Let’s Talk about Psychopaths!

Five facts to help you tune your skepticism meter when it comes to reading suspense novels (or memoirs!) about glib, charming, remorseless, callous, deceitful, frequently violent predators

Raise your hand if you read the New York Times article with Patric Gagne, author of the forthcoming memoir, Sociopath, which has a strong Amazon ranking even though it doesn’t come out until April 2.

Fellow Substacker and friend Donna Freitas wrote about it. Then my husband texted me about it, from work. And he doesn’t even have a subscription to the NYT! He came across it via Pocket. Next, I started swapping texts about the NYT interview with a psychologist friend.

Antisocial personality disorder—we’ll get into technical terminology soon— is an obsession interest of mine because I’m nearing the end of a new novel draft in which “psychopathy” features heavily. Spoiler: I’ve got a psychopath in my book. Or maybe two, three, or four!

I found the interview with Patric Gagne fascinating. She chronicles her past violence and compulsivity. As a child, she stuck a sharp pencil into another child, and even as an adult, she admits to an impulse to steal and lie, and perhaps more than that. In a “Modern Love” essay from 2020, she wrote about the cute signal she’d give her husband to let him know she’d “misbehaved” recently, so that he could forgive her. We have to wonder how far those charming transgressions go.

In her forthcoming memoir, which I haven’t read yet but will, Gagne evidently discusses how she manages to live a principled life and even work as a therapist despite her limited ability to experience empathy and other emotions. In many ways, she asserts, her lack of remorse and guilt help her see more clearly. I’m getting Spock vibes, in a good way. Why couldn’t a person (or AI¹) unsaddled by messy emotions bring something new to the therapy table, we might wonder?

But…how much do we really know about author Gagne? That’s the question that kept bothering me after reading the NYT interview. It’s the same question people should ask about the TikTok sensation who has been telling a long-form story about the betrayals of a pathologically lying husband.

Are these stories even true? Do you care?

I personally think that even in the form of suspense fiction—as in, made-up stories—it’s more interesting when mental health disorders are described with some accuracy, when possible.

To that end, I’m trying to render my psychopath character(s) realistically. Again, when possible. The truth is scary enough!

Fact #1. Psychopaths are all around us.

In my current novel draft, I toss out this tidbit via dialogue. A cop named Robert is talking about what he learned at the Police Academy:

“…They asked us if we knew anyone who runs marathons.”

“They taught you that marathoners are crazy?”

“No. They asked how many of us knew a marathoner. Every hand in the room went up. Most of us knew two or three marathoners, at least. Then our instructor says, ‘One percent of the population. That’s who runs marathons. The same percentage of people are psychopaths.’”

It seems to be true. According to Robert Hare, who invented the “Psychopath Test” in the 1970s, the incidence of psychopathy in the general population is 1%.

Are you fascinated or skeptical of Robert Hare? In either case, read The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. (The audiobook, narrated by Ronson, a quirky Brit, is especially good.)

Fact #2: Among successful people, the rate of psychopathy may be even higher than 1%!

According to Kevin Dutton, another expert who conducted the 2011 Great British Psychopath Survey, the ten careers with the highest proportion of psychopaths are:^[17]

1.     CEO

2.     Lawyer

3.     Media (TV/radio)

4.     Salesperson

5.     Surgeon

6.     Journalist

7.     Police officer

8.     Clergy

9.     Chef

10.  Civil servant

In these careers, there may be a 3-4% incidence of psychopathy.

Fact #3: Most real-life violent, criminal psychopaths are not insane geniuses

Hannibal gets a pass because he got to the psychopath party early. But we don’t need a thousand Hannibal Lecters!

This is my biggest peeve: the mostly inaccurate characterizations of psychopaths.

Granted, we all love an erudite man who can manipulate the FBI and who eats men’s livers “with fava beans and a nice Chianti.” But consistently portraying violent psychopaths as articulate, well-mannered, highly self-regulated smarties over and over fails to capture what psychopathy really is: an enormous dysfunction, which results not only in criminality but in really stupid criminality that usually ends in negative consequences for the offender and his victims.

Instead of being calm, cool, highly logical sharks, psychopaths are usually hotheaded and impulsive. The more typical psychopath can’t make a plan or stick to it. He can’t hold down a job. He doesn’t impress all the ladies, or not the ones who are actively screening for losers, anyway. He—and yes, nine out of ten times it’s a he—usually has lower intelligence.

Now, I know I just told you (see fact #2), that a fair percentage of successful people are psychopaths. But 96%-97% of those successful people aren’t psychopaths. And most psychopaths are not successful.

(By the way, I actually wasted time yesterday trying to make some Venn diagrams illustrating psychopath/successful guy overlaps for you, my favorite readers, but then I decided they weren’t mathematically accurate enough and I tossed them out because I don’t want to be that person who misleads you just to make something the tiniest bit more interesting.)

