I've noted some responses to the groundbreaking work being done by British researchers -- kicked off no doubt by what Robert Hare and his colleagues worked so diligently and constantly at for decades! -- and I really am convinced that many people would far rather see psychopaths as children of Satan or something than finally start to find a SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM.
It isn't a matter of BLAME, it's a matter of finding a way through the existing problem, which must be defined and quantified in EMPIRICAL TERMS.
Research should proceed along two lines: on psychopathic offenders in prisons, say, in return for not being executed, in a very carefully patrolled high-security forensic institution; and on non-criminal psychopaths, in either a residential (psych. hospital) setting where psychopaths are segregated by necessity from other patients or in a very carefully organized separate facility.
In time, I think the predictions a friend of mine has made will turn out correct: there will be hospitals exclusively for psychopaths and there will be -- I have, no, absolutely zero, doubt of this! -- a surgical procedure by which some tiny electronic device can span gaps that natural neurotransmitters cannot, in the brains of psychopaths.
Other, less invasive ideas involve synthesized versions of neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, serotonin, etc. -- combined with a socialization therapy that takes place over time (possibly years to start with) in the inpatient setting.
My friend Sabrina is a genius and a diagnosed psychopath, as I am, although in the near-past I still argued she was a misdiagnosed high-functioning autistic; and this past Spring she marched by invitation in a police-protected nonviolent demonstration sponsored by the local advocacy agency for the disabled. (She also has a number of comparatively moderate physical disabilities, and we both have a seizure disorder.)
After the march, she was given one of those plastic/rubber/whatever coloured bracelets that have slogans on them, from, ironically (given some of your comments), a local group for developmental disabilities.
Since then, she has not taken it off. She showers and sleeps with it on. She also hasn't stopped talking to anyone who will listen about the way she felt in that space of maybe an hour total time; they marched a predetermined route and ended up at a lecture in a local auditorium. There were people with so many different kinds of mental and physical (by which I mean brain and the rest of the body!) disabilities that they couldn't be counted. People wheeled along in electric scooters and wheelchairs. Those who could, marched, as Sabrina did.
Someone shot a picture of her with one fist in the air, holding a banner someone else had made and given out to various marchers, and her expression, though she's shouting, is rapt and ecstatic; she really experienced the closest thing ever to pleasure; she must have been in Beta waves. She made some kind of connection then, be it brief and ephemeral as ever. It was there notwithstanding. She didn't hurt anyone, but she never does, except for, rarely, getting mad enough to say something rude that might briefly hurt someone's feelings. In 2007 she threw herself through a window and nearly died as a result. Her recovery to march in that demonstration was amazing.
She is the reason I gave up on my idea of becoming the world's most prolific serial killer -- as a woman, I figured I'd have to outdo Elizabeth Bathory! -- and finally consented to a very strange kind of therapy. At first the therapist involved in this said that she lacked the "competence" to deal, but she educated herself and, six years later, is finally primed to tackle what nobody else wants: the job of coping with ME!!!!! And others of my despised kind.
Look: EVERYTHING "MENTAL" IS HAPPENING IN THE BRAIN. And THAT is the truth so many of you all over the world FEAR so much: finding out that the "Mind" is simply a construct of the physical BRAIN; that given time, science will unlock that so-long-inaccessible frontier AND EVERY THOUGHT AND FEELING CAN BE PHYSICALLY ASSESSED, TRACKED, RECORDED.
Isn't THAT what you are all afraid will happen -- that Empiricism in its 21st-Century form will FINALLY PROVE DARWIN AND THE ATHEISTS RIGHT, and that we will all, the entire Human Race, finally have to deal with the fact we are probably here ALONE, and that when the physical body and brain die, THERE IS NO FURTHER CONSCIOUSNESS AS WE KNOW IT??? Does that make me a version of the ancient religious Adversary, "Satan"? Accepting the inevitability of death? Despair? Cognitive dissonance? Are you willing to sacrifice the solution to the problem just to make yourselves feel better? Who has any way of knowing what lurks past Death or what made the Universe?
Accepting that the brain IS the mind is like accepting that the Earth is not flat and that it revolves around the Sun instead of the other way around. It will NOT destroy religion; why should what is essentially enlightenment do that? If it hasn't before, it won't now.
Instead of Demonizing us, admit that THERE IS NO DICHOTOMY when scientists speak of finding what's wrong with the brains of psychopaths and speak of finding ways to "treat this mental illness" -- where is the contradiction in THAT?
ALL MENTAL ILLNESS IS SIMPLY A DYSFUNCTION OF THE BRAIN. But we have freedom of choice to take or not take certain actions and are ultimately responsible for them and to a degree for their consequences. And as for morality, yes, the Human Race cannot survive without it, and if you find ways to stop Science from finding a way to bridge the gaps in the brains of wretches like me, you will only doom the whole Human Race, not to my depredations but to those of others of my kind who still lash out at the Human Race on the whole in hatred.
I believe that in not much more time this work will lead to ways to develop that which cannot possibly develop on its own in a psychopath: the thing you call Conscience. And ways to breach the heretofore impenetrable scrim that separates us from the rest of you.
NO, it is NOT "FUN". And believe this: IT. IS. NOT. A. DECISION!!!!!!!! Without the intervention that empirical science can provide, no psychopath can be anything else.
I know a lot of you have been hurt by my kind. But we're not all the one who hurt you. And we ARE a HUGE liability for the Human Race. In 20 years' time mandatory abortion may be suggested for babies bearing the genetic marker for psychopathy, but if neurosurgery outruns eugenics, such absolute means won't be a necessity. There are at least two hundred million of my kind in this world now. We can't all be sent to gas chambers.
