Can you cure psychopath

But this is merely managing psychopathy and not curing it. The underlying malignancy remains. Similarly it has also been observed that putting psychopaths through therapy in an attempt to treat them can often make them worse. It merely allows them to pick up psycho-jargon from the therapist that they are then able to mirror back to others to give off a superficial air of emotional intelligence and literacy.

In other words, it makes them even more adept at deceiving people. It is as if any attempt to try and change them only makes them more determined to be the way they are. The more traits they score for the higher their total score; over a certain point they are normally diagnosed as a psychopath.

Psychopaths in clinical environments are assessed and diagnosed against a certain checklist of well known characteristic traits, such as lack of empathy, deceptiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness etc. These traits do not leave them and they are completely unresponsive to treatment. This brings into mind obvious questions around nature or nurture.

Are psychopaths born or made? There are studies which appear to show that psychopaths do indeed have defects in the structure of their brain which make processing emotion difficult or impossible. Research has shown that the uncinate fasciculus , the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex in particular do not connect and function in the same way they do with normal humans.

Processing of emotion and impulse and aggression control are impaired as a result. Similarly there are those that argue that upbringing and environment also play a role in the development of psychopathy and other personality disorders.

It is difficult to argue how our environment, particularly in our early years, cannot somehow play a role in the person we grow up to be as an adult.

A warm, empathic, caring environment during childhood will tend to produce an adult of the same general disposition, secure and confident of their place in the world and quite capable of connecting with and caring for others. Conversely, a harsh, uncaring, unloving environment during childhood, where the parents are constantly demeaning, belittling and dominating their child cannot fail to have some negative consequences on the development of the child and the adult they later become in life.

In extreme cases this may produce someone who is so closed off they are incapable of connecting with and caring for others, which is when they enter the realm of psychopathy. The fact that childhood has an impact on personality cannot now be reasonably disputed; the entire profession of psychotherapy is largely an effort to undo and repair much of the damage that is done to people by poor upbringing and parenting and the effect it has on them later in life in their relationships with others and how they function in the world.

So which is it then? Are psychopaths born with genetic brain defects which unavoidably make them the way they are or are there specific factors in their early environment and their relationships with their caregivers which make them prone to psychopathic behaviours and traits later in life?

Researchers are still undecided on the topic and no definitive answer has yet been found to this question. A reasonable conclusion to come to for now though is that it is probably a case of both nature and nurture in most cases of psychopathy. In other words, there may be a genetic disposition to it in terms of brain structure in some, and then a bad environment early in life fully brings out this dormant trait and turns it into full blown malevolent psychopathy.

To repeat the phrase used by Anthony Johnson in his excellent presentation on psychopathy:. Psychopathy is increasingly thought by experts to be genetically influenced, with certain people born with brain defects which prevent emotional processing, empathy and impulse control.

This view is further supported by another interesting account given by Stefan Verstappen is his equally excellent interview on psychopathy, where he details a physicist who submitted himself to testing and indeed found himself to have all the brain defects that would indicate psychopathy.

See the 46 minute mark where they discuss this. He had the genetic markers for psychopathy but not the evil, malevolent, scheming behaviour patterns that the worst ones do. Wherever it comes from though, psychopathy can be identified by observing a series of now well known behaviour patterns over a period of time in someone, and this is the crucial thing to remember when spotting and defending against these predators.

Where their disorder comes is in a sense irrelevant in this regard; it is about recognizing and getting away from them as quickly as possible whenever we find ourselves caught in their midst. We say this because the only real psychopaths that are available for testing in a controlled environment are those which have been apprehended for horrendous crimes and sent through the criminal justice system.

As one psychopath put it, "These programs are like a finishing school. They teach you how to put the squeeze on people. There is hope for curing psychopaths, however, and that comes in the form of the treatment of juveniles with psychopathic tendencies " child psychopaths " - psychopathy can't formally be diagnosed until adulthood.

In this population, a treatment that is a conglomeration of other theories and practices called "decompression treatment," has been used with some success. Initially, in , decompression treatment was tried in a small number of children with psychopathic behaviors 10 received decompression treatment, 10 received group therapy, 10 received no therapy.

In the two year follow-up period:. The next, larger, study followed incarcerated boys all considered to be "unmanageable" for 54 months 4. In this study, again, the results were positive:. Additional study has seen similar results and shown that decompression treatment is highly effective in reducing institutional misconduct and recidivism. However, the issue with decompression therapy is that in order for it to be successful, it must be applied for a very long period of time and this is part of the reason for the lengths of these studies.

It appears that short-term decompression treatment is not effective but this treatment used for up to and over a year, is effective, particularly in those with less severe psychopathic tendencies. They also averaged in the severe range on the Youth Psychopathy Checklist, the gold standard for predicting whether a youth will be diagnosed a full-fledged psychopath as an adult.

The hallmark of the Decompression Model is positive reinforcement. The institutionalized youth are monitored continuously by all staff members for any sign of positive behavior, however small. When spotted, the behavior is reinforced with some sort of reward. The youth are also told that their rewards can scale, meaning the longer they persist with good behavior, the greater the prizes become.

What starts out as a pat on the shoulder graduates to a candy bar, which graduates to the right to play video games, and so on and so forth.

The youth were being introduced to the simple benefits of social society. Researchers followed both groups over a five-year period, even after they were released. After all, crime exacts a tremendous monetary and an emotional toll.