Is there a first hand account of antisocial personality disorder?

Answer 1

Answer(s): Yes...The main reason sociopaths don't usually seek help is that they can'ttrust, rather than that they like being as they are. Plus, they canoften sense exactly what sort of a response any call for help on theirpart 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. It may notbe "curable" yet, but it most certainly isn't as hopeless as so manypeople say. There is therefore nothing to be gained and much to be lostwhen therapists and lay folk try to ostracize sociopaths from the humanrace entirely! Sensationalism and superstition will only preventprogress.

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

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

The essay that follows was written in another answer by anotherself-admitted sociopath, who actually might not be a sociopath. Stillanother person added the brief comment to that effect after her tragic essay.

• umm... i kindof am one... just so y'all know, it's not so muchfun being one either. i read that sentence up there, "Incapable of realhuman 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 adirty window and watching re-runs of people I've seen in love or withchildren or with friends, and scratching, sometimes banging at theglass to get in and... nothing. I'm fond of people in every sense ofthe word, their little quirks and habits, the way they see life, exceptif they went away it wouldn't bother me much other than finding someoneelse to be fond of. i don't have friends, i only date military menbecause they're ok with only having a girlfriend for a couple monthsand i tell them in advance i won't wait for them... i don't know whatelse to do to limit the damage i inflict on others just as a result ofthem knowing me, short of moving to the mountains... but i still movebetween 2-5 times a year :( it's kindof hard walking around knowingi'll never have what i see making other people so happy and runningwhen i can tell someone is getting close just because i don't want tohurt them more later down the road... i'd like it alot to settle down,i WANT to be able to feel more with people, but it's hard to miss whatyou never had. i want what i THINK it would feel like... it'd be easyto give in and let someone stay because I'm so lonely... but hey, i'vewritten enough, just know i try to be a responsible little sociopath, iwon't ever get married or have kids, i practice safe sex, i won't stayin one city for long... everything you all take for granted i willnever let myself have just because i WANT to take it for granted. beinglike this won't go away so hopefully i can limit the amount of hatethrown my way by limiting my interaction with people, i don't know whatelse to do. and you all might not belive 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 asociopath because they seem to make efforts to keep from harmingothers, even if it doesn't benefit themselves.

What is it like? Think about it: you know something isn't right, but you can't tellother people, because you have not the slightest idea how to phrasewhat's wrong. Plus, for some odd reason, everyone keeps getting rubbedthe wrong way by you. You try to get ahead in life, but everybody keepstelling you about these strange rules you're supposed to obey, thatthey all seem to know by heart, but you don't. So you study them andtry to memorize them and use them by rote, but keep messing up becauseyou have no mechanism to tell you (from within) that you're stumblingover the line again, and inevitably, you do. Then everyone gets mad atyou and among other things tells you that you know perfectly well whatthe rules are, so why don't you obey them? You start tosecretly suspect they're adding new ones or changing the old rulesaround just to get you to screw up, but actually that isn't true --however, you have no real way of knowing that, either.

As if all this isn't enough, you feel at the very leastuncomfortable, and at the worst like a human bomb, most of the timeyou're awake, which at times can be several days in a row. You noticethat the very things that make other people happy have a very oppositeeffect on you: your head fills with jarring "static," like a radioplaying with the tuner caught between two or more stations. Reactinginstinctively to this, you try to push people away because theircloseness causes the static to get worse, but then you discover a newproblem: you seem to need them anyway.

You seem to need something from other people, but you don't knowwhy. That hug each other and smile, not a phony smile but a real one,and their eyes light up. They get close and they talk to each otherwithout having to closely study the other's eyes to try to figure outwhat to do in response. This seems to be a delicious pleasure to them,much better than anything you've ever experienced. But if you try it,and if you are actually lucky enough to persuade one of them to attemptsuch a relationship and interaction with you, it immediately starts toturn sour on you. Their touch does not warm you; you feel colder anddeader than ever. You don't know how to give back, so you end upgrasping for words you've heard used by other people and trying to fakeyour way through it so they won't figure out how you are; you'veexperienced enough to know by this time that when others figure outyour difference, they hate you for it; in fact, you've been told you're"not a real person" and that you "have no soul" (you're not too surewhat a soul is, anyway) and that people like you "ought to be lined upand shot"!

