I am the last person to read The Devil in the White City, but I have finally gotten around to it. It recounts a serial killer named Dr. Holmes (among other names). He was what we would now call a psychopath (or a sociopath, same thing).
He had no feeling for other people. No sense of empathy.
After he was discovered as a killer, people came to light who had run-ins with him. The cleaning lady he asked to take out an insurance policy in his favor. (“Don’t be scared of me,” he said.) The man he tried to lure to the roof. The man felt something was amiss and claimed to be unable to climb stairs.
He gave out darn creepy vibes. Some people could detect them, many could not.
You every get creeped out by a dude like this? Later did you find evidence to back up your weird-o-meter?
Yeah, my brother makes me feel like this. He borders on autistic the way he treats people, but I’d guess he’s more likely to head down suicide road than murder avenue.
ETA: Does domestic violence count as evidence of my feeling?
Yeah, I encounter psychopaths a few times every week. Many of them are quite glib, and come across as charming. Many try to ‘sell’ me on what great guys they are.
Any patient trying to charm me like this is definitely held at arm’s length.
I kinda think my soon to be ex-husband is. I know it’s easy to throw out a diagnosis based on what you read on the internet, but some things are really starting to show through and it scares me a little sometimes.
I’m not creeped out, just sad. The more I find out the more fake all his emotions seem and how little regard for consequence he shows.
The one of the main manifestations of my sister’s mental illness is her complete inability to put herself in another person’s place (lack of empathy). During Hurricane Katrina, all she was worried about was how soon we were going to be able to get into Metairie to get her crappy possessions, especially this $10 phone from K-Mart she had just bought and kept going on about. This at a time when we had friends and family unaccounted for! At one point I offered her a ten-spot if she’d just shut up, but she just looked at me blankly and kept blathering.
I’ve also worked for the kind of sociopath to which Qadgop refers. Basically I felt that on a very primal level he didn’t recognize other people as people, we were just tools to be used to get what he wanted. When we failed him in that regard, he would lose his temper and fire people, or if they were personal friends, cut them completely out of his life. He was also very seductive and charming.
Sometimes I think I see one in the mirror. Yeah, I know: if you think you are one and are willing to say so on a message board, you aren’t one. Still. Here is what happened.
A person died. Committed suicide, actually. I knew this person superficially. I knew the name and we had met once or twice. When the suicide occurred, I felt absolutely nothing, which is what I personally feel is pretty close to normal when it comes to distant acquaintances like this one. I knew it was hard for friends and family, but not for me. But I saw others with the same relationship that I had, and they broke down into tears, and everyone seemed to expect me to feel really horrible about what happened. So I faked it. And halfway through I realized that this is exactly what psychopaths do: fake emotions.
Now, I know I’m not a psychopath. I feel remorse, shame, love and all that jazz. Still, it was a chilling moment.
My brother used to say, if you’re not his family or on his SEAL team, you’re just taking his space and breathing his air. And I think the family and team thing was more or less trained into him.
I once asked him if he was given orders to put children into the gas chambers at Dachau, could he do it, he said if it was what he was told to do, he could do it. How much of this attitude is real and how much is assumed, I don’t know. My brother is a chameleon. He fits in and has friends no matter where he goes, whether it’s with biker gangs or with born-again christians. He is a law-abiding citizen with a wife and 3 kids. But with him I have a sense that this is a choice, and he could’ve chosen something else.
Erm, not quite. It really just means you are probably not delusional at the moment you say so (if you are one of course.) Psychopaths/Sociopaths are quite capable of knowing what they are and many tend to be quite intelligent.
Of course I’m in no way implying that you are a psychopath.
Doesn’t a true psychopath think “I’m the only one that matters,” not “I’m first and everyone else is second.” I’ve know quite a few of the latter variety, but only two I can say literally thought they were the only people that actually mattered on the entire planet.
I’m pretty sure my BIL’s ex was a psychopath. Heck, she turned her own dad in to the IRS for tax evasion (and for the reward,) then didn’t understand why he didn’t want anything to do with her when he got out of prison. She married my BIL (no one quite knows why, as BIL has some mild mental and emotional problems) and proceeded to take advantage of her (and my) in-laws, borrowing money and never quite getting it paid back. I lost count of how many apartments they were kicked out of, and how many times their phone was cut off. Plus they had at least 2 cars repossessed…
Anyway, one day shortly before Thanksgivingsome years back, she called me (not the inlaws) and said she couldn’t stay married to BIL any longer and we had to come get him. Much like a spoiled child who tires of a pet, she was ready to put him out on the street. And a few months later, she called the inlaws’ house (where BIL was living at the time) all sweetness and light, as if nothing had ever happened.
If anyone deserved to be abducted by alien invaders…
My impression of psychopathology (based on a short rotation through the mental hospital…as STAFF dammit! STOP SNICKERING) is that psychopaths view the rest of us kind of the way we normal people view characters in video games.
Y’know, you and your team are shooting up the aliens, and oops, you knock off an NPC or red shirt, and …well, if it effects your score, that’s a drag, but you’re not all broken up about it. If you’ve saved the level already and have nothing to lose, sure, why not shoot Charlie in the head, or push him into the zombie pit, he’s going to come back when you reload the level. I think that how they think about us. And yes, I think I’m working with one now.
This is almost word for word what I have said about the soon to be ex. In fact, I have called him chameleon more than once. He is what he needs to be when he needs to be it. And not just fitting in by not making waves - I mean gay or straight, racist or (what’s the word here?) not-racist, conservative or liberal, hands-on progressive dad or old-school hard ass, hard line monogamist or couples sex-club joiner . It’s like he has no core values that are his true nature.
One of things that has been so heartbreaking is that I felt like I knew the real one deep down. I wouldn’t answer the phone during his repeated phone calls on Saturday and he left a message about a crisis (whether real or of his own making, I don’t know yet) and I called him back - his response was that he just needed to hear my voice. Why mine? I asked (he initiated this divorce - he dumped me) and his response was that I was the one that really knew him.
The ride has been very fun when it is fun and very frightening when it is not.
I attended a seminar recently and the speaker told this story.
A daughter is at her Mother’s funeral. Although she is distraught at her mother’s death she notices an attractive and interesting looking man, and she is single. As it is a funeral it would be innappropriate to approach him and she puts this thought aside as she will get his name later from a family member. But when she checks later none of her friends or family have any idea who the stranger was. A week later her sister was murdered. What happened?
This is the woman, for only one example, who, while lying in bed next to me, rolled the opposite direction, then did a full 180 degree power spin to plant her knee in my groin. Out of the blue, with no provocation. As I lay there, curled up in a fetal position, thinking that I needed to go to the emergency room and wondering if I could/should call the police and/or what story SHE would tell them about the incident that might result in my arrest…
She first apologized, as per her usual pattern, and claimed that it was an accident. No chance of that. It was a deliberate act. Then, without even pausing to take a breath, launched into a vicious personal attack, screaming at me for “hurting her feelings” and being intentionally mean to her, because she had apologized, and I was still “acting” like I was in pain.
When I tried to speak to her later about this and several other similar incidents of attacking me in bed in the period of a week, all I got was how mean I was being to her, how I was the one with an anger management problem and how she didn’t need any help, I did.
I could go on and on, with many other examples, and stories about how her attitudes and assaults on others changed like flicking a light switch.
The bottom line is that she gets away with it long term by being a “Sympathy Vampire”, playing on the sympathies of others. “Oh woe is me, my life sucks, I’m such a victim, everyone is being mean to me.” And over and over, people buy it!
