People with persistent predatory personalities cause an inordinate amount of pain. Recently, our shared understanding of them has grown – and it could help protect us

This article (originally posted here: https://crust.piefed.social/c/[email protected]/p/128158/mefi-how-to-spot-a-psychopath) is intereting because the research behind it is interesting, and as most of you assumed on sight it goes where you think it does, but it actually goes further.

I had not heard of or considered this before but it references:

The idea of a “pathocracy”, a democracy of normal people taken over by psychopaths, was conceived by an obscure Polish psychologist, Andrew Lobaczewski, who had lived under both the Nazis and then Soviet-era communists. His ideas never landed, because “the psychology publishers thought it was too political, and the political publishers thought it was too psychological,” according to editor and blogger Harrison Koehli. It’s unfashionable to the point of being taboo in psychiatry and psychology now to ascribe personality disorders to public figures. “One of the perils of bringing psychology into politics is that it’s very easy for anyone with any given political perspective to look at their political enemies or rivals and say: ‘OK, well, they’re all psychopaths,’” says Koehli. There’s also the Goldwater Rule, which established as a psychiatric principle that professionals are not allowed to diagnose public figures they haven’t had clinical contact with or met (this was after 1,189 psychiatrists declared Barry Goldwater unfit to be president in the 1964 election). Viding, however, finds the fixation with diagnosis perhaps irrelevant in this context. “I always find the obsession with diagnosing these people interesting. You don’t need to diagnose them, there are a set of personality traits, and you can recognise individuals with those traits. If someone’s in political power, you can see those exemplified in behaviour, and most people are perfectly capable of making an assessment of what that signifies.”

It’s like a light going on over “why does it feel like we’re living in crazytown?” It’s not just the one guy.

The article is worth a read.

  • N0t_5ure@lemmy.world
    11·
    5 hours ago

    People can’t fathom that the Dark Personality is dark, they can’t believe that anyone would want to be deliberately harmful, they can’t process that harm was caused at all. It was bracing to hear Mitchell describe workplace suicides as an issue that partly spurred her research, since it is completely forbidden, in the mental health world, to ascribe a person’s suicide to anyone else’s behaviour. Yet a landmark ruling in France did exactly that in 2019, and found “torment” in the workplace, linked to a number of executives, had created the culture at France Télécom in which 19 employees took their own lives, 12 attempted suicide, and eight suffered from serious depression, between 2006 and 2009. Jane Monckton-Smith, professor of public protection at the University of Gloucestershire, has said in the past that, if we included provoked suicides, domestic homicide statistics could be multiplied “five, six or seven times”.

    I was married to a psychopath that attempted to drive me to suicide. Two other people in her orbit have committed suicide, and I suspect that similar tactics were used on them. I can’t read about a suicide without thinking about the probability that someone may have successfully orchestrated a campaign to drive them to suicide.