This article seems to describe much of the thinking about psychopaths that I am
familiar with. I welcome comments and suggestions for further reading on this
subject. I can think of few other topics that are as important. We not even
be able to solve global warming, and certainly not nuclear proliferation, until
we deal with this. I believe that much of the warfare we are witnessing in the
Middle East and elsewhere is a direct result of the presence of psychopaths at
the highest levels of government and finance worldwide. May God have mercy on
us all.
Hajja Romi/Blue
PSYCHOPATHS AMONG US
Dr. Robert Hare claims there are 300,000
psychopaths in Canada, but that only a tiny fraction are violent
offenders like Paul Bernardo and Clifford Olsen. Who are the rest? Take a look
around
By Robert Hercz
________________________________
"Psychopath! psychopath!"
I'm alone in my living room and I'm yelling at my TV. "Forget rehabilitation --
that guy is a psychopath."
Ever since I visited Dr. Robert Hare in Vancouver, I can see
them, the psychopaths. It's pretty easy, once you know how to look. I'm
watching a documentary about an American prison trying to rehabilitate
teen murderers. They're using an emotionally intense kind of group
therapy, and I can see, as plain as day, that one of the inmates is a
psychopath. He tries, but he can't muster a convincing breakdown, can't
fake any feeling for his dead victims. He's learned the words, as Bob
Hare would put it, but not the music.
The incredible thing, the reason I'm yelling, is that no one in
this documentary -- the therapists, the warden, the omniscient narrator
-- seems to know the word "psychopath." It is never uttered, yet it
changes everything. A psychopath can never be made to feel the horror of
murder. Weeks of intense therapy, which are producing real
breakthroughs in the other youths, will probably make a psychopath more
likely to reoffend. Psychopaths are not like the rest of us, and
everyone who studies them agrees they should not be treated as if they
were.
I think of Bob Hare, who's in New Orleans receiving yet another
award, and wonder if he's watching the same show in his hotel room and
feeling the same frustration. A lifetime spent looking into the heads of
psychopaths has made the slight, slightly anxious emeritus professor of
psychology at the University of British Columbia the world's best-known expert
on the species. Hare hasn't merely changed our understanding of
psychopaths. It would be more accurate to say he has created it.
The condition itself has been recognized for centuries, wearing
evocative labels such as "madness without delirium" and "moral insanity" until
the late 1800s, when "psychopath" was coined by a German
clinician. But the term (and its 1930s synonym, sociopath) had always
been a sort of catch-all, widely and loosely applied to criminals who
seemed violent and unstable. Even into the mid-1970s, almost 80 percent
of convicted felons in the United States were being diagnosed as
sociopaths. In 1980, Hare created a diagnostic tool called the
Psychopathy Checklist, which, revised five years later, became known as
the PCL-R. Popularly called "the Hare," the PCL-R measures psychopathy
on a forty-point scale. Once it emerged, it was the first time in
history that everyone who said "psychopath" was saying the same thing.
For research in the field, it was like a starting gun.
But for Hare, it has turned out to be a Pandora's box. Recently
retired from teaching, his very last Ph.D. student about to leave the
nest, Hare, sixty-eight, should be basking in professional accolades and
enjoying his well-earned rest. But he isn't.
The PCL-R has slipped the confines of academe, and is being used and misused in
ways that Hare never intended. In some of the places
where it could do some good -- such as the prison in the TV documentary I was
yelling at -- the idea of psychopathy goes unacknowledged, usually
because it's politically incorrect to declare someone to be beyond
rehabilitation. At the opposite extreme, there are cases in which Hare's work
has been overloaded with political baggage of another sort, such
as in the United States, where a high PCL-R score is used to support
death-penalty arguments, and in England, where a debate is underway
about whether some individuals with personality disorders (such as
psychopaths) should be detained even if they haven't committed a crime.
So, after decades of labour in peaceful obscurity, Bob Hare has
become a man with a suitcase, a passport, and a PowerPoint presentation, a
reluctant celebrity at gatherings of judges, attorneys, prison
administrators, psychologists, and police. His post-retirement mission
is to be a good shepherd to his Psychopathy Checklist.
"I'm protecting it from erosion, from distortion. It could
easily be compromised," he says. "I'm a scientist; I should just be
doing basic research, but I'm being called on all the time to intervene
and mediate."
