If Psychiatrists Can’t Even Define a Psychopath…

     Labeling someone a psychopath was one of the earliest diagnoses ever in the psychiatric field. Signer of the American Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush, began describing the personality of the psychopath in 1786 as a biological disorder. He noted that the “disease” impairs the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, and the field of psychiatry has unsuccessfully grappled with a satisfactory definition of this “biological disorder” ever since.

     In this week’s Aeon website, Assistant Professor of Forensic Epistemology at the University of Toronto, Rasmus Larsen, chronicles the history of psychiatry’s failed attempts to come up with any consensus for an exact definition of a psychopath. Despite the vast research of hundreds of empirical studies of psychopathy, not one biological marker has been found that distinguishes a psychopath from anybody else. No study has been able to find any distinctions in skin conductance, heart rate, brain activity, or any other physical reactions between a psychopath and a normal person.

     In addition, more than 60 studies of almost 6000 subjects have failed to find any distinction for an absence of empathy in those diagnosed with psychopathy compared to “normal” people. 27 other recent studies also failed to find any evidence of any “shallow emotions” in diagnosed psychopaths compared to “normal,” control group subjects.

     If more than two centuries of research into this earliest of psychiatric labels has failed to reveal any demonstrable criteria behind the diagnosis of a psychopath, what does that say about the psychiatric methods used for all the other diagnoses in psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual?

     The criteria psychiatrists have been using and the methods of analysis they have been applying are apparently ineffective. These psychiatrist are, unfortunately, the same people who have come up with the other 300 or so disorders in the DSM-V. If even “psychopath” is not a mental disorder that can be indentified by these people, how then can any of these other disorders be valid?

     Are there then no psychopaths? 

     Of course there are. Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and others. Any one can see that. It’s only a psychiatrist who can’t see that. Or define it.

     And a psychiatrist probably can’t accurately define any other mental disorder either.