For obvious reasons, I find that totally unacceptable. He seems to be exclusively concerned with the origins of “evil” (whatever that is) and what to do about it. He uses an analogy of a beehive which needs the intervention of a 
beekeeper to save it from destruction. Unless the great beekeeper in the sky intervenes into the affairs of our sad planet, I’m guessing he wants some people to assign the task to themselves. Of course, then there’s the problem of who is the solution and who is the problem. According to 
This book, with it’s pretensions to science hardly seems a step up from the good old fashioned ideological struggle of political goals and means. The collective struggles of people to fashion their own world still looks like the only option (unless one opts for autocracy).
Between the ages of 13 and 15, I was a patient in a nuthouse. Many, many years later, I obtained a copy of the official notes from that time. I was disappointed that there wasn’t much about my therapy nor my day-to-day life on the ward. But there was a lot, one could say far too much, about my mother’s interview(s) with a social worker. Although not what I was interested in, it proved to be quite an eye-opener. For one thing, I learned that she hadn’t really loved my father. She wanted to get married and he proposed so she went for it.
I had honestly believed my parents loved me equally with my sister. This turned out to be untrue. My mother, especially, had ambivalence, to say the least, in her feelings about me. At one point, both my parents described my sister as the prettier one although I was obviously a beautiful baby by any objective standards.
caesarean. A nurse helped her for about a week but she was then fired for showing signs of psychosis. After she left, I’m told, I cried a lot. I remember her vaguely. I also remember my crib in a large room which later became the dining room. My granny (on my mother’s side) lived with us until her death. After she died, I was given her room, a large, sunny room overlooking the street. I loved my granny a lot. She was the only one who gave me unconditional love and her lap was like heaven. I was therefore surprised to read that, according to mommy dearest, I hadn’t been close to my grandmother. I can’t even begin to imagine where she got that. When I was told of her death, I thought it was like going to sleep. A hospital was where one went to do this. I thought you just lay down on a bed and waited to die the way one waits to sleep. I asked my mother what would happen if you can’t die (the way you sometimes can’t fall asleep). And I would ask her if she was dead yet as I was clearly confused about the whole process. Other than that, I didn’t feel any particular way about it.
When my sister grew old enough, she joined me in our large front room. Every night, I recall standing up in bed and looking at the interesting shadows on the walls. We had lots of plants in the windows through which the lamplight caste the shadows. Once in a while, a car would pass. The moving headlights made all the shadows move and shimmer. I awaited these moments as something special. I made up stories about the shadows which I shared with my sister although I can’t remember any of the stories now. Somehow, I ended up asleep every night without a problem.
When my sister was born, I developed “symptoms” such as blinking and stammering. I also insisted they “throw her out the window.” So I was taken to a psychiatric nursery school. I kid you not. I was 3 years, 10 months. They said I “live(d) in a dream world,” according to mommy. Quite true. I day dreamed intensively during my entire childhood. My mother only breast-fed me for 13 days when she ran out of milk. Interestingly, they wrote, “any rejection of Frances by the mother seems to serve also the purpose of elimination of any pathology within herself. It appears that by isolating Frances, she attempts to isolate her own emotional problem.” No wonder I related so powerfully to the lines in Marilyn Manson’s song, 
have been born “that way.” I despised her for her weakness. The notes from that psychiatric toddler’s school also said I had, “a far away, dreamy look, which shows a degree of self-absorption and overwhelming fantasy life written on (my) face.” I also spoke in which they considered “word salad.” I seemed “emotionally much younger” than my biological age. I showed “a great deal of lability” and would “shift from one mood into another one.” I think it’s rather common for a first child to regress for a while out of jealousy of the second one. I also showed “a great deal of confusion as to (my) own identity particularly in relation to (my) sex image, a great deal of preoccupation with sexual differentiation.” Interesting when compared with my mother’s claim that I had no sexual curiosity.