And it's really just beginning. Psychopathy may prove to be as
important a construct in this century as IQ was in the last (and just as
susceptible to abuse), because, thanks to Hare, we now understand that
the great majority of psychopaths are not violent criminals and never
will be. Hundreds of thousands of psychopaths live and work and prey
among us. Your boss, your boyfriend, your mother could be what Hare
calls a "subclinical" psychopath, someone who leaves a path of
destruction and pain without a single pang of conscience. Even more
worrisome is the fact that, at this stage, no one -- not even Bob Hare
-- is quite sure what to do about it.
Bob hare has to meet me in the lobby of the UBC psychology
building, since he's not listed in the directory. He's had threats, by
e-mail and in person. An ex-con showed up one day, angry that a friend
of his had been declared a dangerous offender thanks to Hare's
checklist. Other characters have appeared in his lab doorway, looking in and
saying nothing.
We immediately find ourselves discussing the criminal du jour,
the jet-setting French con man Christophe Rocancourt, notorious for
passing himself off as a member of the Rockefeller family, who has just
been arrested in Victoria.
"I'd sure as hell like to have a close look at him," Hare muses.
Like every scientist, Hare likes a good puzzle, and that was
reason enough to make a career out of psychopaths. "These were
particularly interesting human beings," he says. "Everything about them
seemed to be paradoxical. They could do things that a lot of other
people could not do" -- lie, steal, rape, murder -- "but they looked
perfectly normal, and when you talked to them they seemed okay. It was a
puzzle. I thought I'd try and unravel it."
Hare arrived at UBC in 1963, intending to follow up his doctoral research on
punishment. Certain prisoners, it was rumoured, didn't
respond to punishment, and Hare went to the federal penitentiary in New
Westminster, British Columbia, to find these extreme cases. (He found
plenty. In his chilling 1993 book on psychopathy, Without Conscience: The
Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, he quotes one specimen's
memories: "[M]y mother, the most beautiful
person in the world. She was strong, she worked hard to take care of
four kids. A beautiful person. I started stealing her jewellery when I
was in the fifth grade. You know, I never really knew the bitch -- we
went our separate ways.")
For his first paper, now a classic, Hare had his subjects watch a countdown
timer. When it reached zero, they got a "harmless but
painful" electric shock while an electrode taped to their fingers
measured perspiration. Normal people would start sweating as the
countdown proceeded, nervously anticipating the shock. Psychopaths
didn't sweat. They didn't fear punishment -- which, presumably, also
holds true outside the laboratory. In Without Conscience, he quotes a
psychopathic rapist explaining why he finds it hard to empathize with
his victims: "They are frightened, right? But, you see, I don't really
understand it. I've been frightened myself, and it wasn't unpleasant."
In another Hare study, groups of letters were flashed to
volunteers. Some of them were nonsense, some formed real words. The
subject's job was to press a button whenever he recognized a real word,
while Hare recorded response time and brain activity. Non-psychopaths
respond faster and display more brain activity when processing
emotionally loaded words such as "rape" or "cancer" than when they see
neutral words such as "tree." With psychopaths, Hare found no
difference. To them, "rape" and "tree" have the same emotional impact -- none.
Hare made another intriguing discovery by observing the hand
gestures (called beats) people make while speaking. Research has shown
that such gestures do more than add visual emphasis to our words (many
people gesture while they're on the telephone, for example); it seems
they actually help our brains find words. That's why the frequency of
beats increases when someone is having trouble finding words, or is
speaking a second language instead of his or her mother tongue. In a
1991 paper, Hare and his colleagues reported that psychopaths,
especially when talking about things they should find emotional, such as their
families, produce a higher frequency of beats than normal people. It's as if
emotional language is a second language -- a foreign
language, in effect -- to the psychopath.
Three decades of these studies, by Hare and others, has
confirmed that psychopaths' brains work differently from ours,
especially when processing emotion and language. Hare once illustrated
this for Nicole Kidman, who had invited him to Hollywood to help her
prepare for a role as a psychopath in Malice. How, she wondered, could
she show the audience there was something fundamentally wrong with her
character?
"I said, 'Here's a scene that you can use,' " Hare says. "
'You're walking down a street and there's an accident. A car has hit a
child in the crosswalk. A crowd of people gather round. You walk up, the
child's lying on the ground and there's blood running all over the
place. You get a little blood on your shoes and you look down and say,
"Oh shit." You look over at the child, kind of interested, but you're
not repelled or horrified. You're just interested. Then you look at the
mother, and you're really fascinated by the mother, who's emoting,
crying out, doing all these different things. After a few minutes you
turn away and go back to your house. You go into the bathroom and
practice mimicking the facial expressions of the mother.' " He then
pauses and says, "That's the psychopath: somebody who doesn't understand what's
going on emotionally, but understands that something important
has happened."