Even while they may display some superficial charm, psychopaths are not pleasant or easy to get along with, and many of them end up in jail, repeatedly, with recidivism rates four times the average. As with so many things, psychopathy exists on a continuum. The extreme psychopaths make the most mistakes over and over. They are usually not geniuses.

Having said, that if you want to lose sleep, dig into FBI reports on unsolved serial killings. I used to think all these movies and books about long-time predators were silly. I mean, are there really that many of them out there, evading justice even as they hunt down victims, often within less than two miles from their own homes?

(See? Not so smart! Dudes—just drive a little farther!)

Um, yes. Even the dumb guys get away with a lot. Sorry. Lock those doors!

Fact #4: Increasingly, we see linkages between psychopathy and the brain

Dexter’s psychopathy is linked to one particular childhood trauma, but for some ASPD sufferers, the origin may be biological and complex

In a 2020 New Zealand longitudinal study using structural MRI dated published in The Lancet, based on 1037 subjects, 12% were classified as having life-course-persistent antisocial behavior. An even bigger group, 23%, were classified as having adolescence-limited antisocial behavior.

If you perked up at the phrase “MRI studies,” let me recommend my favorite and most research-heavy book, The Psychopath Whisperer by leading criminal psychopathy researcher Kent Kiehl. Get ready for lots of talk about Kiehl’s beloved mobile MRI vehicles, info on grants, corporate contracts, and scientist career trajectories and…oh, I guess I see why he has fewer readers than Ron Jonson. But I did love Kiehl’s book!

The New Zealand study’s findings provide initial evidence that anti-social behavior can be linked to noted “differences in brain surface morphometry” and contribute to a growing body of data about neurological differences.

More simply: people we call “psychopaths” may have easy-to-spot brain differences resulting in deficits like intelligence, executive functioning, and memory from an early age.

But are all of those people with ASPD actual psychopaths? Probably not. (That Venn diagram would have come in really handy here!) That’s the problem with tossing around the psychopath or sociopath term so loosely. ASPD is the larger umbrella term and psychopathy may define a much smaller subset.

Fact #5: They’re not actually called Psychopaths. Or sociopaths, for that matter.

At last! We arrive at my initial motivation for this post. “Psychopathy” is not in the DSM-V, the current manual health professionals use to diagnose mental disorders. “Sociopathy” isn’t either. Currently, the manual offers us the term “antisocial personality disorder” associated with certain traits.

I planned to write about the rising and falling popularity of various terms like sociopathy and psychopathy over the last century, which is tied to debates over behaviorist versus biological perspectives. But I realize not everyone cares and I am reaching my word limit.

Suffice it to say that preferred terms and etiological beliefs keep a-changin’, as do some very basic ideas that filter down into what we, as writers or as readers or TV viewers, expect of our favorite sociopaths.

Do they have a conscience, and choose at times to act on it? (Possibly: a sociopath.)

Do they feel no remorse or guilt, i.e. have no conscience? (Possibly: a psychopath.)

If there are two very different patterns, it would help us to have two very different terms. The person who understands he shouldn’t violate another person and who chooses not to is quite a different person—or fictional character—than the egomaniac who thinks he is the only person who matters and can’t even read the emotions of his victims. The former person might be able to say no to that liver served with Chianti, no matter how tasty it is. The latter person…is not someone you should date. I think we can agree.

But here’s what’s wrong with advocating for dividing our definitions into “sociopath” versus “psychopath.” Real scientists don’t label people as either one! The labels are both pejorative and potentially misleading.

So why is there is a big buzzy new book coming out with precisely such a label? Gagne’s original book title, we can see from her deal announcement in Publishers Marketplace, was Honest Girl, meant as a double entendre, I’m guessing, because Gagne seems to be telling us that 1) she lies easily and often, but also that 2) due to her disorder, she can sometimes see truths that the rest of us miss.

Who made the decision to title her book in a more simplistic way? And have there been any other pressures, from the author or the publisher, to launch a book that sells rather than one that accurately explains?

Here’s an advance warning, the kind of warning that was completely lacking from the NYT piece, from Kirkus Reviews about Gagne’s Sociopath: “Descriptions of the author’s uncannily astute contributions to her field of study have a particularly dubious quality.”

The memoir has “a markedly fantastical quality.”

And… “though the book is marketed as a memoir, it reads very much like a work of fiction.”

We live in a world where facts and science in general are increasingly devalued. That concerns me. For now, here at Present Tense, the jury on Gagne’s memoir is still out.

Let’s end on a lighter and more interactive note.

Tell me about your favorite psychopath/sociopath thriller, memoir, or movie! It can be realistic, wildly over-the-top, or anywhere in between!

1. My 2018 novel, Plum Rains, posits a near-future world in which AI serve us as essential carers. Specifically, my character Hiro threatens to displace Filipina nurse Anjelica because he appears to be more empathetic to elderly client Sayoko, and perhaps more intuitive about her true needs. I set the book in 2029. Thanks to Chat-GPT and other large language models plus other robotics developments, we may be pretty on-track for that moment. Which is…almost as scary as knowing we are surrounded by psychopaths.