Ableism

The following article by Autistic Hoya was included in today’s Psychopathic Times. It is very politically correct but I decided to reblog it because it discusses concepts like psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder in interesting ways. Some people I know would do well to read this. NOTE: I will be adding emphasis to certain passages. I made some sentences RED for emphasis. I particularly like the point about professionals labeling people who don’t submit to their authority as suffering from “antisocial personality disorder.” I have long held that these concepts support the mainstream values of society. Resistance is a form of “mental illness.”

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“The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There is no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.” — Arundhati Roy

24 September 2013

Psychopathy: Racism and Ableism from the Medical-Industrial Complex

Trigger warning/Content: Disability-related slurs and other ableist language, mention of rape, racism, and ableism.

Edit: In the original post, I neglected to ntion the connections between Antisocial Prsonality Disorder and Cnduct Disorder and Oppositional Defiant Dsorder, nd structural racism, sxism, and ableism. typos b/c eited from pphone.

Psychopathy: Racism and Ableism from the Medical-Industrial Complex

When we commit to examining our language and our ideas and deconstructing the ableism we find in them, we must make a full commitment, no partial or half-hearted commitments allowed. When we stop using “autistic” and “retarded” as insults, when we realize the urgent need to stop scapegoating mass murder and rape on “mental illness” and “emotional instability,” when we learn to stop referring to our political opponents as “blind,” “deaf,” or “crippled” in their ideologies, we must also critically re-examine our use of the psychopathy label.

This constructed term of art does not in fact refer to an accepted diagnostic label in psychiatry or psychology. In the recently-replaced DSM-IV (the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the closest label was “Antisocial Personality Disorder,” a diagnosis that still exists in the current DSM-5. The DSM-5 also contains the newly created diagnosis of Conduct Disorder. The diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder and Conduct Disorder come perhaps the closest to the lay definition for psychopathy that is usually intended when the term is invoked.

The lay definition for psychopathy typically goes like this:
Someone who has little or no empathy for other people and no real control over their behavior.

Psychopathy is usually invoked when referring to either

1. violent people, such as murderers, serial killers, school shooters, terrorists, or rapists, either by the mass media or by legal professionals, including prosecuting and defense attorneys, judges, sentencing advocates, probation and parole officers, and corrections officers and prison guards
2. other disabled people, such as autistics, people with mental health or psychiatric disabilities, or learning disabilities (though usually when a person in this group has been accused of or formally charged with a crime)
3. members of oppressive classes, such as wealthy people, cisgender men, or abled people, and especially when the member of the oppressive class is in a position of political power in addition to apolitical structural power

Yet, as noted before, psychopathy is not even a medical or psychiatric diagnosis. It doesn’t exist in the DSM-IV nor does it exist in the DSM-5, and as much as I hate lending any further credence to the medical-industrial complex’s state-sanctioned and socially-approved authority, this is important to recognize. Even the medical-industrial complex does not officially recognize psychopathy as a diagnosis. 

On the other hand, Antisocial Personality Disorder is recognized as a psychiatric diagnosis by the medical establishment. And who are the people typically diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder? They are overwhelmingly poor students of color who frequently have other disabilities. Antisocial Personality Disorder, the diagnostic category that comes closest to approximating the lay definition of “psychopathy,” is a tool for criminalizing poverty, blackness and brownness, and disability. It is the diagnostic label to legitimize non-compliance as a mental health problem.

Refusal to take psychiatric medications? Non-compliant. Doing poorly in math class? Non-compliant. Stimming in public? Non-compliant.

If you are non-compliant, you are anti-social. You are mentally ill. You have Antisocial Personality Disorder. You are a psychopath.

The language of pathology, of mental illness, of disease, of disability, has long been used to reinforce existing structural oppressions like racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, binarism, cissexism, and ableism. I spoke at UC Berkeley this past Friday on the need to recognize and move beyond ableist metaphor. Ableist metaphor is all-pervasive in public discourse, in academia, in grassroots organizing, in progressive and radical movements as well as in conservative, neoliberal, and nationalist movements. Ableist metaphor draws on the language of disability to characterize, to denigrate, to attack, to rhetoricize, to politicize — and it does so based on the presumption that deviation from typical thought, movement, emotional processing, communication, bodily/mental functioning, learning, remembering, sensing is evidence of defect, deficiency, disorder, and ultimately, moral failure. And if this is so, then it is certainly justifiable to refer to one’s political opponents as blind or deaf to progressive ideas, or to refer to structures like capitalism or anarchy as social diseases, or to refer to violence visited either by individuals or oppressive systems as evidence of psychopathy.

