To think some children are budding psychopaths?

[brasty]

I know being a psychopath does not mean that you will be violent or criminal. It does mean that you do not really feel empathy for anyone else and have a lack of a conscience.

I think rightly children are not labelled as psychopaths, but I do think children who are showing these traits should get proper treatment and their parents should get proper advice and support.

Children showing psychopathic traits are those pre puberty children who are bullies, setting fires, lying routinely, showing no empathy for others, deliberately cruel to animals, and for whom punishment has no impact. A child has to have a number of these issues, many children bully for example, but still show empathy towards people they love.

But at the moment, parents with children showing these traits, receive little help, and are often blamed for causing their child's behavior. There seems to be resistance to seeing this in young children.

That's interesting brasty when we looked at it at university I felt sick thinking about all the prem babies/pnd babies etc. It's good to know it's not as severe as it's made out.
Was also taught that there is another window at around 7 years old and once that window is passed the damage it often irreversible.

I agree with bellasuewow, and John Locke, the mind of a baby is tabula rasa. There is no language, only a capacity to develop language, and all the neural pathways are not formed, the brain has great plasticity and develops over time. I think nurture plays a greater part than nature, even early trauma such as being left to cry for extended periods as a small baby, or having a mother suffering from severe PND, or a main care giver who fails to bond and show empathy, or respond with warmth, or parents who are emotionally absent will have some effect on brain development. I think that it is also entirely possible to use intellect to decide on normative actions, without any recourse to empathy, and that many scientists, mathematicians and philosophers probably fall into this group!

Human behaviour is a spectrum. What people think of as sociopathy can actually be very beneficial - a leader during wartime isn't going to be much good if every individual death hits them. A surgeon isn't going to be any good if they have empathy past a point - they neeed to see the body as a machine, to some extent.
We have a long history as a species, and only recently have we started living in such large groups. What we consider as unusual personality types may be in fact beneficial in certain settings - risk takers are needed in dire times, nurturers in others. The spread and variety of personality types is just another aspect of our variation. In the past these traits may well have been beneficial and they continue to be beneficial today - a large proportion of people who are successful are actually not what you'd call particularly nice. There's a certain level just below the C suite where the shark eyes kick in.

There's no medical diagnosis of psychopathy.

I have met many people over the course of my life who are 'the type.' Some have become incredibly successful, some are in jail, some are just out making lives hell.

We are all a mixture of nature and nurture. Babies aren't blank slates but neither are they unaffected by their upbringing. And abuse and neglect is not always beating/sexually abusing. It can be very subtle emotional damage that is actually crippling and you would never guess from even knowing the family well. Just go look at the stately homes thread.

It's an interesting area of study. We don't have all the answers by a long way and maybe we never will.

I thought the thing with 7 years old, was that for severely neglected children, and I am talking about children left to lie alone in a room or cot year after year, if they are rescued, they need to be rescued before 7 to learn language. After that age they can learn words and phrases, but not be able to put them together to have long conversations.
Also children this neglected, will often have what some have described, as autism by neglect. It is not true autism, but simply they have had too many years of being totally ignored to learn to relate normally to others.

But these are the kind of children who are found in a bedroom at 7, in dirty nappies, never having been held or talked to, and only given milk in bottles. That level of neglect is incredibly rare.

I'm pretty sure I have one in my class right now.

Schadenfruede am not sure what went in their house tbh. I was only a child myself.

He had 2 older brothers and a younger sister who are all pretty normal. Maybe he was left out when the sister was born? I don't know.

I suspect disowning him was as much to do with shame as what it was to being disgusted by what he did. Or the final straw after years of his abuse to them as much as anyone else. It was a big thing locally and although a couple of other people were also charged and sentenced his wasnthe name most people associate with it.

Was also taught that there is another window at around 7 years old and once that window is passed the damage it often irreversible.
This is terrifying. I know of a child (indirectly) who has done something quite terrible. He's 7. It's awful to think he is beyond being saved so to speak.

ihatebikerides What makes you think that?

I used to be a teacher. I used Ronson's book about psychopaths to see if any children might be. One in particular stands out. It would not surprise me if he is in the paper in a few years having killed family or a girlfriend. No girls would go out with him and no teachers liked him. Utterly callous foul boy. Sad, as a teacher, to meet it. Glad I'm not, any more.

I am not talking about children with signs of personality disorder, that is a pretty catch all term. The number of young children who show real signs of being budding psychopaths is small. There is work going on with young adults who show these traits to a very high degree, and it is showing some success.

I said antisocial personality disorder. What work is going on? I am genuinely interested. I know that adults with the disorder don't respond to psychotherapy, but some work involving behaviour modification goes on, e.g. in prisons.

The window is actually narrower than that I think - from the cases we have there's just a couple of critics years to acquire some linguistic forms. They are such troubling cases - truly horrific. And actually more common than you might think.

I have a family member who works in a school. Decent area, not super posh but by no means rough. She's seen I think three cases of such severe neglect that a child had severe attachment disorders and non functional language. In all three cases a younger sibling was recovered too and had a slightly better outcome but was still very badly affected. The early years are really critical. I don't think babies are a true tabula rasa (although I'm open to argument on that) I'm a geneticist and I see some things that are insurmountable. At the same time I think babies are incredibly impressionable in many ways (and robust in others.) neglect o any type has a profound effect.

It may not be the most popular opinion but cases like that make me think that some people should never be allowed to have children. Truly horrendous.

Also Frouby I wonder if we know the same person? I do wonder if there is a point when it doesn't matter that they are your child, you just cannot have a relationship with them?