“We are dealing,” the narrative continued, “here with a child who shows a variety of pathology related to symptoms such as fears of noises, of smells, of dogs, with like symptoms…” A toddler afraid of dogs and noises is showing symptoms of pathology? “In addition, an inability to relate herself to the external world except on a rather narcissistic level. Primarily, we deal here with a conflict which indicates an interference of the maturation progress to a degree where we have a very poorly established ego structure, and therefore a tendency toward regression and a lack of super-ego formation.” They also said I had “an extremely disturbed mother” (sorry, mom). My mother took me out of that school because it was full of very aggressive boys (“biters, kickers, etc.,” my mom). That’s what I remember primarily about the place. Lots of chaos. One time, a big, fat boy hit me and the staff mentioned that he was having a bad day. Poor boy.
The notes by the social worker who kept interviewing my mom require particular attention as they involve a highly distorted picture of an experience in school. The principal of my elementary school was a politically ambitious termite who sought to further his reputation to making the kids donate money to veterans. This man hated kids as evidenced by the way he talked to us in Assembly. He harangued us for money to his cause by describing his image of us selfishly spending our pennies on candy and movies instead of helping him get ahead. His voice was alive with loathing as he proposed a hypothetical situation where we had the money in our pockets and had to decide what to do with it. His voice quivered with rage when he listed ways we might actually enjoy our money on kid diversions. The message was that kids had no right to have fun. This was just beneath the standard of how a kid should live.
I’ll also never forget what he did to a boy in my class. This boy wasn’t a very good student. He was kind of a low achiever. We were having a rehearsal for a graduation ceremony. We had to line up. This principal placed that boy in the front of the line, saying, “thereby fulfilling the biblical prophecy, ‘the last shall be first.'” What a mean thing to say in front of the whole graduating class. Adults probably have no idea how much kids notice about their behavior. But we do notice. I did, anyway. My father, to his credit, understand the situation perfectly. My mother, according to what she told the social worker, did not.
According to my mother, the class decided to raise money for veterans. Yeah, right. A bunch of little kids got this idea all on their own. It was the principal. My teacher put a lot of pressure on all of us to donate. I refused as a matter of principle. Instead of seeing this as a sign of strong character, my mother depicted it as a symptom of social maladjustment. According to her, “a group of the girls had waylaid (me) in the hall and were mauling (me) when (a teacher) interfered.” Nice story. But it is 100% fiction. The kids never showed any interest in the project, far less wanting to beat me up for not being part of it. Since my mother is dead, I will never have to chance to confront her about this lie (or, let us be kind, delusion).
I was a tomboy until adolescence. One night I dreamed I was climbing my favorite rock but I had two pairs of legs. On one, I was wearing my sneakers. On the other, I had my school shoes. A perfect Freudian symbol of my conflict between my carefree days as a tomboy and the woman I was becoming. Apparently, I chose womanhood as my interest in cloths became girly. I was still a bookworm. How my reading fed my fantasy life is already described in my autobiographical 
Nobody. Not even my shrink. It really disturbed him as well as a lot of people, especially my mother. “She has shown increasing hostility toward patient’s visits home on week-ends, and once remarked to assigned social worker that her reputation had been ruined by the patient, and she could no longer accept her back in the household. By February, 1958, the mother had arranged to move into a more expensive apartment with fewer rooms, with the idea that the patient would not be allowed to return home. She also stated tearfully, ‘I no longer consider Frances my daughter.'” I can’t really blame her since the girl I tried to kill was a daughter of one of her closest friends. But she never carried through with her plans and I returned to the family home after my discharge (with a “guarded” diagnosis).
We moved to a small town where I finished high school. She died during my high school years. The months preceding her death were characterized by a lot of weeping on her bed. This only made me angry. It seemed all my life I had been a thorn in her side. That got old long before her final year. She died of lung cancer which isn’t surprising because she smoked like a chimney.
One of the items on the PCL-R is manipulative. But isn’t everyone manipulative? Except for severely retarded or autistic people. In the old laugh-at movie, Reefer Madness, the goody-goody main character is so honest, they say of him, he “never lies.” But real people tell lies. And we all manipulate.
past the verbiage, it really boils down to one thing. How to show the kid who is boss and make him submit. They do this by making undesirable (to them) behavior have consequences. Like a wild horse, a disobedient child must be broken. It is the will which must be broken to make him submit.