Hare's research upset a lot of people. Until the psychopath came into focus, it
was possible to believe that bad people were just good
people with bad parents or childhood trauma and that, with care, you
could talk them back into being good. Hare's research suggested that
some people behaved badly even when there had been no early trauma.
Moreover, since psychopaths' brains were in fundamental ways different
from ours, talking them into being like us might not be easy. Indeed, to this
day, no one has found a way to do so.
"Some of the things he was saying about these individuals, it
was unheard of," says Dr. Steven Stein, a psychologist and ceo of
Multi-Health Systems in Toronto, the publisher of the Psychopathy
Checklist. "Nobody believed him thirty years ago, but Bob hasn't
wavered, and now everyone's where he is. Everyone's come full circle,
except a small group who believe it's bad upbringing, family poverty,
those kinds of factors, even though scientific evidence has shown that's not
the case. There are wealthy psychopaths who've done horrendous
things, and they were brought up in wonderful families."
"There's still a lot of opposition -- some criminologists,
sociologists, and psychologists don't like psychopathy at all," Hare
says. "I can spend the entire day going through the literature -- it's
overwhelming, and unless you're semi-brain-dead you're stunned by it --
but a lot of people come out of there and say, 'So what? Psychopathy is a
mythological construct.' They have political and social agendas:
'People are inherently good,' they say. 'Just give them a hug, a puppy
dog, and a musical instrument and they're all going to be okay.' "
If Hare sounds a little bitter, it's because a decade ago,
Correctional Service of Canada asked him to design a treatment program
for psychopaths, but just after he submitted the plan in 1992, there
were personnel changes at the top of CSC. The new team had a different
agenda, which Hare summarizes as, "We don't believe in the badness of
people." His plan sank without a trace.
By the late 1970s, after fifteen years in the business, Bob Hare knew what he
was looking for when it came to psychopaths. They exhibit a cluster of
distinctive personality traits, the most significant of
which is an utter lack of conscience. They also have huge egos, short
tempers, and an appetite for excitement -- a dangerous mix. In a typical prison
population, about 20 percent of the inmates satisfy the Hare
definition of a psychopath, but they are responsible for over half of
all violent crime.
The research community, Hare realized, lacked a standard
definition. "I found that we were all talking a different language, we
were on different diagnostic pages, and I decided that we had to have
some common instrument," he says. "The PCL-R was really designed to make it
easier to publish articles and to let journal editors and reviewers
know what I meant by psychopathy."
The Psychopathy Checklist consists of a set of forms and a
manual that describes in detail how to score a subject in twenty
categories that define psychopathy. Is he (or, more rarely, she) glib
and superficially charming, callous and without empathy? Does he have a
grandiose sense of self worth, shallow emotions, a lack of remorse or
guilt? Is he impulsive, irresponsible, promiscuous? Did he have
behavioural problems early in life? The information for each category
must be carefully drawn from documents such as court transcripts, police
reports, psychologists' reports, and victim-impact statements, and not
solely from an interview, since psychopaths are superb liars
("pathological lying" and "conning/manipulative" are PCL-R categories). A
prisoner may claim to love his family, for example, while his records
show no visits or phone calls.
For each item, assessors -- psychologists or psychiatrists --
assign a score of zero (the item doesn't apply), one (the item applies
in some respects), or two (the item applies in most respects). The
maximum possible score is forty, and the boundary for clinical
psychopathy hovers around thirty. Last year, the average score for all
incarcerated male offenders in North America was 23.3. Hare guesses his
own score would be about four or five.
In 1980, Hare's initial checklist began circulating in the
research community, and it quickly became the standard. At last count
nearly 500 papers and 150 doctoral dissertations had been based on it.
It's also found practical applications in police-squad rooms.
Soon after he delivered a keynote speech at a conference for homicide
detectives and prosecuting attorneys in Seattle three years ago, Hare
got a letter thanking him for helping solve a series of homicides. The
police had a suspect nailed for a couple of murders, but believed he was
responsible for others. They were using the usual strategy to get a
confession, telling him, 'Think how much better you'll feel, think of
the families left behind,' and so on. After they'd heard Hare speak they
realized they were dealing with a psychopath, someone who could feel
neither guilt nor sorrow. They changed their interrogation tactic to,
"So you murdered a couple of prostitutes. That's minor-league compared
to Bundy or Gacy." The appeal to the psychopath's grandiosity worked. He didn't
just confess to his other crimes, he bragged about them.
