What should you do if you show 17 out of the 20 characteristics that describe a sociopath?

Answer 1

Self-Diagnosing as a SociopathHere is input an advice:

• You should stop diagnosing yourself and get someone who is qualified to do it. It is very difficult to judge yourself on characteristics you've read. Let someone else who is qualified do that.

• The other poster is absolutely correct. Don't diagnose yourself! If you go under most diseases on the internet all of us could fit under most of them with the symptoms that are given. It is best to see your doctor and let him/her decide.

• I agree with the first two posts. I wonder if you are trying to diagnose yourself because of something you read here or because of someone you hurt or someone close to you who suggested that you are a sociopath. A sociopath self-diagnosing, realizing there's a problem and getting help is rare. Whatever the case, reading a description of mental illness online is not like reading your horoscope or a personality profile. You really have the potential to do serious damage to yourself or to people who love you. If you are really trying to get help and actually proceed in getting help not only to help yourself but others around you, then I commend you. But please DO IT.

  I commend the first three people who posted; never diagnose yourself with a mental or physical illness; seek professional help.

  That said, there is essential information about the subject of sociopathy that will help you understand it more, especially if you or someone you know do/does end up diagnosed with this bizarre and rather unique condition that is as common as one in twenty-five people...

  Sociopathy is a mental illness misunderstood by most thanks to misinformation from the media. A sociopath is someone who suffers from Anti-social Personality Disorder, which means that they do not feel normal human emotions; they lack remorse, shame or guilt; and their emotions are shallow.

  Sociopaths do not usually "seem crazy" to casual observers; they are in a way extremely rational, but without feeling. If you want someone completely gone, it is rational to kill them, isn't it? Yet it is human empathy which dictates to us that this is wrong. A sociopath is uncontrolled by human emotion, and any appearance of this is a facade with an ulterior motive. This condition is not curable, as you cannot force someone to 'feel' something, and it is a chronic condition that neither gets better nor worse. For more information on sociopathy do a web search. I find Google most helpful. www.Google.com

  If you are a sociopath, you probably are resistant to the idea of change.

  Robert Hare, PhD., says that the personality of a sociopath (psychopath) is essentially set in stone, so to speak, by adulthood, and incredibly hard to change. His test, the PCL-R, has not 20 but 24 points, and a score of 18 or more indicates the person is a psychopath. The test MUST be given by a professional mental health practitioner or researcher. Hare says that sociopaths can be helped but notcured.

  So, some believe all sociopaths to be totally beyond all help. But some keep trying to help them; giving up is not an option. Sociopaths cause too much trouble.

  A good therapist can prevent you from victimizing him/her without victimizing you in the process. And recent studies made by neurosurgeons and other medical experts have finally begun to pinpoint the things that go awry in the brain that are part of what causes sociopathy.

  In some cases, such medications as Depakote, Topamax, and even Lithium are being prescribed, and although some individual therapists prescribe Ativan and the like, much more research needs to be done there on ultimate benefit of drug treatment. It is already known that drug treatment must be augmented by a very structured and positive-oriented talk therapy.

  Sociopaths can get somewhere in talk therapy if the clinician is self-confident and relaxed, firm but never authoritarian or self-important. It must not ever become an ego-contest.

  Once the process gets far enough along so that the sociopath is actually able to feel even a tiny flicker of genuine happiness, that is an impetus that will grow stronger if the process continues to move forward.

  But a sociopath seeking this must be warned that at some point quite well along in the process of therapy, there will be an interval in which all the newly developing strength is called upon to endure very deep and long-buried pain. Sticking to it through that takes a very strong will.

  The therapist must repeatedly remind the patient that the process will also reward him or her with better and better feelings, ultimately becoming its own reward: that terrible emptiness called 'boredom' or 'static' being replaced by feeling, both painful and joyous.

  In cases where brain damage is too severe to permit of this on its own, new developments in technology in the next decades will bring implantable devices that may be able to be used in the brain, along with other means including synthetic replacement neurotransmitters, to carry nerve impulses along paths formerly silent and unused in the sociopath's brain.

