Quite a disturbing book about how the medical profession have been on a drive to have an easy simple way of detecting psychopaths. Unfortunately most of us display some of the traits on the PCL-R Hare checklist at some point, and once you have been labelled it is very difficult to prove otherwise since the more you deny it the stronger you are seen to be a psychopath.
The actual book is engaging and written as a story of how a journalist investigates a series of particular cases rather than a dry academic text. It doesn't just cover those in mental institutions but also reality TV contestants, ADHD in schools, senior corporate managers, .....
Really made me think - am I a psychopath, how many people I know are psychopaths by these definitions?
They say Hubbard was the very first man to reveal that psychiatrists were dosing patients with massive amounts of LSD and electro-convulsive therapy in secret CIA-funded attempts to create brainwashed assassins. He published his account of the experiments in 1969 and it wasn’t until June 1975 that the Washington Post announced to an unsuspecting world that these programmes (codenamed MK-ULTRA) existed.Read more at location 789
Their conclusions became the basis for his now-famous twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist. Which was this:
ITEM 1: Glibness/superficial charm
ITEM 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth
ITEM 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
ITEM 4: Pathological lying
ITEM 5: Cunning/manipulative
ITEM 6: Lack of remorse or guilt
ITEM 7: Shallow affect
ITEM 8: Callous/lack of empathy
ITEM 9: Parasitic lifestyle
ITEM 10: Poor behavioral controls
ITEM 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior
ITEM 12: Early behavior problems
ITEM 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals
ITEM 14: Impulsivity
ITEM 15: Irresponsibility
ITEM 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
ITEM 17: Many short-term marital relationships
ITEM 18: Juvenile delinquency
ITEM 19: Revocation of conditional release
They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain there’s not much left except the will to win.’ ‘Which means you’ll find a preponderance of them at the top of the tree?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The higher you go up the ladder the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.’Read more at location 1772
Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work – co-authored with a psychologist named Paul Babiak.Read more at location 2141
Practically every peak-time programme is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The people who are the right sort of mad are a bit madder than we fear we’re becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren’t as anxious as them. We might be paranoid but we aren’t as paranoid as them. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we’re not as mad as they are.Read more at location 3265
There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.Read more at location 4220
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