The most startling finding to emerge from Hare's work is that
the popular image of the psychopath as a remorseless, smiling killer --
Paul Bernardo, Clifford Olson, John Wayne Gacy -- while not wrong, is
incomplete. Yes, almost all serial killers, and most of Canada's
dangerous offenders, are psychopaths, but violent criminals are just a
tiny fraction of the psychopaths around us. Hare estimates that 1
percent of the population -- 300,000 people in Canada -- are
psychopaths.
He calls them "subclinical" psychopaths. They're the charming
predators who, unable to form real emotional bonds, find and use
vulnerable women for sex and money (and inevitably abandon them).
They're the con men like Christophe Rocancourt, and they're the
stockbrokers and promoters who caused Forbes magazine to call the
Vancouver Stock Exchange (now part of the Canadian Venture Exchange) the scam
capital of the world. (Hare has said that if he couldn't study
psychopaths in prisons, the Vancouver Stock Exchange would have been his second
choice.) A significant proportion of persistent wife beaters,
and people who have unprotected sex despite carrying the AIDS virus, are
psychopaths. Psychopaths can be found in legislatures, hospitals, and
used-car lots. They're your neighbour, your boss, and your blind date.
Because they have no conscience, they're natural predators. If you
didn't have a conscience, you'd be one too.
Psychopaths love chaos and hate rules, so they're comfortable in the
fast-moving modern corporation. Dr. Paul Babiak, an
industrial-organizational psychologist based near New York City, is in
the process of writing a book with Bob Hare called When Psychopaths Go to Work:
Cons, Bullies and the Puppetmaster. The subtitle refers to the three broad
classes of psychopaths Babiak has encountered in the workplace.
"The con man works one-on-one," says Babiak. "They'll go after a woman, marry
her, take her money, then move on and marry someone else.
The puppet master would manipulate somebody to get at someone else. This type
is more powerful because they're hidden." Babiak says psychopaths
have three motivations: thrill-seeking, the pathological desire to win,
and the inclination to hurt people. "They'll jump on any opportunity
that allows them to do those things," he says. "If something better
comes along, they'll drop you and move on."
How can you tell if your boss is a psychopath? It's not easy,
says Babiak. "They have traits similar to ideal leaders. You would
expect an ideal leader to be narcissistic, self-centred, dominant, very
assertive, maybe to the point of being aggressive. Those things can
easily be mistaken for the aggression and bullying that a psychopath
would demonstrate. The ability to get people to follow you is a
leadership trait, but being charismatic to the point of manipulating
people is a psychopathic trait. They can sometimes be confused."
Once inside a company, psychopaths can be hard to excise. Babiak tells of a
salesperson and psychopath -- call him John -- who was
performing badly but not suffering for it. John was managing his boss --
flattering him, taking him out for drinks, flying to his side when he
was in trouble. In return, his boss covered for him by hiding John's
poor performance. The arrangement lasted until John's boss was moved.
When his replacement called John to task for his abysmal sales numbers,
John was a step ahead.
He'd already gone to the company president with a set of facts
he used to argue that his new boss, and not he, should be fired. But he
made a crucial mistake. "It was actually stolen data," Babiak says. "The only
way [John] could have obtained it would be for him to have gone
into a file into which no one was supposed to go. That seemed to be
enough, and he was fired rather than the boss. Even so, in the end, he
walked out with a company car, a bag of money, and a good reference."
"A lot of white-collar criminals are psychopaths," says Bob
Hare. "But they flourish because the characteristics that define the
disorder are actually valued. When they get caught, what happens? A slap on the
wrist, a six-month ban from trading, and don't give us the $100
million back. I've always looked at white-collar crime as being as bad
or worse than some of the physically violent crimes that are committed."
The best way to protect the workplace is not to hire psychopaths in the first
place. That means training interviewers so they're less
likely to be manipulated and conned. It means checking resumés for lies
and distortions, and it means following up references.
Paul Babiak says he's "not comfortable" with one researcher's
estimate that one in ten executives is a psychopath, but he has noticed
that they are attracted to positions of power. When he describes
employees such as John to other executives, they know exactly whom he's
talking about. "I was talking to a group of human-resources executives
yesterday," says Babiak, "and every one of them said, you know, I think
I've got somebody like that."
By now, you're probably thinking the same thing. The number of
psychopaths in society is about the same as the number of
schizophrenics, but unlike schizophrenics, psychopaths aren't loners.