  Although such devices would have to be used with extreme care to avoid causing violent convulsive seizures, some of the anti-convulsant medications that are already being prescribed to sociopaths in test trials could possibly prevent this unwelcome side-effect.

  In the present, therapy is hard to come by for anybody not extremely wealthy, and for sociopaths, many of whom are unable to work, it is even that much harder to find help. But it exists. And, looking at some observations posted at other similar questions by others, one can see that a very popular opinion is that sociopaths, psychopaths, are all "evil" and undeserving of help!

  One very important point, therefore, is that, most certainly, no one helps sociopaths by repeatedly calling them 'evil'! That kind of response cannot possibly help anyone.

  Yes, of course sociopaths arouse great anger in people; one must take care of oneself and make steps so as not to allow oneself to be victimized. But HATRED is another issue: if hate takes you over, you become that much more like the sociopath.

  A sociopath before treatment cannot trust anyone and must learn the fundaments of trust and interaction between people. No one who is persuaded to believe that he or she is just plain bad can sustain any hope for change.

  It becomes a vicious cycle: the sociopath, being told he or she is evil and cannot be helped, gives up, and in frustration and anger lashes out again at people, and in response to that, people say that their original point is proven.

  The main reason sociopaths don't usually seek help is that they can't trust, rather than that they like being as they are. Plus, they can often sense exactly what sort of a response any call for help on their part is most likely to elicit from professionals and lay folk alike.

  Sociopaths are not breezing along in paradise. It isn't all a game. It's a truly miserable existence. And it can be made better.

  Being born with a genetic marker that, for reasons neuroscientists don't yet know, causes the cerebral cortex to process information in a chaotic way, and to miss much of the emotional information that would normally shape the growing child's mind and start the process of socialization.

  Robert Hare (see his book, "Without Conscience") worked with existing EEG and brain-scan (PET scan?) technology to show that sociopaths do not process emotional information the way other people do.

  It is believed that in childhood, a born sociopath learns to direct such input through other routes in the cerebral cortex, but as of yet no one knows what blocks the impulses and signals from following their normal route.

  Cortical underarousal, underactive sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system, and brain waves while awake (on EEG) that resemble the alpha-waves of light sleep, are all common or universal symptoms of primary psychopaths.

  In addition, more and more research shows that psychopaths lack the neurotransmitter Oxytocin (secreted by the pituitary gland) and often have only half as much Vasopressin (antidiuretic hormone) as most people do. Abnormalities are thus not confined to the cerebral cortex; they can be found in the cingulate gyrus and the entire limbic system as well.

  ANYTHING THAT AFFECTS NEUROLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE FETUS CAN POSSIBLY CAUSE THESE DEFICIENCIES. In addition to this, a child's brain develops exponentially after birth, and early development requires physical contact and stimulation in order to form the basis for interpersonal bonding; secondary psychopaths are thought to have lacked this; refers to Reactive Attachment Disorder too.

  It may not be "curable" yet, but it most certainly isn't as hopeless as so many people say. There is therefore nothing to be gained and much to be lost when therapists and lay folk try to ostracize sociopaths from the human race entirely! Sensationalism and superstition will only prevent progress.

  This was written on another question on the same essential topic as this one, by a self-confessed sociopath (other than me!) --

• Sociopaths, though born that way, are people too. To avoid an entire group of people is absurd. That's like saying, "Since these people have dark skin, everyone should completely avert themselves from them." I am a moderate sociopath, and though part of me doesn't want to change, another does. Many times it is really entertaining to see how stupid people can be, especially when they're so gullible as to believe every word that mellifluously flows from my lips. Yes, I am parasitic, but even so, there are some people I would like to stop hurting. I can't find any websites that can provide a way to help my sociopathy. Maybe people like you should stop your self-victimisation and start trying to actually help people like me! I knew I was a sociopath before the age of ten but have only recently had it officially diagnosed. I am eighteen years old now, and I have been lying and destroying others' sanity for a long time. So, please post some helpful tidbits that might help sociopaths resist the sweet urges we get when we encounter weak human beings. When you cut us, do we not bleed? When you kill us, do we not die? Do you honestly think that you're being lied to and manipulated when we sincerely ask for help. Listen to yourselves! This is the internet; ergo, you're safe from our fortified mental grasp.

