Confessions of a Sociopath (7 page)

The role that a diagnosis of sociopathy should play in criminal sentencing is an admittedly thorny issue. The legal standard for an insanity plea is that the perpetrator must not be able to distinguish between right and wrong. Sociopaths actually know what society considers right and wrong most of the time, they just don’t feel an emotional compulsion to conform their behavior to societal standards. The debate is whether this faulty wiring makes them more culpable, less culpable, or equally culpable compared to a similarly offending
nonsociopath. Kent Kiehl, a prominent researcher who specializes in scanning the brains of sociopaths in prisons, suggested treating them the same as people with low IQs, who may know that their actions are wrong but lack sufficient “brakes” on their violent impulses.

Furthermore, there is the question of effectiveness of punishment. Cleckley asserted that treating sociopaths as ordinary criminals—and simply imprisoning them when they had committed a wrong—did not work, since punishment does little to deter them. Of course, the deterring effect of imprisonment on anyone is questionable. I doubt that empathetic people who commit crimes of passion are deterred by the thought of imprisonment, and I wonder how much it works on lifelong drug dealers born into gangs and poverty who thus have few alternatives. However, scientific research has been conducted to show that sociopaths are particularly nonresponsive to negative consequences, and I have found this to be true in my own life. The threat of punishment at home or school only served as a challenge to figure out how to circumvent the consequences when I did what I wanted to do anyway. I didn’t fear the punishment, I just saw it as an inconvenience to work around.

Cleckley’s intuition that sociopaths do not respond normally to negative consequences was validated by a famous study by Hare in which he administered mild electrical shocks to both psychopaths and a normal control group. A timer ticking down preceded the shock. Normal people would show signs of anxiety as the timer got closer to the shock, anticipating the slight pain. Psychopaths were remarkably unfazed by the shock and did not express a comparable increase in anxiety as the timer ticked down.

This blithe reaction to negative events may be due to the excessive dopamine that characterizes the sociopathic brain.
Vanderbilt University researchers have linked the excess dopamine in sociopaths to a hypersensitive reward system in the brain that releases as much as four times the normal amount of dopamine in response to either a perceived gain of money upon the successful completion of a task, or chemical stimulants. These researchers suggested that the overactive reward system is to blame for a sociopath’s impulsive, risk-seeking behavior because “these individuals appear to have such a strong draw to reward—to the carrot—that it overwhelms the sense of risk or concern about the stick.”

I have my own doubts about this hypothesis, though. A hypersensitive reward system could explain why sociopaths are allegedly sex fiends, at least compared to the rest of the population. It could also explain why you’ll see them at the top of their field, professionally speaking. Sociopaths are probably contributing to society in all sorts of random ways in order to trigger an enormous amount of dopamine flooding through their brains. Risk takers, though? Maybe we are, but I don’t think it’s because of excess dopamine, particularly because an earlier study at Vanderbilt showed that
low
amounts of dopamine were highly correlated with risk taking and drug abuse. From personal experience, I feel like my risk-seeking behavior stems from a low fear response or a lack of natural anxiety in potentially dangerous, traumatic, or stressful situations.

I do all sorts of risky and often stupid activities, particularly when you consider that I am a financially secure white-collar professional with a brilliant IQ who was raised devoutly religious in a stable middle-class home. When I was young, I did the usual reckless teenage stuff: mosh pits, hitchhiking in developing countries, being towed in a shopping cart from the back of a truck, fistfights, etc. I might have grown out of some
of the more childish thrill-seeking activities, but I never quite grew out of the inability to learn from experiences.

One summer I lost all of my savings trading high-risk options. Not only were the options risky, I took an incredibly risky approach to them—holding when I should have sold and putting all of my eggs in one basket. Even after many failed trades, I still took unnecessary gambles. I knew objectively that I was losing a lot of money, but I couldn’t make myself feel the pain of it in a way that seemed to matter. Though it doesn’t seem related, I don’t use knives. The risk of injury never sinks in, even with such a mundane tool. I’ve cut myself many times, lopping off chunks of skin or cutting down to the bone and requiring stitches, but I can never force myself to be more careful, so now I just don’t use them.