But that seems so one-sided. Is the child (or good citizen) just submitting? It seems to me there is a two-way process at work. The kid wants to be rewarded instead of punished. To get what he wants, the kid applies those behaviors he was taught. It’s mutual manipulation. After all, society is a system of levers and pulleys that people learn to manipulate to get a favored outcome.
The leader of the fictitious community, Walden Two, is a man named Frazier who claims a lot of power. But Frazier’s “control” is hardly what is usually implied by that word, which would be power-over, power wielded over people against their will. Frazier’s only “power” comes from his ability to organize people in a way that enables them to be happy and to get what they want. It is power-with.
Even in situations that are completely power-over such as a kidnapping, the prisoner finds ways to exert some control by knowing the person who has the power over, finding his weaknesses. That is what keeps them alive and enables them to escape eventually.
As long as people are at all affected by the behavior of other people, power will always be a matter of give and take. A lot of manipulation is based on the knowledge on the part of the manipulator (consciously or otherwise) of secret guilt, inadequacies and resentments on our part (which is usually unconscious). This form of manipulation is blackmail. The antidote to manipulation is the same as the antidote to blackmail: to tell the truth. The victim of most forms of manipulation is not as much afraid of the blackmailer telling the world as he is of becoming aware of his own secrets, carefully hidden from himself. A self-aware human being is enured to blackmail. It always costs us to face our inner demons and that is the true cost of freedom.
Munchausens by Proxy is one of the creepiest things found in the annuls of psychiatry. I thought it must be listed in the DSM-5 but it seems not. It is a “syndrome” rather than a personality disorder. Wikipedia defines “syndrome” as “
correlated with each other. The word derives from the Greek σύνδρομον, meaning ‘concurrence’.” Yet, it is also called MBP which looks like a DSM abbreviation. So, since it’s not a “disorder” by a specific “syndrome” of behavior, I guess it’s just something that certain “disordered” people do. 
The title of this blogpost is a quote from Marilyn Manson’s song The Man that You Fear, the Antichrist Superstar album. Two images came to me from this song. One is my own mother. She never made me physically sick like the MBP people do. But the lines, “…to camouflage your scars” and “Peel off all those eyes and crawl into the dark.” The other image is of a Grade B movie of a monster terrifying a helpless old woman.
Marilyn Manson has said that his songs come from his dreams. His video makes the meaning of this song seem very different from my interpretation. But my interpretation remains compellingly true for me. And it (the interpretation) begins with a dream.
an interview that he abused his mother at one time:
to my pointy ribs are all your infants in abortion cribs.”
What a wealth of meaning comes through that one line, alone! When I hear that line, I can sense the shame Manson must have felt; shame for his mother. She is not a “natural mother.” She destroys her young. She “poisoned all (her) infants to camouflage (her) scars.” Rejecting and feeling ashamed of one’s own mother is, itself, poison. It eats into the soul, causes one to feel hopelessly tainted and flawed. Unlike Trent who can say right out lines like “my whole existence is flawed” and “the tainted touch of my caress,” the shame projected in this Manson song goes too deep for direct utterance. At the point of the song, Manson, or the person within himself he is dramatizing, is overpowered by his shame.
To help determine if someone has factitious disorder, mental health providers conduct a detailed interview and run tests for possible physical problems.
impaired vision and retardation. Dee Dee conned doctors into surgically removing salivary tissue and putting a feeding tube down her throat. She had to drag around an oxygen tank. Her teeth were hideous, sticking out and dominating her mouth. Her head was shaved (to make people think she was on chemo). The pictures taken during the charade would be disgusting on their own face value. Being what it was upgrades “disgusting” to “revolting.” Gypsy was forced to stay in a wheelchair and wear horrible glasses and wear a hideous grin (not at all the way she really was). The mother is fat and grotesque. The more ungainly, the saintlier. They have been featured in special human interest shorts.
