The Sopranos and talk therapy

Factual Questions
1

Recently on the Sopranos, Tony’s psychiatrist has been getting a little grief from her colleagues about the use of talk therapy in treating sociopaths and how it not only doesn’t help, it makes it worse. My question is, is this completely made up for the show or are there real studies that show that talk therapy is worse than useless regarding sociopaths? Intuitively, I feel that the answer is that talk therapy is indeed useless in that situation but I don’t want fictional tv show to inform my thinking.

Thanks for your help,
Rob

2

I haven’t read the studies, but the researcher named is real, and works in that field: Samuel Yochelson.

3

Some would disagree.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=15176755&ordinalpos=14&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum