Everyone is somewhat of a psychopath: the boxes of psychiatry
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon a “list of behavioral traits characteristic of psychopathy”. As I read through them, I felt like I was reading the profile of a friend, one of the smartest people I know! Which makes sense, because 1 to 4% of all people fall somewhere the psychopathy scale, and the proportion is even higher amongst people in leadership positions like CEOs, lawyers, surgeon and politicians. Oh, and some criminals.
Psychopaths are “detected” through the PCL-R test, which assesses 20 personality traits such as overly confident, manipulative, charming, easily bored, prone to lying, lack of empathy or remorse, weak emotions… Essentially, psychopaths are people whose brain work in an extremely rational manner, they unconsciously value efficiency results and performance above emotional human interaction. Psychopathy is based mainly on self-rated personality dimensions.
But wait, I thought psychopathy was a psychiatric illness? According to the list, it only seems like a particular type of personality, like the Harry potter houses represent student’s overall personality, but belonging to any of them isn’t an illness. So why do we fear psychopaths, classify them, consider them ill and try to treat them? Why do we consider that personality traits that make one a psychopath represent an illness, and not the personality traits that makes one a Hufflepuff?
Under a neurological approach, psychopathy is caused by a particular organization of the brain (still not fully understood). Other organizations of the brain can make people particularly emotional, or never scared or make a person an outlier on any other personality scale. Which does not explain why scientists decided psychopathy was an illness, or anxiety disorders or depression and not every other kind of behavioral outlier.
Under a sociological approach, humans like to classify, humans dislike difference, humans feel more at ease with what is within the norm. Since psychopaths tend to have the necessary assets to be leaders, classifying psychopaths could be a coping mechanism to make society feel like we control the situation. What better way to not feel controlled or threatened by a group of potentially powerful people, than to call them sick? Creating boxes to put people in is comforting. We as a society like things to be organized with name-tags.
When someone is out of the norm it is either exceptional (prodiges, athletes, gifted minds..) or detrimental to society. Diagnosis of psychological and psychiatric conditions are necessary. They help people understand themselves, receive the appropriate treatment and help patients be as adapted to society as possible despite their paarticular condition. But behavioral tests based on thresholds are dangerous to use, because people don’t fit into boxes. Not all psychopaths should be feared to become serial killers, and not all people with my friend’s personality traits should be labeled psychopaths. The mind is not only like a computer with ‘if’s and ‘then’s: everything is a question of scales, levels and degrees.