Gypsy Rose is in prison now. For what she suffered from that woman, she had a right to kill her. I know nobody will agree with me, well, maybe some people. I hope I don’t get a lecture on due process and “nobody has the right to take the law into their own hands.” I just don’t want to hear it. In her interviews, Gypsy shows herself to be an intelligent and articulate young lady and makes the gap between her fake persona and reality all the more glaring.
opened up credit cards in the names of her family members and wrote bad checks. She was also on America’s Most Wanted. If she ever showed up in the Bayou, she would have been arrested. Her mother, Emma Pitre, was into petty theft, shoplifting and even stealing peoples’ cloths from the laundromat. Dee Dee’s family suspects she killed her mother by starving her. Dee Dee’s father and step mother completely reject her now. They didn’t even want her ashes.
What is Dee Dee? Her apparent lack of conscience pegs her as a psychopath. But her desire to appear saintly in the eyes of the public suggest narcissism. It would have to be the most malignant kind, of course. Gypsy was afraid of her and didn’t dare go off script while she was in the public eye where Dee Dee often put her. She was Dee Dee’s little performing slave. One time, she said the “wrong thing” and Dee Dee took a hammer and smashed Gypsy’s computer and phone. She told Gypsy that if she ever did it again, she would do that to her hands.
I guess she got a new computer because she managed to make an online friend while Dee Dee was asleep. This guy was very strange. He thinks he has multiple personalities and he asked Gypsy to invent personalities to go with each of his. So she had a little girl persona, a slut persona, an evil persona. Sure the relationship was strange but coming from the abuse she grew up with, I find it amazing that it was as healthy as it was and as creative. Gypsy plans to finish school in prison. She only finished second grade while in her mother’s power.
I am Julie Gregory’s Mother, Sandy Gregory-Parocai. Julie wrote the book: “Sickened,Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood”. Totally unknown to me and without my permission the book used my actual name and pictures.Written as a true story the book has shattered our home and the well being of our two adopted children,Misty and Doug.To promote her book Julie flew from Ohio to Montana in 2003. She made a “Referall” to Childrens Services that she had been abused all her life by me and I was doing the same thing to our adopted children. Julie also presented herself as a graduate student of Psychiatry from Sheffield University, England. There is no Masters Degree for Julie there, nor did she graduate. Convinced that the children were in grave danger our children were immeadately taken from our home. Not only were Ed and I in shock but it terrified our children to be abruptly taken from the home that they had been in for 7 years. Both children were crying and terrified. Misty was 13 years old at the time and Doug was only 7 years old. I was put under a 90 day investagation and Ed and I only had “Supervised” visits with our children. Then there was the National T.V. Program and a write-up in a nationally known magazine makeing me out as a horrible child-abuser,a mentally ill person and a mother that had continually tried to take her own life. Capitalazing on the fact our children were taken from our home ,this was used as a GIANT COMMERICAL to promote Julie’s book. Meanwhile, Ed was hospitalized 6 days from the stress! The truth is that Julie was never abused to begin with. I have the court records showing she tried to accuse me of child abuse in 1986 to get out of being found guilty in a court of law for an offence that she committed. I was investaged then and found not guilty but Julie was charged as being an UNRULY child and sentenced accordingly. I have never been arrested for anything in my life,EVER!! I have never had a mental illiness or tried to kill myself,EVER!!The 90 day investagation by Childrens Services in 2003 here in Montana proved I was not guilty of Julie’s alligations. Our adopted children have THRIVED HERE since thier placement in 1997.I was not charged with 
anything in a court of law and our children were returned to Ed and I. But,2 years after the book was written, Julie is still trying to get our children removed from our home. This is terriozing our children as Julie is petioning Oprah Winfrey to use her “CLOUT” to remove our children. Misty and Doug are in counciling to try and help them cope with this. Julie petioned the Attorney General of our state and the Governor here too besides her web-site petition.No One has removed our children because, COULD IT BE THAT THERE IS NO ABUSE GOING ON HERE?? I will be happy to provide records to our innocence as well as recent pictures of our adopted kids if interested. Does anyone have any suggestions for us? I can prove that 90% of Julie’s book is untrue.
CLUSTER B 