The newest breakthroughs yield enormous insight into this perplexing
and devastating condition that plagues four percent of the population
and causes those persons to plague everyone else!
Almost everyone in the world -- except psychopaths (sociopaths) and
a few others, such as those with ADD -- has a neatly organized way of
storing information in the brain. Your left hemisphere handles such
things as speech, logic, and sequential thinking. It helps you keep
things in order. Meanwhile, your right hemisphere handles such things
as appreciation of (or creation of) art, symbols that evoke emotion,
and the way one puts together in the present time all the pieces of the
world around him or her as far as it is known.
But NOT if you're a sociopath.
Studies (see the masterful work "Without Conscience" by Robert D.
Hare, PhD.) have now conclusively demonstrated that the way such
information is stored in the brain of a sociopath is not at all like
the way it is for others. Instead of things being organized into those
specific regions in one or other of the brain's two hemispheres
depending upon the type of information it is, the sociopath has a brain
that operates a little bit like a computer hard drive: it breaks all
data down into tiny fragments and stores it all over the place and in
both hemispheres. Thus, to retrieve any given segment is formidable and
leads to omissions and errors far more often than most people
experience:
(Patient in an inpatient unit, to an NP who is organizing an
outing.) "No, I'm not going out with you guys this time, and I'm going
to buy some magazines when I'm there." HUH???? This kind of thing, as
Hare demonstrates, happens all the time.
Clinicians give numerous (including some erroneous) reasons for not
wanting to treat sociopaths, and one of the more surprising ones is
that it's very difficult at times to make sense of what the patient is
saying.
Unlike the jumbled mess of a schizophrenic's speech, the
sociopath's speech makes sense within the fragments, but when these
parts of speech are strung together, they are often jarringly
incompatible. Did the sociopath in the inpatient hospital intend to go
out and buy some magazines? Or did she decide to stay in? She seemed to
think she could do both at the same time. If the NP who had asked her
was astute enough, she might've said, "Miss Smith, if you don't want to
go out, why don't you write down what you want us to pick up and give
us the money to buy it?" Although that's a realistic way to do both
things at the same time, one might wonder why the patient didn't just
say so in the first place!
When you speak, your brain is going through a staggering feat of
juggling and data-organization at a speed that makes broadband look
like a snail trail. If your cerebral cortex is storing your vocabulary
and the related ideas behind it, as well as all of the other numerous
types of information it must handle, in the right places, this isn't so
hard; if your brain has to fumble all over the place for tiny fragments
of data and try to assemble it fast enough to keep up with your
conversation, it is not going to be easy -- and trained professionals
will know that something, at least, is awry.
So, now scientists know that the seemingly meaningless and frequent
lies that the sociopath tells may not all be actual lies. Some are
lies, particularly in sociopaths who have broken the law and are trying
to charm or bully their way out of trouble. But some -- especially
impulsive-sounding bragging or announcements of lofty intent ("I'm
gonna get out of this bugbox and write a best-selling novel, climb
Mount Everest, and go work for NASA!") -- are not intended to deceive
others so much as to tell them "I want to do something with my life!"
But, sadly, lacking the means and wherewithal to do this, the sociopath
will undoubtedly end up in trouble all over again.
Think about it: you know something isn't right, but you can't tell
other people, because you have not the slightest idea how to phrase
what's wrong. Plus, for some odd reason, everyone keeps getting rubbed
the wrong way by you. You try to get ahead in life, but everybody keeps
telling you about these strange rules you're supposed to obey, that
they all seem to know by heart, but you don't. So you study them and
try to memorize them and use them by rote, but keep messing up because
you have no mechanism to tell you (from within) that you're stumbling
over the line again, and inevitably, you do. Then everyone gets mad at
you and among other things tells you that you know perfectly well what
the rules are, so why don't you obey them? You start to
secretly suspect they're adding new ones or changing the old rules
around 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 least
uncomfortable, and at the worst like a human bomb, most of the time
you're awake, which at times can be several days in a row. You notice
that the very things that make other people happy have a very opposite
effect on you: your head fills with jarring "static," like a radio
playing with the tuner caught between two or more stations. Reacting
instinctively to this, you try to push people away because their
closeness causes the static to get worse, but then you discover a new
problem: you seem to need them anyway.