To use psychopathy as the lens through which one views systemic or individual violence — the violence of capitalism or patriarchy, for example, or the violence of a single serial killer or rapist — is to reinforce the structural power of the medical-industrial complex, and to do so at the expense of disabled people, poor people, and people of color who have been victimized by the labels of non-compliant, anti-social, and psychopathic.

To defend the use of this term as medically accurate is to imply that you have knowledge that an individual has been medically assessed as and diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder or Conduct Disorder, which in itself, cedes control and power to the psychiatric establishment and the medical-industrial complex. It presumes personal medical knowledge, it reinforces the creative fictions of these diagnostic labels, and it enables the systems of violence that use the language of disability to pathologize and ultimately, to dehumanize.

Be precise in your language, and say that oppressive structures are violent and manipulative. Say that those who abuse their structural positions of power act with reckless disregard for other human beings. Say that they are callous and unabashedly wielding the power that comes with their privilege.

But don’t call them psychopaths.

I’ve experienced enough ableism in my life to last me several lifetimes. I don’t need fellow radicals feeding into ableism.

Labels: ableism, culture, mental health, mental health disabilities, mental illness, mental illnesses, psychiatric disabilities, psychiatry, psychology, psychopathy, society

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Normal Psychopaths

Reblog:

An article by Jessica Brown, This is How Normal Life Feels as a Psychopath, is very spot on. A large part of my own motivation in blogging about psychopathy is the belief that with all the talk that goes on about us, we should have our own voice(s) to speak for ourselves. Ms. Brown talks about the misconceptions about psychopaths created by Hollywood and the media. I concur. But there are also misconceptions created by people who identify as “victims” or “survivors” of psychopaths. See A Psychopath’s Guide to Haters. So, without further ado, here is a reblog of Jessica Brown’s article:

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This Is How Normal Life Feels as a Psychopath

Everyday, nonviolent psychopaths say they’re nothing like the psychopath we see on our movie screens

Jessica Brown

Jul 12, 2018

Illustration by Jessica Siao

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Not so long ago, a woman was sitting on a plane, minding her own business, when the man next to her made several attempts at conversation. Jane, let’s call her, assumed the man was drunk, so she didn’t bother being friendly or making any effort with him. But her unfiltered behavior didn’t go unnoticed, and at the end of the flight, the man politely suggested she might be a psychopath.

That comment resonated enough with Jane that she looked up the term “psychopathy” when she got home. She recognized herself in the descriptions and tried to talk to her sister about it, but her sister seemed hurt and offended. So Jane took it back and said she wasn’t a psychopath and that she didn’t mean it.

That reaction isn’t surprising, says M.E. Thomas, author of Confessions of a Sociopath. “What are the implications of someone you know being a sociopath? Maybe that they don’t love you after all, at least not in the way that you thought they did,” Thomas says. “Maybe that they’ve had bad thoughts about you. Maybe that they’ve manipulated you or hurt you in ways that you weren’t even aware of at the time. Maybe you go back through your interactions with them and doubt their intentions or their feelings for you.”

In recent years, the violent, manipulative psychopath has become so pervasive in popular culture that it’s hard to find a Netflix series about anything else. After watching 400 movies made between 1915 and 2010 to identify “realistically” portrayed psychopaths, Belgian psychiatry professor Samuel Leistedt concluded, “It appears that psychopathy in the cinema, despite a real clinical evolution, remains fictional…Most of the psychopathic villains in popular fiction resemble international and universal bogeyman, almost as ‘villain archetypes.’”

Away from our screens, however, psychopathy is not a monolithic disorder with clearly defined behaviors. It’s nuanced and widely misunderstood, according to James Fallon, a neuroscientist who incidentally discovered his own psychopathic traits when examining his PET scan as part of an unrelated research project.

“The only thing really accepted is antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), which is a subpart of psychopathy,” Fallon says. The latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines ASPD as a “pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.” Psychopaths are considered to have a severe form of ASPD.

“I don’t like the assumption that because these four letters exist next to my name in my medical notes — ASPD — I should be treated with a great deal of suspicion.”

Scientists estimate that the prevalence of psychopathy in society varies between around 0.2 and 2 percent, and research suggests that those with psychopathic traits are more violent than those without. But experts, also acknowledge that not everyone with a diagnosis is violent, including Fallon.

“I’d never hurt the people I know. I’ve put people in dangerous situations, but I’ll do it with them. I like the thrill, so for me it’s just fun, but most people can’t go there. They still hang around with me but just won’t fall for any traps,” Fallon says. “They’re looking for me to pull a prank on them, but I’ve never manipulated a stranger. They’re very safe around me. I have a rich life with lots of friends, so why lie and put people in true danger?”