I’ve always loved to bike in cities, partly because it’s so dangerous. If a car starts creeping into my lane, I will punch at it or use my portable tire pump to swing at it. If a car cuts me off, I will follow it until I catch up, then dart in front and come to a skidding halt, forcing them to slam on their brakes. I’m sure it’s incredibly dangerous for me to do this, and really only for me, but it also freaks the hell out of them. And I don’t really care for my safety enough to change my behavior. It’s not that I’m being irrational. It’s that suffering the consequences of something rarely involves actual “suffering.” Maybe there is a small thrill in taunting drivers or risking my life savings, but mainly it’s that I just don’t feel sufficient anxiety in these situations warning me to be more careful.

I can’t tell you how many times I have gotten food poisoning from eating rotten and questionable food, but I never seem to learn my lesson. A few years ago I woke up naked on the floor of a YMCA shower. I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there, but I am sure it was something stupid. People who know
their limits don’t end up passed out naked in a YMCA. I don’t have the off switch in my brain telling me when to stop—no natural sense of boundaries alerting me to when I am on the verge of taking something too far. When I do these things, it doesn’t feel as if I’m so overwhelmed by the carrot; it’s more like I am so unimpressed by the stick.

I have always lived in the worst neighborhoods. Rent is cheap and I figure there’s no need for me to pay a safety premium if I have health insurance. It drives my friends and family crazy, but it makes me easy to shop for when it comes to birthdays and Christmas: pepper spray, dead bolts, automobile theft deterrents, etc. Just after college I lived next door to a drug-infested Chicago housing project, taking night jogs through the neighborhood with headphones blaring loud enough to cover the sounds of gunshots, which were pretty loud. Recently I walked in on my apartment getting burglarized for the second time—the first time was just a few days after I had moved in. When it’s not getting burglarized, I get visitors banging on my door at all hours of the night. (I think one of my neighbors might be a drug dealer and these people are mistaking my apartment for his. Just idle conjecture.)

Perhaps my risk taking can be best seen in terms of my affection for and mishaps with motor vehicles. I love cars. I feel invincible behind the wheel, and I often put myself and others at risk because I didn’t think through the consequences of my decisions. Once when my brakes started going out, I opted to drive the car into the mechanic’s rather than pay for a tow, even though I had driven much too long on the brakes, until they were all but useless. It was rainy that day and I had to drive several miles on a steady decline. Making matters worse, when I got close to the shop, I saw that I would have to cross a bridge over train tracks, which rose and fell dramatically over
the distance of about a block on a busy four-lane main thoroughfare. By the time I was at the bottom of the bridge without brakes, I was going at least forty-five miles an hour, much too fast for traffic that was slowing at a red stoplight up ahead. Making a split-section decision, I jerked the wheel to the left and power-slid across two lanes of opposing traffic, across both lanes of a parallel frontage road, and finally jolted to a stop when the right rear and then front wheel made contact with the curb on the far side of the street. I looked up at the addresses on the buildings and noticed that I was just south of the driveway to the mechanic’s, so I crawled into the parking lot and used the parking brake to come to a full stop, all to the gaping stares of onlookers.

Of course I was pretty pleased with myself at the time. It’s nice to have proof of your seeming invincibility. But if it had gone horribly wrong—had my car slid off the bridge and exploded on impact—I would have felt much the same about it. As long as I keep surviving, I seem okay. It’s not that bad things don’t happen to me; they do. But I just don’t feel that bad about them. Maybe in the moment I feel some regret or anxiety, but it’s quickly forgotten and the world seems ripe with promise again. I’m not superhuman, not entirely immune to sorrow or pain. I just have an extremely robust sense of optimism and self-worth that keeps me looking at the world through rose-colored glasses.