The essay that follows was written in another answer by another self-admitted sociopath, who actually might not be a sociopath.

Still another person added the brief comment to that effect after her tragic essay.

• umm... i kind of am one... just so y'all know, it's not so much fun being one either. i read that sentence up there, "Incapable of real human attachment to another." i don't even know what that is, i see it, i approximate it... it's like being outside a door looking through a dirty window and watching re-runs of people I've seen in love or with children or with friends, and scratching, sometimes banging at the glass to get in and... nothing. I'm fond of people in every sense of the word, their little quirks and habits, the way they see life, except if they went away it wouldn't bother me much other than finding someone else to be fond of. i don't have friends, i only date military men because they're ok with only having a girlfriend for a couple months and i tell them in advance i won't wait for them... i don't know what else to do to limit the damage i inflict on others just as a result of them knowing me, short of moving to the mountains... but i still move between 2-5 times a year :( it's kind of hard walking around knowing I'll never have what i see making other people so happy and running when i can tell someone is getting close just because i don't want to hurt them more later down the road... i'd like it a lot to settle down, i WANT to be able to feel more with people, but it's hard to miss what you never had. i want what i THINK it would feel like... it'd be easy to give in and let someone stay because I'm so lonely... but hey, I've written enough, just know i try to be a responsible little sociopath, i won't ever get married or have kids, i practice safe sex, i won't stay in one city for long... everything you all take for granted i will never let myself have just because i WANT to take it for granted. being like this won't go away so hopefully i can limit the amount of hate thrown my way by limiting my interaction with people, i don't know what else to do. and you all might not believe this, but i am sorry, hopefully i can speak for the other people who have damaged your lives.

Comment: The above testimony is clearly not indicative of a sociopath because she seems to make efforts to keep from harming others, even if it doesn't benefit herself.

One of the things that would be necessary in the attempted recovery of a sociopath using neurosurgery or medication would be to then try to socialize the person whose congenital birth defect made such a thing completely impossible before. Sociopaths cannot be "resocialized" because they were never socialized to begin with; the parts of the brain that handle that did not develop at all in the sociopath.

Whatever intervention is used, be it drugs or computer chips or what have you, it would probably -- I'd say certainly -- be excruciating for the patient at first.

With no knowledge of how to cope with the emotions the rest of the world has been dealing with all their lives, the recovering sociopath would be rendered as vulnerable as a baby.

Which makes sense, because some of the most basic aspects of the human mind would be developing from the primordial stasis in which they had remained since birth!

A person thus treated would never be fully normal, but the human brain is amazing in the way it adapts and continues to develop all through life.

And given the utterly joyless and meaningless existence a sociopath leads, any improvement is better than none.

The matter of missing neurotransmitters in a sociopath is, of course, another problem. Would "waking up" the cerebral cortex eventually stimulate production of these? Or would they have to be synthesized?

Only time will tell.

If you are a sociopath, like me, go out and wreck someones life, vandalism an expensive car, do something that ordinary morality would consider WRONG. Then think about what you have done. If you feel no guilt, no remorse, nothing, the you are a sociopath. Now, go to a therapist, and actually try to help them help yourself. I know that my therapist has helped me immensely.

SabrinaSingularity with several additional other writers.

Suggestion: Better to sign in; better to be a name rather than a number.

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That's 85% common characteristics...

Did you know mice have about 30,000 genes, as do humans. Of that, 85% of their DNA sequencing are the same. I don't think that a human and a mouse are very similar. Nor do I believe 17 out of 20 characteristics(85%), make you a sociopath.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/05/MN153329.DTL&type=science

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