The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience by Kent A. Phd Kiehl Read Free Book Online Page B

returned with a six-inch-thick file, bound together with several thick rubber bands.
That’s not so bad
, I thought, picking up the file. Then the clerk said, “Hold on, that’s just the first folder.” She called back, “You want this in a box or do you want to try and carry it?”
    “Umm, box, please,” I said. Gary’s file filled a copypaper box. He was right; it would take me more than a lunch hour to read his file.
    It turned out to be one of the most amazing case histories I would ever read. Gary would become my first perfect score—a 40 out of 40 on the Psychopathy Checklist, one of only a handful that I would find in the next twenty years.
    Gary also became the very first psychopath to participate in brain scans a few years later.
    After passing Gary and Grant’s charade, the inmates accepted me into their circle. They signed up en masse to participate in research. During my seven-year tenure at RHC, over 95 percent of inmates volunteered for research. And so my career was under way, interviewing hundreds of inmates, cataloging their life histories, assessing their symptoms and personality traits, and eventually, studying their brains.
    *   I have changed the names and characteristics of my interviewees to protect their identities.

Chapter 2
Suffering Souls
    Fact: There are over 29,000,000 psychopaths worldwide. 1
    In 2008, author John Seabrook of
The New Yorker
wrote a feature article about my laboratory with the title “Suffering Souls.” 2 As part of his research prior to writing the story, John visited my lab several times and had a tour of one of the New Mexico prisons where my team and I conduct research. At the outset, Seabrook didn’t know the historical research that has been conducted on the psychopath, instead relying heavily on the way psychopaths are portrayed in popular film and media. Seabrook and I spent several weeks discussing the history of psychopathy, and he wove a wonderful story capturing the status and controversies of the field at the time.
    As I told Seabrook, a little less than 1 percent of the general population, or about 1 in 150 people, will meet criteria for psychopathy. However, the number of psychopaths in prison is much higher than in the community because psychopaths tend to get themselves in trouble with the law. Studies indicate 15 to 35 percent of inmates worldwide will meet criteria for psychopathy—with more psychopaths being found in prisons with higher security ratings. I told Seabrook that something
special
seems to happen when the majority of psychopathic traits coalesce in the same person. I’ve often been quoted as saying that there is “just something different” about psychopaths.
    Nevertheless, it’s important to recognize that psychopathic traits exist, more or less, in all of us. Fortunately, the distribution of psychopathic traits is skewed
—most
people have very low levels of the traits,
some
people have a bit more of the traits, and only a
few
people have high levels of the majority of the traits. It’s the last group that scientists reserve for the diagnosis of
psychopath
.
    But the term
psychopath
continues to be (mis)used in a wide variety of contexts. For example, it is not uncommon for the media to declare that a Wall Street trader, politician, or deadbeat dad is a
psychopath
. In this context the media are typically using the label
psychopath
as a derogatory term, and they are not referring to the scientific definition of the disorder. When I am asked about such offending politicians, I typically reply that such individuals may be a bit
more
psychopathic than the rest of us, but I prefer to leave the diagnoses of
psychopath
for those few among us who have the full manifestation of the disorder.
    Let’s examine how history has recorded those among us who are “just different” from the rest of us.

A Brief History of Psychopathy
    Like Seabrook, I have borrowed the “Suffering Souls” chapter title from German psychiatrist J. L. A.