Thomas, an attorney and law professor whose book details her life as a self-described nonviolent sociopath, says there is truth to the questions people might ask themselves in Jane’s family’s position, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In the process of being open with people about her own diagnosis, Thomas lost one friend and many professional opportunities, but most of her friends eventually came around.

It would be much easier if people didn’t have misconceptions around psychopathy, she says. In her book, Thomas writes that he calls herself a “sociopath” instead of “psychopath” because of the negative connotations of “psycho” in popular culture — even though psychosis is not a characteristic of psychopathy. For those with an ASPD diagnosis, these popular misconceptions can have serious consequences.

Scout Bolton calls herself a nonviolent, high-functioning sociopath. She was diagnosed with ASPD nine years ago at the age of 20, while under the care of a mental health team for bipolar disorder. Bolton had been getting into fights, dealing amphetamines, and had even been arrested. But today she has a stable life with good friends, a supportive fiancée, and her first child on the way. She blogs about how to turn antisocial traits into positives.

“They’re very safe around me. I have a rich life with lots of friends, so why lie and put people in true danger?”

Because of her diagnosis, Bolton explains, people interpret her positive traits negatively, assuming her confidence is narcissism and her social skills are manipulation — medical professionals included. “Doctors will write you off and believe everything you say is a manipulation,” she says. “I don’t like the assumption that because these four letters exist next to my name in my medical notes — ASPD — I should be treated with a great deal of suspicion.”

Bolton is so affected by the public perception of psychopaths that she often stays indoors to avoid interacting with people. “My life is colored by how hidden I feel, and sometimes it makes me quite contemptuous, to a point where I don’t want to leave the house,” she says. “It’s not aggression or depression. I’m not worried anything bad is going to happen, but I just don’t want to interact with anyone, because I know I’ll go into an overdrive of resentment and a feeling of injustice, so I stay home, lay low, and stay isolated.”

This judgement toward people with ASPD is particularly unfair, Fallon argues, because they’re not responsible for thinking the way they do. “People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) get obsessions and rituals, but they know they’re irrational,” he says. “Someone with a personality disorder has similar thoughts as someone with OCD, but they think their behaviors are good and true.”

Another unfortunate consequence of pop-culture psychopathy is the fetishization of its dangerous side, which, Bolton says, is a particular problem for women. “We’re here to bring exquisite fire and fury into the lives of the terminally bored, whether we made that decision or not,” she says. “But when people get in relationships with us, they quickly find that all the things they found irresistible about us were a fantasy, and when we fail to live up to that masturbatory illusion, we’re demonized.”

Sexual fantasies aside, the growing public fascination with psychopaths interferes with the lives of nonviolent psychopaths in strange ways. This is something 38-year-old Becky, who also has ASPD, found when she signed up for Facebook to talk to others about her diagnosis. The popularization of psychopathy, she says, has roused people — usually young men who haven’t been diagnosed with a personality disorder — to request membership to the Facebook group she runs for psychopaths. She says people often open with the question, “Have you killed anyone?”

Some psychopathic traits can be attributed to being abused as a child, research has found. Bolton was diagnosed with conduct disorder as a child, which is defined as the display of aggressive and antisocial behavior in children to the extent that it interferes with them leading a normal life, according to the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatrists. Conduct disorder often leads to a diagnosis of ASPD later in life.

Bolton argues that the link between ASPD and childhood trauma makes it even harder to justify the judgements against people with the diagnosis. “If you’re a child going through a hard time at home and you’re reacting with impulsive, tearaway behaviors, you’re written off,” she says. “You’ve become the problem. But what child decides to become a sociopath, just for a laugh?”

Fallon, who attributes his nonviolent nature to his happy upbringing, says he has a series of genes called “warrior genes,” which are thought to be a risk for aggression, violence, and low empathy, but only in those raised in an abusive environment. Being raised in a positive environment can offset some of the genes’ negative effects. “I grew up really good-looking, really athletic, and I got everything I wanted all the time. I don’t know what I’d do if life was bad, because it’s never been bad,” Fallon says.

While the damaging stereotype of the psychopath has far-reaching consequences, Fallon, who helps writers in Hollywood gain a realistic idea of psychopathy, says things are improving. “We’re no longer seeing much of this idea of the psycho, somebody out of their minds, growling and sneering like a mad dog,” he says. “This doesn’t describe a lot of people with psychopathy.”

While Bolton feels unfairly judged because of how psychopaths have been portrayed, she doesn’t want to see the disorder completely censored. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing to portray real psychopathy,” she says, citing Netflix’s Mindhunter as “a really good portrayal of psychopathy.”

“I like how what seems like benign, and even positive ASPD, seems reflected back in the show’s protagonist,” she says. “I’d like to see more of that.”

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