Although I am largely immune to misery, my siblings and friends aren’t. They sometimes hate me for my recklessness and the third-party externalities it causes. I vividly remember trying to coax my frozen hands to operate a tire jack in a snowdrift on the side of the road, replacing the tire that I had “fixed” myself a couple days earlier while my oldest brother spat epithets in my direction. After one burglary too many, my
friend begged me to move to a different neighborhood—for peace of mind. When I assured her I was not bothered by the experience, she pressed on, saying, “Peace of mind for your loved ones, then.” It’s hard to find any incentive to change, though. I have always managed to get out of scrapes, whether that meant begging for money from strangers, pleading for mercy from police, or spinning webs of lies to cover my tracks. Because I was always willing to go double or nothing and because my unlucky streaks never lasted for long, I always managed to come out okay. And precautions are expensive, either in terms of actual costs for safety or opportunity costs for risks that you could have taken but didn’t. I understand that for a lot of people precautions are worth the money for, as my friend put it, “peace of mind.” But my mind is almost always at peace no matter what I do. Which is why I never bothered to be more careful.

After a number of years of living as a self-diagnosed sociopath, even running a blog for sociopaths, I decided to get formally assessed. At first I wasn’t inclined to seek a professional diagnosis. I had read all of the criticisms of the diagnostic criteria. I trusted my own self-assessment as much as I would anybody who happened to have a degree in psychology. However, eventually I decided that the lack of formal diagnosis might lead some readers to discount my point of view. Without a formal diagnosis, how could they know that I was an actual sociopath? I figured that if I was going to risk outing myself as a member of one of the most hated subclasses of humans, I might as well ensure that people believed me.

My diagnostician was Dr. John Edens, PhD, a professor at Texas A & M and a leading researcher in the field of sociopathy,
whose opinions have recently been solicited for articles in the
New York Times
and on NPR, among other media outlets. Dr. Edens worried that the test he intended to give me was strongly wedded to Hare’s criminal-oriented model of sociopathy. Given that I had no documented criminal record, Dr. Edens felt that the test score in my case might be somewhat questionable and might in fact understate my true level of sociopathic traits.

I underwent a form of the PCL-R, the PCL:SV (Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version), among other tests. The PCL:SV, as the name implies, is a checklist of criteria historically associated with Hare’s conceptualization of psychopathy. It was developed to assess for psychopathic features while relying less on the extensive file and criminal-history data required to complete the PCL-R. The PCL:SV is comprised of twelve individual criteria scored from 0 to 2 points, which are summed to form a total score from 0 to 24. The test is divided equally into two parts. Part 1 includes the personality traits typically associated with sociopathy, including lack of remorse and empathy for others, and interpersonal behaviors, including deceitfulness and grandiosity. Part 2 taps more socially deviant behaviors and activities, including irresponsibility, impulsivity, and adult antisocial behavior.

During the interview, I was asked about my significant history of impulsive, aggressive, and generally irresponsible conduct—things like fistfights and theft—that, while perhaps not having resulted in criminal charges, easily could have led to various encounters with the criminal justice system under different life circumstances. Dr. Edens noted in my report that these actions appear to have been almost entirely for thrill-seeking purposes rather than for any type of economic gain or other instrumental purpose. He noted: “Whether Ms. Thomas’s lack of police contact has been due to her successfully
manipulating her way out of ‘jams,’ various protective factors evident in her life (e.g., high intelligence and educational success, generally supportive family structure, and other socioeconomic advantages), random luck, or some combination of all of the above is unclear at this time.” I talked about my family, my reckless teenage years, my inability to stick with my jobs after law school, and my subsequent self-analysis that had led me to his office, telling Dr. Edens stories that I had all but forgotten.

I scored a total of 19 out of 24 on the PCL:SV. There are no sharp diagnostic cutoffs, but according to the manual, scores of 18 and higher “offer a strong indication of psychopathy.” I got a 12 for part 1 (personality) and a 7 for part 2 (antisocial behavior). Dr. Edens remarked: “Notably, 12 is the maximum score one can obtain on Part 1 of this rating scale and indicates the presence of pronounced affective and interpersonal characteristics typically evidenced by highly psychopathic individuals.”