By “psychopath” I mean someone with the cluster B personality disorder.
There isn’t a cluster B personality disorder called psychopathy. Psychopathy has never been a formal disorder and the only time we’ve ever been close to it is way back in 1952 when the DSM-1 had a condition called “Sociopathic Personality Disturbance”. The closest you’ll get these days is Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is a garbage bin diagnosis that covers a fairly broad range of antisocial behaviours, including the thing most people have in mind when they say “psychopath”, but also plenty of other personality archetypes that don’t seem particularly psychopathic, like adrenaline junkies and people with impulse control issues.
Okay; so what’s the reality about the people we’re thinking of when we say psychopathic? The term seems to still be in use among some professionals, for bad or good reasons.
A garbage bin diagnosis seems like a step down if psychopathy or sociopathy was pointing to a more specific set of attitudes and tendencies.
I think Valentine gave a good description of psychopath as “people who are naturally unconstrained by social pressures and have no qualms breaking even profound taboos if they think it’ll benefit them”, where just eyeballing human nature, that seems to be a “real” category that would show up as a distinct blip in a graph of human behaviour and not just “how constrained by social pressures people are is a normally distributed property and people get called psychopaths in linear proportion to how far left they are on the bell curve”.
Cool. I knew there at least used to be “antisocial personality disorder”, which I thought was under cluster B along with narcissism and borderline. And I thought “psychopathy” was a different term for APD. Thanks for the correction.
The main thing I wanted to gesture at there is that I wasn’t using “psychopath” as something derogatory. I didn’t mean “bad guys”. I meant something more like “people who are naturally unconstrained by social pressures and have no qualms breaking even profound taboos if they think it’ll benefit them”. (I just now made that up.) It seems to me that it’s a pretty specifically different mental/emotional architecture.
There isn’t a cluster B personality disorder called psychopathy. Psychopathy has never been a formal disorder and the only time we’ve ever been close to it is way back in 1952 when the DSM-1 had a condition called “Sociopathic Personality Disturbance”. The closest you’ll get these days is Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is a garbage bin diagnosis that covers a fairly broad range of antisocial behaviours, including the thing most people have in mind when they say “psychopath”, but also plenty of other personality archetypes that don’t seem particularly psychopathic, like adrenaline junkies and people with impulse control issues.
Okay; so what’s the reality about the people we’re thinking of when we say psychopathic? The term seems to still be in use among some professionals, for bad or good reasons.
A garbage bin diagnosis seems like a step down if psychopathy or sociopathy was pointing to a more specific set of attitudes and tendencies.
I think Valentine gave a good description of psychopath as “people who are naturally unconstrained by social pressures and have no qualms breaking even profound taboos if they think it’ll benefit them”, where just eyeballing human nature, that seems to be a “real” category that would show up as a distinct blip in a graph of human behaviour and not just “how constrained by social pressures people are is a normally distributed property and people get called psychopaths in linear proportion to how far left they are on the bell curve”.
Cool. I knew there at least used to be “antisocial personality disorder”, which I thought was under cluster B along with narcissism and borderline. And I thought “psychopathy” was a different term for APD. Thanks for the correction.
The main thing I wanted to gesture at there is that I wasn’t using “psychopath” as something derogatory. I didn’t mean “bad guys”. I meant something more like “people who are naturally unconstrained by social pressures and have no qualms breaking even profound taboos if they think it’ll benefit them”. (I just now made that up.) It seems to me that it’s a pretty specifically different mental/emotional architecture.
Yep, your intended meaning about the distinctive mental architecture was pretty clear, just wanted to offer the factual correction.