After trying several times in this new relationship to get thepleasure other people are always basking in, and failing, you start toget angry at all of this -- and the anger builds into a terrible,towering rage that begins to make you feel like a human bomb. "I willactually, physically explode if I don't..." you're thinking, and yetunder the rage there is a weird, disconsolate feeling that even yourburgeoning hatred is as hollow and empty and starved as you are. Youconsider taking your life, and certainly you think about taking livesof some of these lucky, smugly superior others. You settle forembezzling money, or something of the sort; you're clever andmanipulative and you don't get caught. Triumph!

Or not. The things you buy please you for five minutes; a day,tops. Then...flat, meaningless, like everything else in your life.

Of course, you don't HAVE a life -- and you never will. That's starting to become increasingly clear.

But WHY???? You see "The Others," as you're starting to think ofthem, studying diligently to help and even to cure other kinds of weirdthings wrong with people's minds, most of which seem to have to do withthe brain. But no one seems to know what's going on in you. It occursto you that to get some kind of attention from them, you might pretendyou have one of those other problems they study, and then once they'repaying attention to you, maybe somehow it'll lead somewhere. What haveyou got to lose?

You're about to find out you can still lose more.

You go into a clinical situation presenting withcarefully-memorized symptoms of the mental illness you have decidedwould get you the attention you want. But faking whatever it is turnsout very quickly to be a lot more complex than you'd thought. In fact,it turns out to be impossible. And, branded a malingerer, you arerejected yet again, told that all that's really wrong with you is thatyou don't want to try to better yourself.

That, and you're "evil," and it's not paranoia on your part torealize that EVERYONE HATES YOU. Once they figure you out. Yes: to knowyou is to hate you.

And you will go to your grave (as gloats Martha Stout of "TheSociopath Next Door" book fame) never knowing the wonders of real humaninteraction, meaning, and warmth.

It might just make you decide to go off the rails and kill everyone you can before turning the weapon on yourself.

Except for one thing: YOUR CONDITION MAY SOON BE TREATABLE!

Just the very fact that some scientists know thatmuch about the brain of a sociopath means that solving the problem isno longer an impossible and obscure wish -- it's moving within therealm of concrete possibility.

As soon as large numbers of sociopaths begin to be treated in a waythat actually helps them, that corrects as much as possible the chaosof misdirected signals in their confused and disorganized brains, andthen a form of therapy that in addition to that, by necessity, teachesthem to cope with the resulting maelstrom of emotion and impressionthat was formerly impossible, so that they can put it in order andstart to develop the heretofore dormant and silent segments of theirbrains and better use those formerly mixed-up areas where norecognizable order ruled, THEN THE OTHERS MAY BEGIN TO NOTICE WHAT ISGOING ON...and they will know at least this much: instead of "the kissof death," a diagnosis of ASPD (the DSM-IV way of saying sociopathy orpsychopathy) will lead someplace; that there will be things done thatactually make a difference.

Crippled as they are neurologically, sociopaths are yet shrewd, andthey're always looking out for themselves in a way similar to that of aloner predator. Seeing others like them actually benefitting fromtreatment will have to start persuading them that there's something togain in going for help after all. Not being rejected or met with "Wecan't help you; you're evil incarnate," or the equivalent thinlydisguised in euphemistic psychology jargon; NOT being met with asituation where they'd have to substitute symptoms of an "acceptable"illness in place of those they bear in secret -- that would almostcertainly, if gradually, have an effect: if a sociopath can clearly seea benefit coming from admitting his or her real situation, there'snothing to stop him or her from doing just that.

It's already started to happen, if in a tiny, barely perceptible trickle.

Right now, all science has at the ready for them is to use varioustypes of preexisting medication given in attempts to counteract thechaotic way the brain of a sociopath functions. That and types of talktherapy carefully altered to avoid the pitfalls that have in the pastcaused regular therapies to make sociopaths worse instead of better.But the more that scientists such as Robert Hare and his colleaguesdelve into and experiment with the new types of brain scans andlearning what makes sociopaths tick like human bombs, the more likelythat it becomes with each passing year that a means will soon beisolated to defuse those bombs.

The primary source of a sociopath's infamous rage is frustration,of a sort so alien and so extreme that almost no one else canunderstand what it means. Once they start getting taken seriously, thatfrustration, and the wild rage it provokes, will lessen, and since itis a primary source of the constant distrust that makes regular therapyfail sociopaths, the defusing of that rage and its maddening causeswill be a huge step in the right direction.