What we’ve said about Psychopathy

“I'm saying that we should reserve the term psychopathy for people who have a true innate impairment, not just a psychological problem when it comes to feeling remorse, guilt and concern for others”

“Psychopathy is not a totally separate thing. Psychopathy often has this structure and then often what we call like super ego deficits. So there's absolutely no guilt. There's often on top of this a desire to kind of get over on other people, to manipulate, to use other people”

“If you look at psychopaths, they actually have the opposite profile to autism spectrum disorder. They have really good cognitive empathy. They're strong in cognitive empathy, unlike autism spectrum disorder. They have bad affective empathy. And I think there's actually research to show that autistic individuals actually have some internal affective reaction to other people”

“It's not because he has some kind of a strong moral core where he has deliberated and felt about other people's reactions. It's because it seems to be easy and doable and pleasurable in the moment that he does it”

“The antisocial personality disorder diagnosis is not psychopathy. It's purposefully encompassing both low grade tendency to break rules, basically. And the parasitic lifestyle and the actual psychopaths, right”

“looking at the hair psychopathy checklist, you can break it up into two different factors. And then actually you can break it up into like four different factors”

“What are the ordinary aspects here? Well, grandiosity, pride, ambition, and a willingness to do what it takes to be the best, right? These are not necessarily pathological and these are not necessarily the result of pathological narcissism and psychopathy”

“the classical people you think of as psychopaths, Ted Bundys, all that, they have what you just described with something on top of it, which is sadism and high self-esteem”

“There are high functioning psychopaths and then there actually are mostly low functioning psychopaths. Most psychopaths are low functioning. They're probably incarcerated. They're very impulsive”

“a lot of these people who chronically harm others or violate their rights, I think they are lacking innately in that sense of guilt and remorse. And then you have to manage people like that very differently”

“being outside of the norm is not enough to say if someone is mentally ill for a professional, for a psychiatrist. We need to say in what particular way is he outside of the norm”