What caused a sociopath to become one?

Answer 1

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. Insead 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 erroneus) 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 instinctually 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 way the brain of a sociopath functions. That and types of talk therapy carefully altered to avoid the pitfalls that have in the past caused regular therapies to make sociopaths worse instead of better. But the more that scientists such as Robert Hare and his colleagues delve into and experiment with the new types of brain scans and learning what makes sociopaths tick like human bombs, the more likely that it becomes with each passing year that a means will soon be isolated 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 can understand what it means. Once they start getting taken seriously, that frustration, and the wild rage it provokes, will lessen, and since it is a primary source of the constant distrust that makes regular therapy fail sociopaths, the defusing of that rage and its maddening causes will be a huge step in the right direction.

In her book, Martha Stout expresses the hope that people in general will stop excluding groups of other people as less than human -- ethnic, racial, the disabled, and even the mentally ill -- except for one group among the latter. It's apparently perfectly okay to dismiss one group alone of people as less than human, and she does: the sociopaths. And many other people do, too.

And sociopaths know that. And people whose messed-up brain circuitry makes it almost impossible for them to trust others certainly aren't ever going to try again after getting hit with THAT.

Sociopaths don't always behave as though they're invulnerable. Some have said, "You don't know this, but it hurts to be me." People sneeringly say to this, "Another of your miserable lies!" But it is in fact a miserable truth.

Being angry at them is understandable, but why do people insist on justifying their anger by dehumanizing the object of their rage? Sociopaths may seem like aliens, but they aren't. Perhaps what really galls the others is that when they look at sociopaths, in certain tiny ways they see aspects of themselves, for everyone has some antisocial thoughts.

Also, sociopaths hurt a lot of people. What seems to hurt most is the idea that the sociopath is breezing happily through life having a blast whie a trail of wounded victims struggle to put their shattered lives back together.

No sociopath breezes through life. They just know how to make it look like they do. It's part of the sick game they play because they can't do much of anything else, as they are.

If sociopathy is treated instead of ignored and shunned, this won't have to happen.

Those who would have been hurt by sociopaths might not be able to fully appreciate that they escaped harm because neuroscience finally found a way to treat these people who would otherwise have hurt them, but the thing that makes the most difference is that, in the final analysis, they wouldn't have to know.

Just as science understands that epilepsy is not demonic possession, that people with dissociative conditions are not harboring ghosts or devils in their bodies, and that depression is not a "deadly sin," it would and will be able to prove that sociopathy happens for a reason and that it can be dealt with. Sociopaths do very bad things. But branding them all "pure evil" isn't going to help anyone. It's just more hate.

I have commented elsewhere that the human brain is the greatest new frontier in many ways. (Although I certainly have no lack of interest in space.) Sociopaths, along with other "hopeless cases" like people with Alzheimer's disease, Down's syndrome, Asperger's, ADD, ADHD, autism, and the schizophrenias, along with more common disorders such as depression and addiction, and so on, are a mystery, but scientists have a way of hammering away at mysteries until they unravel them, and they are well on their way to the core of this one.

If one says that sociopaths aren't worth helping, one rather misses the point, after all. The price the world pays for not being able to help these people is incalculable. Euthanasia isn't the answer. There are people (whose consciences I really must wonder about) who suggest that all the sociopaths that can be located and diagnosed by the authorities should be gathered up whether or not they've done anything wrong yet, and killed en masse (shades of World War Two, but with a different group of people). This is appalling, for reasons I hope I don't really need to explain!

But it also shows the hopelessness that sociopaths and their behavior make many people feel.

To counter that hopelessness, please know these two incontrovertible points: (1) no, the sociopath who hurt you isn't happy; (2) yes, the massive population of sociopaths the world over will be able to be treated before long, and possibly the first threads of that are already starting now.

Answer 2

It is belived that sociopathy is caused both by a genetic link and early childhood life. Somone could have the genetic trait to become a sociopath but never develop into one because their early life was fine, or they could live in a completely abusive home and never become one becuase they do not have the trait. However if you have both it is belived you will become one.

Answer 3

With all the 420 weed they have smoked