Notice how I said that- it manifests traits of psychopathy. It doesn't call that person a psychopath because it's not likely that I would have been given the okay to sit down across the table from that person and do an assessment and, again, that kind of testimony is not likely to come in to the case in chief, but more likely to come in in a sentencing phase.
R.K.: I see. And in Hare's book he talks about how people use it for cases of parole.
M.O.: Well, you're right, and that's a different matter. That's a different matter. In civil cases, a different situation and some states have civil commitments, which means an offender has done their time in prison for a particularly violent sexual crime, and the state feels that individual still needs to be incarcerated, they will have what's called a civil commitment hearing in which case that often includes an assessment for psychopathy because psychopathy is used and considered very important when you're doing risk assessments for re-offending. And I think that will make sense to your audience because if someone has no feelings of guilt, or remorse; if you're trying to decide if someone could act out violently again; if you have no remorse, or guilt, that takes away the barriers that would keep you from acting out violently. So, the likelihood of your choosing to be violent in the future if you're psychopathic would increase those risks, that risk level. Psychopathy assessments can be brought in then. They can be brought in to, say, child custody hearings. Certainly whether or not someone is paroled, particularly, again, based on the type of crime for which they were incarcerated. There are others times it can be brought in, but if you're talking about a criminal case, where it's not part of the substantive crime, then it's not likely it's going to be brought in. At least in my experience.
R.K.: Okay. Now, so it sounds like the legal system really makes it difficult to bring up the idea of psychopathy in hearings and I wonder how hard is it to talk about psychopathy even during investigations?
M.O.: Right. It may sound like that, but, you know, the prosecution can bring in behavior at the crime scene and they can bring in the behaviors through the investigator's experience and they can bring in behavior at the crime scene and point out the lack of empathy, the gratuitous violence, the lack of concern and compassion for the victim.
They can point out those kinds of behaviors through testimony and you don't have to sit down and have someone label an individual a psychopath and to me that's really important because if you look up the eighteen traits and characteristics of psychopathy, there's nothing in there that says one of those traits is a trait for violence.
So, it may be even more confusing to the jury for them to hear, okay, but none of these traits say that this person is, or won't be more violent, so it has to be put in context in terms of the crime scene behavior. So, you can really bring it in that way and, that way, it kind of elucidates for the jury, for the courts, what we mean by a lack of empathy in a crime scene, the impulsivity and the need for thrill and excitement, and you back that up with here are the behaviors which are manifested by these traits and characteristics.
R.K.: Now, in reading your article it mentioned that sociopath is kind of an obsolete word which confuses me because I am still finding doctors who talk about it and then you refer to the idea that psychopath is not, was not, in DSM IV. Did it make it into DSM V?
M.O.: No, it did not.
R.K.: Okay, so, it's not even a diagnostic category. How would somebody who is a psychopath show up in DSM V?
M.O.: There are several ways that it could show up in the DSM V and that's through their, it's really through their symptoms and that's what DSM V is. It's really a recognition of symptoms, or behaviors, that generally are causing the individual who goes to the psychiatrist, or a social worker, or a counselor, some kind of distress in their life and so it could show up that way and could show up through, again, the symptoms and not necessarily the label.
So, for years, for example, one of the personality disorders that have been listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is antisocial personality disorder, otherwise known as APD. If you go back and you look at APD, it will talk about the behavior, antisocial behavior, robbing banks, stealing cars, you name it, but what's absent from that diagnosis is what really causes psychopathy to stand out, which is this very profound, stunning lack of affect, or emotion. You don't see that in the diagnosis of APD and so, when people are diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, that doesn't mean that they're psychopathic. It's very distinct because I have actually had dealings with people who probably are very antisocial, but kind of scrape it away a little bit after you talk to them for hours and you find out that, yeah, they grew up in a gang family. They grew up in a family that dealt with drugs, or organized crime and they learned how to be very criminal, but they, actually, they love their children and they love their parents.
It takes a long time to get to that point because emotions have to be sort of subjugated when you grow up in an environment like that, but they're still there. When you're dealing with someone who is psychopathic, on the other hand, yes, they can be very antisocial and you spend hours with them and dig into what makes them tick and you're looking for that emotion, that emotional attachment to another human being. It will not be there.
That's a big difference and that's the most significant difference and the reason that sociopathy was thrown out in the late 1960's, in DSM. In the DSMs that come up every number of years you will see remarkable changes, but sociopathy really was a disorder, not a mental illness, but a disorder, that really dealt more with the socialization of someone who grew up more in a crime family, or in a criminal venue, than it refers to someone without these feelings of empathy and compassion for other people.
So, it was more like learned behavior. Now, here's something that I'm going to say that may be very disturbing to people, because the current research does suggest that with psychopathy there are some genetic links to it; that we have no such research for the term sociopathy. We have no such research, really, for APD, but because of the brain scans and the functional MRIs that are being done by our scientists in the area of psychopathy, we know that it does have a genetic link to it.
R.K.: And how is that link manifested, biologically, or psychophysiologically?
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