You seem to need something from other people, but you don't know
why. 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 other
without having to closely study the other's eyes to try to figure out
what 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 attempt
such a relationship and interaction with you, it immediately starts to
turn sour on you. Their touch does not warm you; you feel colder and
deader than ever. You don't know how to give back, so you end up
grasping for words you've heard used by other people and trying to fake
your way through it so they won't figure out how you are; you've
experienced enough to know by this time that when others figure out
your 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 sure
what a soul is, anyway) and that people like you "ought to be lined up
and shot"!
After trying several times in this new relationship to get the
pleasure other people are always basking in, and failing, you start to
get 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 will
actually, physically explode if I don't..." you're thinking, and yet
under the rage there is a weird, disconsolate feeling that even your
burgeoning hatred is as hollow and empty and starved as you are. You
consider taking your life, and certainly you think about taking lives
of some of these lucky, smugly superior others. You settle for
embezzling money, or something of the sort; you're clever and
manipulative 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 of
them, studying diligently to help and even to cure other kinds of weird
things wrong with people's minds, most of which seem to have to do with
the brain. But no one seems to know what's going on in you. It occurs
to you that to get some kind of attention from them, you might pretend
you have one of those other problems they study, and then once they're
paying attention to you, maybe somehow it'll lead somewhere. What have
you got to lose?
You're about to find out you can still lose more.
You go into a clinical situation presenting with
carefully-memorized symptoms of the mental illness you have decided
would get you the attention you want. But faking whatever it is turns
out 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 are
rejected yet again, told that all that's really wrong with you is that
you don't want to try to better yourself.
That, and you're "evil," and it's not paranoia on your part to
realize that EVERYONE HATES YOU. Once they figure you out. Yes: to know
you is to hate you.
And you will go to your grave (as gloats Martha Stout of "The
Sociopath Next Door" book fame) never knowing the wonders of real human
interaction, 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: the mere fact that some scientists know that
much about the brain of a sociopath means that solving the problem is
no longer an impossible and obscure wish -- it's moving within the
realm of concrete possibility.
As soon as large numbers of sociopaths begin to be treated in a way
that actually helps them, that corrects as much as possible the chaos
of misdirected signals in their confused and disorganized brains, and
then a form of therapy that in addition to that, by necessity, teaches
them to cope with the resulting maelstrom of emotion and impression
that was formerly impossible, so that they can put it in order and
start to develop the heretofore dormant and silent segments of their
brains and better use those formerly mixed-up areas where no
recognizable order ruled, THEN THE OTHERS MAY BEGIN TO NOTICE WHAT IS
GOING ON...and they will know at least this much: instead of "the kiss
of death," a diagnosis of ASPD (the DSM-IV way of saying sociopathy or
psychopathy) will lead someplace; that there will be things done that
actually make a difference.
Crippled as they are neurologically, sociopaths are yet shrewd, and
they're always looking out for themselves in a way similar to that of a
loner predator. Seeing others like them actually benefitting from
treatment will have to start persuading them that there's something to
gain in going for help after all. Not being rejected or met with "We
can't help you; you're evil incarnate," or the equivalent thinly
disguised in euphemistic psychology jargon; NOT being met with a
situation where they'd have to substitute symptoms of an "acceptable"
illness in place of those they bear in secret -- that would almost
certainly, if gradually, have an effect: if a sociopath can clearly see
a benefit coming from admitting his or her real situation, there's
nothing 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 various
types of preexisting medication given in attempts to counteract the
chaotic patterns of brain impulses they suffer. Talk therapy added to this must be specially geared to the sociopath or it'll make the problem worse. And some people believe that sociopaths who are not at the most severe end of the spectrum of their illness can respond to some degree to sensitivity training. This might not, however, work as well with sociopaths who are abuse survivors.
In any case, once the type of neurosurgery that could help correct this has become possible, intervention of a sort that may fix some of what is broken in their brains someplace, this science will take a gigantic leap ahead!