I have a cousin who is currently in prison at the tender age of 18...has served a year after doing time at a youth correctional facility too.

He has zero remorse what he has done:-
Attacking people
Robbing
Crashing houses
Destroying pubs and clubs

However he did have a very disturbing childhood. Think drug addicted dad, mum running away with children, dad abducting them back, police standoffs and when the parents finally got back together, father died from heart attack after years of drug abuse.

Now his brain must be wired differently as he was not the only child going through this. He wasn't the oldest or the youngest. Though he was the youngest for a short period before his mum had another child with another man.

Now all the children have their faults, but none of them apart from him have been criminal

It's a great problem Frouby - I mean, he could have been an unresponsive baby that his parents found hard to bond with, while his siblings were a joy. Or maybe his mother had PND, or his parents were going through a rocky patch when he was born, or he looked like a family member they disliked - it's so very. very complex, isn't it?

Or he could have had wonderful care and just had a cerebral short-circuit.

If we could discover the causes (because I'll bet that there are many and various, and that they will also impact differently on different children) and learn how to cope with them, how much pain could be avoided.

DixieFlatLine There was a documentary about the work with young men in prisons. They asked prisons to send their most dangerous young prisoners, and then screened them for psychopathy. They said the hardest to treat are those without abusive backgrounds.
I have since read about other work happening in the US. Parents are offered free sessions to advise on how to parent children with psychopathic traits, in just one state though. And I think there is a bit of work going on in Canada?

But it is in its infancy. Some people have realised that we need to do something about this. And there has been increasing research into identifying young children with these traits.

There is a logical fallacy in "severe neglect causes psychopathic behaviour" = "all cases of psychopathic behaviour must therefore be due to neglect".

Falling on your head from a height is known to cause unconsciousness. That does not mean all cases of unconsciousness are caused by people falling from a height and that any denial of such an event having taken place is just people trying to cover the tracks.

I don't think we know enough about psychopathic behaviour yet to be able to say for sure what must have caused it in individual cases.

But I do know, as a parent whose child suffers from anxiety, that it is very easy for everybody around to make assumptions about the kind of parent I must be, even though they've never actually seen me parent (it's over-protective and uptight for anxiety).

But the situation at the moment seems to be that there is so much fear about wrongly labelling young children, so instead parents and children simply get no help at all.

^This

My Health Visitor tried to get help for Son2 when he was pre-school but the Paediatrician turned us away at the first appointment saying he didn't like to put labels on children. He's fifteen now and I would swear, as much as I could, that he is Autistic. He's had three different diagnoses of whether he is Dyslexic or not as well, so I'll probably never know. Not helpful. I realize none of this is about being a psychopath I was just saying it as an example of the not labelling thing resulting in people not getting much needed help

What work is going on? I am genuinely interested

Mixed bag, and not enough money being put into it. BPd (borderline) is quite treatable with the correct therapy. Other personality disorders seem more fixed.

My opinion? I think we look at mental disorders in a way that totally wrong. We classify depression as one big thing, schizophrenia as another, but many disorders have overlapping symptoms and almost NONE of them are diagnosable empirically via lab tests. We are guessing.

I see drug trial data as well as this just reinforces that opinion.

I think we are looking at mental disorders wrongly. Depression, psychosis, etc can be a rational response to an unbearable situation. I don't believe in the 'just a chemical imbalance' theory either. We are a very complex mix of genetics and environment, and right now we don't have a good theory to account for what comes out at the end.

I think it would be better to not use the term psychopath you have to remember what you can unconsciously project

Of course some children will grow up and have antisocial personality disorder but the term psychopath is so loaded and so over used

Some children you will see difficult and challenging behaviour but to wright them off potential psychopaths is ridiculous and really not helpful they are highly likely to have experienced neglect, chaotic and/or abusive upbringings

Anatidae, my experience from a money-strapped NHS is that doctors are very happy to assume that everything is due to environment, particularly in children, because that lays the onus fairly on the parents.

Have posted before about the unedifying scene of a young adult seeking help for extreme anxiety and memory loss and being told this was typical for young girls in abusive relationships (she kept repeating she isn't in a relationship, of any kind).

This is about the opposite of writing off children.

Agree there is no clear evidence about what causes psychopathic traits. But the evidence there is suggests either abuse with perhaps an inherited tendency, or being born with this tendency. There is growing evidence that some people are bornw

There was a really interesting book I saw recommended on here once called And I Don't want to live this life by the mother of Nancy Spungen (of Sex Pistols / Sid Vicious fame) and this details how Nancy displayed psychopathic tendencies from a very young age and how she almost tore her (privileged, middle class) family apart. She could speak full sentences at 18 months old and her parents and siblings lived in fear of her. IIRC her mother used to lock her siblings in their bedrooms at night for their own safety. It sounded horrifying.

I wonder how many politicians would be found to be classic psychopaths?

That's awful cory

I've found psychotherapy (proper in depth stuff) and antidepressants to help a bit with my anxiety.

I'm afraid that good talking therapy isn't cheap - which I'm sure fuels the NHS dogma of CBT and pills for everything. CBT is useful for some things but it's not the cure all it's touted as - it is however cheap. :(

I hope she can get some help, it sounds terrifying.

Psychopaths can be very successful in business though so it's hardly a problem unless they start experimenting on next doors moggies

Sorry. I've just lived through an earthquake where a lot of new buildings in my neighbourhood fell down because the developer saved money but using inferior materials and not building them to withstand earthquakes. There is something seriously wrong with anyone who can build a building in a known earthquake zone knowing it will fall down and much as I love cats, this much, much worse.