Of course it's a developmental disability; it's like living locked behind a scrim. I've tried to claw my way through that invisible barrier and cannot. There's always that ineluctable sense of missing at least half the cues that everyone around me responds to. To say nothing about being unable to shiver when I'm cold, night-blindness, being unable to stand up suddenly without passing out because my blood-pressure can't equalize fast enough, having a very limited sense of taste and being almost unable to tell I'm thirsty until I'm getting sick from dehydration. I have no depth perception. I can't hold a pen the right way. I'm typing all this with one finger because it's impossible to type the normal way. People have to repeat instructions to me over and over and unless I see the task done I cannot remember how to do it by words alone. I parrot such instructions until I drive the people around me up a wall, and still I can't remember. Once I see it done I almost never forget it. I know how weird that must seem to you. As a kid I got beaten savagely when those in charge of my care couldn't deal with it any more, the eerie way I made them feel.
And as a kid I used to get so frustrated I'd bang my head against a wall until someone stopped me. I know another person like me who bites her hands and fingers unless someone stops her.
We do have feelings, but they are confusing and unformed, more like what my genius friend terms "proto-emotions".
And then there's the aging issue: I'm expected, if I'm lucky, to live to age fifty. I might even live to be a Senior Citizen, but odds are against it. In some ways I'm like a child, other ways like an adolescent, and still others like an elderly person. What, I wonder, directs aging, ultimately? DNA -- and the brain.
Why am I saying this? Do I seek your PITY?? NOOOO! I'm trying to make a case for this: PROGRESS IN RESEARCH ABSOLUTELY MUST CONTINUE WITH ALL POSSIBLE SUPPORT!
Look: people used to whip dyslexic kids for not learning, and confine people with cerebral palsy to horrible institutions where they were treated worse than zoo animals, BECAUSE THEY SEEMED TO BE SUCH A PROBLEM. But now it's known that they HAVE a problem! A hundred years ago a sweet, non-psychopathic child who happened to be blind would be considered an "evil child" by most people of conscience. In a world that still prints books with "Helen Keller jokes" and the like, I doubt my words will have much effect, but here I post (or try to post) them anyway...
PLEASE DO NOT TRY TO STOP THE PATH OF EMPIRICAL SCIENCE IN COPING WITH THE WORST AND BY FAR MOST MASSIVELY DESTRUCTIVE MENTAL ILLNESS THAT EVER WAS OR EVER WILL BE!!!!!!! It's the only real hope the human race has; that or extirpating us all, and if you do THAT, won't you have hopelessly violated your own much-vaunted CONSCIENCE?
It is THIS that I appeal to: your conscience, yes, but above all your REASON. Yes, I also have reason. But much of my map of life is a hazy grey I cannot decipher. I hate it. I hate the fact I cannot will myself to perceive that which remains indecipherable to me. I stare at people when they talk to me because part of talk is nonverbal expression and I'm liable to completely miss the meaning if I can't read something in the speaker's eyes. Also, my attention is liable to wander.
This mental illness is no less a trap than any other: all the more, as I know I need something I cannot absorb from those around me. At age eight, I shocked the heck out of my caretakers by suddenly screaming, "I'm trapped in here and I can only see out through the eye-holes!! I CAN'T GET OUT!!" and clawing at my face. I had to be restrained for fear I'd put my own eyes out. I started screaming until I ended up seizing. The next thing I recall I was waking up where I'd been laid out on a couch. My friend who tried to kill herself has tried to get out every window where she lives at some time. There's no "out" but death, and I don't want to die; I'll be tucked safely in my grave soon enough, I assure you.
What little space of time I have left in my truncated lifespan, I do not want to waste in this grey nowhereland. The people treating me have me on a cocktail of meds (at least nine of them) that horrifies the pharmacists, though they are mostly not controlled substances (my seizure med is), and they are in legal amounts and combinations. They are constantly adjusting, testing, tracking, and recalibrating, trying to at least build a bridge past the enemy that cannot be defeated.
I have long since lost count of all the MRIs and CT-scans and EEGs I've had...I hope none of these tests turns out to cause cancer. I have shocked at least one EEG technician by being fully awake and talking lucidly whilst the waves being tracked indicate I'm supposed to be fast asleep! Conversely, I have great trouble sleeping deeply enough to restore my body, a possible source of the accelerated aging. Oddly, both Beta-waves and Delta-waves, so different, are so rare in my kind...am I doing that on purpose? NO.
But, yes, I have free will, but not to just become like you. Where do you think our hostility comes from? So long as your hatred blinds your sense of rational thought, and so long as the need to believe that the brain is not all the mind is, keeps you from dealing with the source of the problem and, far worse, leads you to try to stop the inexorable course of empirical study, then yes, we will end up hating you.
I abjure you to let Science take its wonted and necessary course; in fact, rather than oppose it, assist it.
If I've made my point, I have; if not, so be it: I have no doubt that my essay is way too long and rambling. Another one of those things I try to moderate but can't seem to get a grip upon.... Not YET, anyway. As my therapist keeps telling me, "In this moment, you're still alive."
Unauthorized music quote: "The world isn't rendered in Black and White/Other shades lie between/Don't view the world with Binary Eyes/We're Human/Not Machine!" Binary Eyes, VNV Nation.
Amen to THAT. And to those among you who are in support of the empirical solution: keep the faith. It will reap results; it already is, that's why all the furor of controversy. Once again, the world is being proven to be round.
Raven P.
