PSYCHOPATHS AMONG US

"Psychopath! psychopath!"

I'm alone in my living room and I'm yelling at my TV. "Forget rehabilitation -- that guy is a psychopath."

Ever since I visited Dr. Robert Hare in Vancouver, I can see them, the psychopaths. It's pretty easy, once you know how to look. I'm watching a documentary about an American prison trying to rehabilitate teen murderers. They're using an emotionally intense kind of group therapy, and I can see, as plain as day, that one of the inmates is a psychopath. He tries, but he can't muster a convincing breakdown, can't fake any feeling for his dead victims. He's learned the words, as Bob Hare would put it, but not the music.

The incredible thing, the reason I'm yelling, is that no one in this documentary -- the therapists, the warden, the omniscient narrator -- seems to know the word "psychopath." It is never uttered, yet it changes everything. A psychopath can never be made to feel the horror of murder. Weeks of intense therapy, which are producing real breakthroughs in the other youths, will probably make a psychopath more likely to reoffend. Psychopaths are not like the rest of us, and everyone who studies them agrees they should not be treated as if they were.

I think of Bob Hare, who's in New Orleans receiving yet another award, and wonder if he's watching the same show in his hotel room and feeling the same frustration. A lifetime spent looking into the heads of psychopaths has made the slight, slightly anxious emeritus professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia the world's best-known expert on the species. Hare hasn't merely changed our understanding of psychopaths. It would be more accurate to say he has created it.

The condition itself has been recognized for centuries, wearing evocative labels such as "madness without delirium" and "moral insanity" until the late 1800s, when "psychopath" was coined by a German clinician. But the term (and its 1930s synonym, sociopath) had always been a sort of catch-all, widely and loosely applied to criminals who seemed violent and unstable. Even into the mid-1970s, almost 80 percent of convicted felons in the United States were being diagnosed as sociopaths. In 1980, Hare created a diagnostic tool called the Psychopathy Checklist, which, revised five years later, became known as the PCL-R. Popularly called "the Hare," the PCL-R measures psychopathy on a forty-point scale. Once it emerged, it was the first time in history that everyone who said "psychopath" was saying the same thing. For research in the field, it was like a starting gun.

<br>But for Hare, it has turned out to be a Pandora's box. Recently retired from teaching, his very last Ph.D. student about to leave the nest, Hare, sixty-eight, should be basking in professional accolades and enjoying his well-earned rest. But he isn't.

The PCL-R has slipped the confines of academe, and is being used and misused in ways that Hare never intended. In some of the places where it could do some good -- such as the prison in the TV documentary I was yelling at -- the idea of psychopathy goes unacknowledged, usually because it's politically incorrect to declare someone to be beyond rehabilitation. At the opposite extreme, there are cases in which Hare's work has been overloaded with political baggage of another sort, such as in the United States, where a high PCL-R score is used to support death-penalty arguments, and in England, where a debate is underway about whether some individuals with personality disorders (such as psychopaths) should be detained even if they haven't committed a crime.

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Frontline

The Profile: Feelings and Relationships
by Dr. Robert D. Hare

The Psychopathy Checklist lets us discuss psychopaths with little risk that we are describing simple social deviance or criminality, or that we are mislabeling people who have nothing more in common than that they have broken the law. But it also provides a detailed picture of the disordered personalities of the psychopaths among us. In this chapter and the next, I bring that picture into focus by describing the more salient features one by one. This chapter looks at the emotional and interpersonal traits of this complex personality disorder; chapter 4 examines the unstable, characteristically antisocial lifestyle of the psychopath.

The Psychopathy Checklist lets us discuss psychopaths with little risk that we are describing simple social deviance or criminality, or that we are mislabeling people who have nothing more in common than that they have broken the law. But it also provides a detailed picture of the disordered personalities of the psychopaths among us. In this chapter and the next, I bring that picture into focus by describing the more salient features one by one. This chapter looks at the emotional and interpersonal traits of this complex personality disorder; chapter 4 examines the unstable, characteristically antisocial lifestyle of the psychopath.

Emotional/Interpersonal
glib and superficial
egocentric and grandiose
lack of remorse or guilt
lack of empathy
deceitful and manipulative
shallow emotions
Social Deviance
impulsive
poor behavior controls
need for excitement
lack of responsibility
early behavior problems
adult antisocial behavior

The Profile: Feelings and Relationships continues...

Psychopaths: New Trends in Research

By Robert D. Hare (c)1995 The Harvard Mental Health Letter, September 1995

Public concern about crime has never been greater. Perhaps most troubling are seemingly senseless and dispassionate acts of violence, particularly those committed by young people. In a frantic search for understanding, we readily blame upbringing, poverty, flawed environment, or an ineffective criminal justice system. All these may be important, but we tend to ignore another part of the picture: the enormous social, economic, and personal suffering inflicted by a few people whose antisocial attitudes and behavior result less from social forces than from an inherent sense of entitlement and an incapacity for emotional connection to the rest of humanity. For these individuals - psychopaths - social rules have no constraining force, and the idea of a common good is merely a puzzling and inconvenient abstraction.

Psychopaths use charm, manipulation, intimidation, and violence to control others and satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they cold-bloodedly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest guilt or regret. Although their numbers are small - perhaps 1% of the population - psychopaths account for a large proportion of the serious crime, violence, and social distress in every society. Psychopathic depredations affect people in all races, cultures, and ethnic groups, and at all levels of income and social status. As many as 15% or 20% of prisoners are psychopaths; the disorder is common among drug dealers, spouse and child abusers, swindlers and con men, high-pressure salesmen and stock promoters, gang members, mercenaries, corrupt politicians, unethical lawyers and doctors, terrorists, cult leaders, and black marketeers. In societies undergoing a chaotic breakdown (today, for example, in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union), psychopaths often emerge as "patriots" and "saviors." Wrapped in the flag, they enrich themselves by callously exploiting cultural or racial tensions and grievances.