That means most of us have met or will meet one. Hare gets dozens of
letters and e-mail messages every month from people who say they
recognize someone they know while reading Without Conscience.
They go on to describe a brother, a sister, a husband. " 'Please help my
seventeen-year-old son. . . .' " Hare reads aloud from one such
missive. "It's a heart-rending letter, but what can I do? I'm not a
clinician. I have hundreds of these things, and some of them are thirty
or forty pages long."
Hare's book opened my eyes, too. Reading it, I realized that I
might have known a psychopath, Jonathan, at the computer company where I worked
in London, England, over twenty years ago. He was charming and
confident, and from the moment he arrived he was on excellent terms with the
executive inner circle. Jonathan had big plans and promised me that I was a big
part of them. One night when I was alone in the office, Jonathan appeared,
accompanied by what anyone should have recognized as two prostitutes.
"These are two high-ranking staff from the Ministry of Defence," he said
without missing a beat. "We're going over the details of a contract,
which I'm afraid is classified top secret. You'll have to leave the
building." His voice and eyes were absolutely persuasive and I complied. A few
weeks later Jonathan was arrested. He had embezzled tens of
thousands of pounds from the small firm, used the company as a mailing
address for a marijuana importing business he was running on the side,
and robbed the apartment of the company's owner, who was letting him
stay there temporarily.
Like everyone who has been suckered by a psychopath -- and Bob
Hare includes himself and many of his graduate students (who have been
trained to spot them) in that list -- I'm ashamed that I fell for
Jonathan. But he was brilliant, charismatic, and audacious. He radiated
money and power (though in fact he had neither), while his real self --
manipulative, lying, parasitic, and irresponsible -- was just far enough under
his surface to be invisible. Or was it? Maybe I didn't know how
to look, or maybe I didn't really want to.
I saw his name in the news again recently. "A con man tricked
top sports car makers Lotus into lending him a £70,000 model . . . then
stole it and drove 6,000 miles across Europe, a court heard," the story
began.
Knowing Jonathan is probably a psychopath makes me feel better. It's an
explanation.
But away from the workplace, back in the world of the criminally violent
psychopath, Hare's checklist has become broadly known, so
broadly known, in fact, that it is now a constant source of concern for
him. "People are misusing it, and they're misusing it in really strange
ways," Hare says. "There are lots of clinicians who don't even have a
manual. All they've seen is an article with the twenty items --
promiscuity, impulsiveness, and so forth -- listed."
In court, assessments of the same person done by defence and
prosecution "experts" have varied by as much as twenty points. Such
drastic differences are almost certainly the result of bias or
incompetence, since research on the PCL-R itself has shown it has high
"inter-rater reliability" (consistent results when a subject is assessed by
more than one qualified assessor). In one court case, it was used to label a
thirteen-year-old a psychopath, even though the PCL-R test is
only meant to be used to rate adults with criminal histories. The test
should be administered only by mental-health professionals (like all
such psychological instruments, it is only for sale to those with
credentials), but a social worker once used the PCL-R in testimony in a
death-penalty case -- not because she was qualified but because she
thought it was "interesting."
It shouldn't be used in death-penalty cases at all, Hare says,
but U.S. Federal District Courts have ruled it admissible because it
meets scientific standards.
"Bob and others like myself are saying it doesn't meet the
ethical standards," says Dr. Henry Richards, a psychopathy researcher at the
University of Washington. "A psychological instrument and diagnosis should not
be a determinant of whether someone gets the death sentence. That's more of an
ethical and political decision."
And into the ethical and political realm -- the realm of
extrapolation, of speculation, of opinion -- Hare will not step. He's
been asked to be a guest on Oprah (twice), 60 Minutes, and Larry King Live.
Oprah wanted him alongside a psychopath and his victim. "I said, 'This is a
circus,' " Hare says. "I couldn't do that." 60 Minutes also wanted to "make it
sexy" by throwing real live psychopaths into the mix. Larry King Live phoned
him at home while O. J. Simpson was rolling down the freeway in
his white Bronco. Hare says no every time (while his publisher gently
weeps).
Even in his particular area, Hare is unfailingly circumspect.
Asked if he thinks there will ever be a cure for psychopathy -- a drug,
an operation -- Hare steps back and examines the question. "The
psychopath will say 'A cure for what?' I don't feel comfortable calling
it a disease. Much of their behaviour, even the neurobiological patterns we
observe, could be because they're using different strategies to get
around the world. These strategies don't have to involve faulty wiring,
just different wiring."
