I have read on more than one occasion that children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder can be treated (to a degree) if caught early enough (around age 2, or thereabouts).
If a parent, teacher, caseworker, etc is perceptive enough to recognize the pathology of the associated personality disorder in a young child, is there a treatment available to bring the growing brain’s “empathy circuits” online, or is the sociopathic brain hardwired and unfixable?
It almost certainly cannot be cured, any more than autism can be “cured.” Nonetheless, there are promising attempts at managing the undesirable behaviors.
http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/07/can_psychopaths_be_cured.html
Probably unfixable, but that’s my opinion. I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “you can’t get a cat to bark”.
They made a HBO series structured on that…ask Tony Soprano.
But that’s fiction, so OP still stands.
The behavior can be caused by a brain tumor, and in theory fixable. But in that case the diagnosis is inaccurate and simply describing the symptoms and not an inherent condition.
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Since no one has mentioned this it should be noted that Sociopathy / Psychopathy is not on the autism spectrum. And usually they’re referred to now as “anti social personality disorder” and not Sociopathy / Psychopathy.
You probably can’t get a sociopath to believe that other people have feelings, but you can get them to pretend and act as if they do, and for most purposes that’s good enough.
If ASD is caught early enough (and not that severe) you can work on a child’s behavior. They’re still learning how to behave and act at a young age.
The same may be true for other social and behavior disorders, but I don’t think Sociopathy / Psychopathy are diagnosed that early. Are they actually diagnosed?
According to the very interesting book “The Psychopath Test”, yes they are. The test in question is the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.
Is it a matter of not believing they have feelings or not caring?
Sociopaths know perfectly well that others have feelings. And typically learn how to exploit those and mimic them.
How would a psychologist go about making a child who naturally doesn’t give a flying flip about what other people feel/think to pretend to care what other people think/feel? Some sort of reward system? Like, Johnny gets a cookie/gold star/more time on the computer if he doesn’t hit/tease/steal something from Timmy today?
I don’t know if they qualify as psychopaths or not, but with my relatives who seem to have that kind of mindset it appears to have been a matter of making them see ways in which playing with/to the crowd is more profitable than going against it. They don’t really care about other people, but they fake it well enough to get rewards from it. Mr Hyde comes out to play when the reward (the pleasure obtained) is greater by letting him do so than by keeping him caged (which normally means social recognition and financial rewards).
You might have some success by exposing the child to as many other different people as you can. Rich people, middle class people, poor people, homeless people. Blue collar working class, white collar - board members. Religious people from various religions. Non-religious people. Developmentally disabled people. Take to homeless shelters.
And with the above, it is possible the child will just “mimic” empathy, not really feel it? I don’t know. It is my understanding that age 15 kind of sets things in concrete? So best to do as much as possible prior to that age.
Also another term for ASPD is “Conduct Disorder” (under age 18).
There is some weird dichotomy but also similarity between autism and sociopath/psychopath. Both have problems with empathy, however autistic have trouble with ‘‘theory of mind’’ and being able to read people’s emotions and intentions, whereas sociopaths are very good at reading people to the extent it enables them to manipulate others and charm them in order to use this knowledge for their own gain. Autistic people often seem robotic or unemotional to neurotypical people but in fact they usually have the same emotional need for friends, affection, and love, but its hard for them to communicate this to others and to read people well enough to know how to socialize properly.
Many Autistic people also have severe problems with anxiety especially in social situations, whereas sociopaths don’t appear to have really much anxiety at all compared to normal people. I also read a study once using brain imaging that basically said sociopaths do have more ability to empathize with others than is thought but that they can in effect ‘‘switch off that part of themselves’’ at any time, don’t know how true that is.
It’s also important to remember that not every sociopath or psychopath will kill people, or even break laws. Killing people is a tremendous hassle in that you have to get rid of the body, arrange an alibi, etc. Even lawbreaking is a pain in the ass if you get caught. Sociopaths and psychopaths are aware of this, and they may well be content just to remain assholes in general, breaking promises, being manipulative, and lying their asses off when it suits them, but staying out of trouble with the law.
So, unless the sociopath or psychopath (is there a difference between the two?) truly wants to change, they can remain as they are, and it is a waste of time to try to change them.
One sociopath that I knew DID understand that other people had feelings, and he was not afraid to use that against them.
Yes, from reading Hare and others the core (obviously simplistic) characterization seems to be that psychopaths have an impaired or absent “empathy module” - it’s not that they don’t recognize that other people have feelings, it’s just that don’t intuitively care. It’s also usually characterized by reckless behavior, but there’s a rather obvious problem with sampling bias here, since non-reckless psychopaths might go undiagnosed.
Psychopaths (defined thus, simplistically, as those with significantly impaired empathy) surely have widely differing social skills and competences. Non-psychopaths with a fully functional “empathy module” don’t need to be smart or sophisticated to grasp that failing to account for harm to others may have bad consequences for themselves, since the notion is completely intuitive. To psychopaths it’s not so obvious, and many psychopaths are in jail for reckless criminal behavior (the proportion of psychopaths in prisons is vastly higher than in the general population, by any metric). But many more have figured out how to function in a perfectly acceptable manner in society; and others have figured out to function in an unacceptable manner, but not get caught.