no
I lack empathy but other than that I’m a normal person
You seem to have some causality backwards there.
This type of discussion always reminds me of the difficulty I have with so many efforts to diagnose personality traits as “mental illness.”
Of course, if you don’t diagnose a pathology, you don’t get to bill for treatment… :rolleyes:
None of this is to deny the existence of mental illness, or to suggest that mental illness and personality issues ought not be treated, medicated, or accommodated to some extent. But life is hard, and we all have our issues.
If you read “the manual” that defines mental conditions (DSM whatever the current iteration is), it carefully defines all sorts of conditions. I don’t know about now, but DSM used to distinguish between mental disorders (like schizophrenia and depression) and personality disorders (like antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder).
Also, if you read this book, you will quickly become convinced that you and everyone you know has every disorder under the sun. The particular skill in using (or abusing) this book comes from carefully applying only those criteria which are in fact present, and rejecting the rest. While you may have narcissistic tendencies and people around you may identify you as a narcissist, you should not get the label narcissistic personality disorder unless enough boxes can accurately be checked off. The hard part is knowing when to check the box off or not.
So anyway, while it sometimes seems that they are trying to define us all as crazy, I think that careful application of the criteria will show that you are probably not. (at least that’s what the voices tell me…)
Yes. It’s a cliché that after reading a medical textbook everybody feels like they have every disease, the deadlier and more obscure the better 
But as I said, personality disorders go beyond simply having a kink or a trait. Just because you have a mood swing once in a while doesn’t mean you’re bipolar - *everybody *experiences the odd abrupt mood swing from time to time. Just as everybody is a little bit enamored with themselves in at least some respects, likes to be the center of attention in some circumstances, has blue days, harmless little tics or idiosynchratic obsessions etc…
But to take the mood swing example : when they become a recurring cyclical pattern however, and when the violence of the emotions (or lack thereof) in question reaches a roughly quantified threshold, AND when somethingsomethingcriteria3 etc… ; then and only then will a physician start thinking “likely to have BPD, let’s do some further digging to confirm”.
Very roughly speaking, a personality trait “becomes” a disorder only when it starts fucking up your life and/or that of the people around you to a serious degree. Same difference as that between “having a beer with the fellas on Fridays” and being an alcoholic : when you’re routinely getting lit at 10 AM and start pissing blood, *then *it’s maybe time to start thinking of it as a genuine problem
Meh. Who cares?
My job affords me the dubious pleasure of referring to the DSM and reading psych/counseling reports nearly daily. Even more than most medical resources, the DSM reflects the social climate, and the interests of the mental health trade association. I readily acknowledge the very significant need to provide mental health care. However, at least some health care providers (not limited to mental health) benefit from expanding their areas of practice. In our “for profit” health care system, there is an interest in diagnosing something as a treatable pathology, rather than within the range of expected behavior/personality.
My personal opinion is that many in our current society value attributing personal shortcomings to “pathologies.” One is less responsible for their shortcomings if they can attribute it to their “disability.” I’m certainly not saying that there is no such thing as - for example - clinical depression. But - in my non-medical opinion, I regularly encounter many people who impress me as relying on their diagnosis as an excuse. Life is extremely hard. The current economy is tough. Social dynamics can be very confusing. It can be very comforting to believe that one’s situation reflects one’s “disability” rather than one’s choices and shortcomings.
Also in my opinion, some mental health practitioners encourage this. The same way some (not all) chiropractors will gladly continue to provide you weekly “adjustments” as long as you can keep paying the premiums.
Sorry, I’m writing this as a quick post, not a thesis. I’m sure there are many words/phrasings herein that could be more artful.
Also, as others have observed, the DSM is only of value if it is applied rigorously. I have long ago stopped being amazed at the number of mental health whores, who seem eager to diagnose and prescribe for various profound pathologies based on a single walk-in interview. Every profession - including medical - has a large share of practitioners who are merely mediocre - and a sizeable number at the left end of the bell curve who are downright hacks.
Don Corleone was not a sociopath. He may have been a bad man, but I’d never identify him as a sociopath. He clearly had empathy for other people, was capable of true love, had excellent foresight, was sociable, and on and on. If you run through any list of sociopathic traits he possessed almost none of them.
Psychopathy isn’t equal to “bad,” it’s a particular brand of mental disorder.
[QUOTE=Enola Straight]
However, psychopaths/sociopaths are very charming…
[/QUOTE]
Not necessarily, no. Psychopaths don’t have to be especially charming. What is true is that their level of charm is disturbingly disconnected from their actual degree of empathy, which is disconcerting to normal people.
More recent studies have apparently shown that it may be the case that psychopaths can perhaps* choose *to be empathetic, as opposed to normal people, for whom empathy is to a large degree an automatic response.
This is the first thing that popped into my head upon reading the OP.
My father-in-law is a full blown narcissist and exhibits every symptom to the Nth degree. The only time he has even a smidgen of what could pass for empathy is when someone else situation could possibly affect him.
It’s very similar to a sociopath!
People who have Antisocial Personality Disorder frequently exhibit a highly exaggerated concern for the welfare of animals. Hermann Goering has often been cited in clinical psych texts as a classic example of this.
Goering did do a lot for animal welfare ( politically, regulations etc. ) yet Hitler — and other nazis, and maybe the slain animals — despised him for being a hunter and killing for sport.
Not that Goering was particularly anti-social, more of a gregarious self-seeker. He set up the Gestapo, but left it to others to run it ( story of his life ); and anyway, were the founders of the CIA psychopaths just for setting it up ? No more than Hitler are personal cruelties or sadism recorded.
Except perhaps as said, animal-hunters aren’t doing their victims any good.
This is very accurate. It’s taken me many years to realize that some people can actually be this cruel. In addition, I’ve heard that some of the personality disorders can “overlap”, so sometimes it’s hard to distinguish what, if any, personality disorder a person has.