Are these people qualitatively different from us? "I would think yes," says
Hare. "Do they form a discrete taxon or category? I would
say probably -- the evidence is suggesting that. But does this mean
that's because they have a broken motor? I don't know. It could be a
natural variation." True saints, completely selfless individuals, are
rare and unnatural too, he points out, but we don't talk about their
being diseased.
Psychopathy research is raising more questions than it can
answer, and many of them are leading to moral and ethical quagmires. For
example: the PCL-R has turned out to be the best single predictor of
recidivism that has ever existed; an offender with a high PCL-R score is three
or four times more likely to reoffend than someone with a low
score. Should a high PCL-R score, then, be sufficient grounds for
denying parole? Or perhaps a psychopathy test could be used to prevent
crime by screening individuals or groups at high risk -- for example,
when police get a frantic "My boyfriend says he'll kill me" call, or
when a teacher reports a student threatening to commit violence. Should
society institutionalize psychopaths, even if they haven't broken the
law?
The United Kingdom, partly in response to the 1993 abduction and murder of
two-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-olds, and partly in response to PCL-R
data, is in the process of creating a new legal
classification called Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD).
As it stands, the government proposes to allow authorities to detain
people declared DSPD, even if they have not committed a crime. (Sample
text from one of the Web sites that have sprung up in response: "I was
diagnosed with an untreatable personality disorder by a doctor who saw
me for ten minutes, he later claimed I was a psychopath. . . . Please
don't let them do this to me; don't let them do it to anybody. I'm not a danger
to the public, nor are most mentally ill people.")
Hare is a consultant on the DSPD project, and finds the
potential for abuse of power horrifying. So do scientists such as Dr.
Richard Tees, head of psychology at UBC, a colleague of Hare's since
1965. "I am concerned about our political masters deciding that the
PCL-R is the silver bullet that's going to fix everything," he says.
"We'll let people out [of prison] on the basis of scores on this, and
we'll put them in. And we'll take children who do badly on some version
of this and segregate them or something. It wasn't designed to do any of these
things. The problems that politicians are trying to solve are
fundamentally more complicated than the one that Bob has solved."
So many of these awkward questions would vanish if only there
were a functioning treatment program for psychopathy. But there isn't.
In fact, several studies have shown that existing treatment makes
criminal psychopaths worse. In one, psychopaths who underwent
social-skills and anger-management training before release had an 82
percent reconviction rate. Psychopaths who didn't take the program had a 59
percent reconviction rate. Conventional psychotherapy starts with
the assumption that a patient wants to change, but psychopaths are
usually perfectly happy as they are. They enrol in such programs to
improve their chances of parole. "These guys learn the words but not the
music," Hare says. "They can repeat all the psychiatric jargon -- 'I
feel remorse,' they talk about the offence cycle -- but these are words, hollow
words."
Hare has co-developed a new treatment program specifically for
violent psychopaths, using what he knows about the psychopathic
personality. The idea is to encourage them to be better by appealing not to
their (non-existent) altruism but to their (abundant) self-interest.
"It's not designed to change personality, but to modify
behaviour by, among other things, convincing them that there are ways
they can get what they want without harming others," Hare explains. The
program will try to make them understand that violence is bad, not for
society, but for the psychopath himself. (Look where it got you: jail.) A
similar program will soon be put in place for psychopathic offenders in the UK.
"The irony is that Canada could have had this all set up and
they could have been leaders in the world. But they dropped the ball
completely," Hare says, referring to his decade-old treatment proposal,
sitting on a shelf somewhere within Corrections Canada.
Even if Hare's treatment program works, it will only address the violent
minority of psychopaths. What about the majority, the
subclinical psychopaths milling all around us? At the moment, the only
thing Hare and his colleagues can offer is self-protection through
self-education. Know your own weaknesses, they advise, because the
psychopath will find and use them. Learn to recognize the psychopath,
they tell us, before adding that even experts are regularly taken in.
After thirty-five years of work, Bob Hare has brought us to the
stage where we know what psychopathy is, how much damage psychopaths do, and
even how to identify them. But we don't know how to treat them or
protect the population from them. The real work is just beginning.
Solving the puzzle of the psychopath is an invigorating prospect -- if
you're a scientist. Perhaps the rest of us can be forgiven for our
impatience to see the whole thing come to an end.
© 2001 Robert Hercz. Used with permission.
http://www.hare.org/links/saturday.html
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