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Comprehending the con

The University of British Columbia
UBC Reports
July 13, 2000

Psychopath expert Prof. Robert Hare is a wanted man worldwide

Gunfire punctuates the screams of schoolchildren, a shackled, serial rapist grins into the limelight, scam artists set up shop and we ask, "Who are these people?"

The question leads many to Robert Hare, who has become recognized as the foremost authority on psychopaths over 35 years of research at UBC.

Technically retired and no longer teaching, the professor emeritus of Psychology is busier than ever.

"I'm certainly not fading into the sunset," he says, pushing aside appointment notes and airline tickets, putting the phone on call-forward and listing some of his current projects.

U.S. justice officials seek his advice on school shootings and the potential release of some 100 serial killers that plea-bargained or otherwise "slipped through the cracks." In the U.K. he is a key member of the advisory panel developing programs for the treatment of psychopaths.

Comprehending the con continues...

Chat log:

Robert Hare
on The Psychpaths Among Us

Omni Magazine
Date: Fri Dec 27 1996
From: Keith_Harary_with_Robert_Hare

Good evening and welcome to Brainstorms. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Harary, Editor at Large of Omni.

Please join us tonight, 10 p.m., eastern time, when our special guest will be one of the world's foremost experts in the area of psychopathy, Dr. Robert Hare. Dr. Hare is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, where he developed the Psychopathy Checklist -- which is rapidly being adopted worldwide as the standard instrument for researchers and clinicians working in this area. Dr. Hare is the author of three books and numerous articles on psychopathy, including his most recent book, WITHOUT CONSCIENCE: THE DISTURBING WORLD OF PSYCHOPATHS AMONG US.

Mind of a Murderer: Programme transcript

Man with glasses: My very first contemplation of criminal behaviour was trying to put together a plan of getting away with murder, and I was going to kill my brother.

I knew that every Sunday he would jump on his bike and he'd head down the road to join up with some other fellers. He loved that bike and he used to tell me: 'You ever touch my bike, I'll kill you!'

So this Sunday morning, while he's working, I take his bike, I knew if I provoked it just a little bit more that he would chase me. So I gave him a couple of kicks and took off on a dead run for a tree that was right beside my grandfather's barn. And it went up on to the roof and on the opposite side of the barn there were cutter rakes. And sure enough he chased me up there and as he topped the edge of that roof I kicked him off it, and he fell on to those rakes.

Some court people came and got me.

Narrator: There are few more emotive words in the English language than 'psychopath', a clinical term for a condition that has only recently begun to be properly defined. It describes a dangerous pattern of behaviour which, although it's been recognised for the best part of a century, is little understood.

Every decade has produced its own particular brand of psychopaths whose horrific crimes have defied any kind of rational explanation.

Recent research in psychopathy in Britain and America is encouraging scientists to believe that they are close to discovering the root cause of the condition.

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Sex Offender Re-Offense Risk Assessment Videotape Training Program

Written by William Burke, Southeastern Offender Assessments, published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, September 2001, pgs. 965-966.

Excerpt
Robert Hare presents the theory of psychopathy and the utilization of the Hare PCL-R for sex offender recidivism. Hare warns of the impact that psychopaths have on the general population and the inability of other psychological measures to identify them. Hare's survival analysis addresses sexual and violence recidivism rates. His presentation of the SPECT study of psychopaths is fascinating and supportive of the idea that psychopaths may represent another taxon.

Sinclair Seminars

Psychopathy and Antisocial Personality Disorder: A Case of Diagnostic Confusion

by Robert D. Hare, Ph.D.
Psychiatric Times February 1996 Vol. XIII Issue 2

A Secret Service agent recently asked if I was familiar with a 1992 FBI report that almost half of the killers of law enforcement officers met the criteria for antisocial personality. I replied that I had not seen the report but that the finding did not seem surprising or noteworthy to me. My comment was based on the assumption that the report had used antisocial personality as a synonym for antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), a category listed in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) and applicable to the majority of criminals.

However, the agent explained that the description of the killers in question indicated to him that they matched the profile of the psychopath defined by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (Hare 1991). When I later saw a copy of the FBI report, I realized that he was correct in his assessment and that the report's findings were indeed noteworthy and chilling, particularly for law enforcement officers.

The killers' characteristics referred to as antisocial personality in the FBI report were as follows: sense of entitlement, unremorseful, apathetic to others, unconscionable, blameful of others, manipulative and conning, affectively cold, disparate understanding of behavior and socially acceptable behavior, disregardful of social obligations, nonconforming to social norms, irresponsible. These killers were not simply persistently antisocial individuals who met DSM-IV criteria for ASPD; they were psychopaths- remorseless predators who use charm, intimidation and, if necessary, impulsive and cold-blooded violence to attain their ends.

The distinction between psychopathy and ASPD is of considerable significance to the mental health and criminal justice systems. Unfortunately, it is a distinction that is often blurred, not only in the minds of many clinicians but in the latest edition of DSM-IV.

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This list was compiled by Steve Hart, Adelle Forth and Robert Hare for personal use. Most, but not all, of the articles discuss or evaluate the PCL-R and/or PCL:SV. Those marked with an asterisk (*) are empirical studies based on the PCL-R or PCL:SV. Some of the references are to conference presentations, but please don't ask us to send you copies..

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