Serious question: Can someone explain something?

CrazyRabbit

walshb wrote: »

I read about that. These guys are plain evil, they will not be healed or rehabilitated.
Some people are born evil, it's no different than some people being born with red hair or black hair etc. These two are evil, always will be. Bullet to the head now to prevent any future damage

From what I've read, the two boys who committed these terrible acts were raised in an extremely violent, unstructured and insecure environment. I don't in any way condone what they have done, but I can't help but see them as victims as well. If they had even half-decent parents then they would never have committed these crimes.

BTW...evil doesn't exist. It's a word used by people who find it hard to grasp the complexities of mental illness and socially dysfunctional behaviour. Conscience & morality are learned traits. A young baby has no concept of these and are in effect, extremely selfish. Children are gradually taught the difference between right & wrong, and the associated shame/fear with doing something wrong. This shapes their morality.

Nodin

CrazyRabbit wrote: »

From what I've read, the two boys who committed these terrible acts were raised in an extremely violent, unstructured and insecure environment. I don't in any way condone what they have done, but I can't help but see them as victims as well. If they had even half-decent parents then they would never have committed these crimes.

A pair of disasters the two of them. Ideally something will be done to repair the damage in the period of their detention, rather than more harm done.

nacho libre

Biggins wrote: »

I posed (and still do) the general question as regarding what we see as possible "phyco's",

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.


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 ****." 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.

OutlawPete

Well you wouldn't post that last post on Twitter, I can tell ya

MaybeLogic

OutlawPete wrote: »

Well you wouldn't post that last post on Twitter, I can tell ya

That's what he's been doing since yesterday morning.
He probably didn't even notice Boards going down.

Ickle Magoo

Unless Nacho Libre is Robert Hercz, then it's just a cut & paste job from here...

http://www.hare.org/links/saturday.html

MaybeLogic

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

Unless Nacho Libre is Robert Hercz, then it's just a cut & paste job from here...

There was me thinking he wrote it all out.:rolleyes::p

itac

I can't remember who it was, but someone in this thread asked how did the police/social workers fail? Between the police and the social workers, they missed at least 30 different opportunitites to intervene (according to this piece)

Placing two children (known to social services et al for causing trouble consistently) with a couple in their sixties in a quiet village, should also have raised some sort of alarm bells with someone in the services-how in the hell did they think that was a good idea?!!


Rehabilition may or may not work, but there's no way to prove it unfortunately. I'm sure it would be very easy to train yourself to give the answers you know the parole board/case reviewers will want to hear, and to act in such a way that will gain you a good name.

I do realise that yes, the two torturers had s***e lives growing up as well, and you have to look to their parents too. Reading the details of their home life before that is depressing reading (although obviously not as depressing as the case itself...) There is talk of the parents facing charges, but god only knows how that will work out.

I've always been of the opinon that there's got to be some good in everyone (yes, I am that character in the film who gets killed for being gullible enough to believe that the murderer has changed...:rolleyes:) but I can honestly say, if this had happened to one of my family, I doubt I would be able to forgive, and wish the two torturers a happy new anonymous life in ten/fifteen years.....

Jay P

I shuddered every time this came on the tv today, and I only knew the bare bones of the story. That article is just scary.

dylano_k

Yeh dont jamie bulgers' killers both have new names and i think i heard they are in college in America somewhere.

OP are these the 2 kids that said they tortured these kids because they are "Bored" ??

They should be left to rot and suffer in a cold dark cell.

sam34

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

IIRC the child psychologist on the case said the younger brother had the potential to develop into a psychopath - which would infer neither are actually psychopaths at the moment, or at least no one has diagnosed them as such. I'm not actually not sure of the legalities of being able to label a still growing and changing child's personality as life long psychosis, I suspect it's frowned upon.

there is a vast vast avst difference between being a psychopath and having psychosis, they are not the same things at all

Ickle Magoo

sam34 wrote: »

there is a vast vast avst difference between being a psychopath and having psychosis, they are not the same things at all

I didn't say they were....

sam34

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

I didn't say they were....

from the post i qouted above, where you discussed that someone said one of them had the potential to become a psychopath, and you then went on to query whether an evolving personality could be labelled as psychosis, it very much looked like you did.

why did you bring teh issue of psychosis into the discussion so?

theres been nothing to suggest either of them were psychotic

Ickle Magoo

Psychosis translates as abnormality of mind. I didn't say having a psychosis or a psychiatric psychosis, I said life long psychosis ie a life long abnormality such as psychopathy. I would also suggest that in order to make young boys sexually abuse each other out of boredom & drop breeze blocks on a child's head, they would need to have either absolutely no empathy or have a degree of disconnection from reality - which could potentially point to either.

sam34

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

Psychosis translates as abnormality of mind. I didn't say having a psychosis or a psychiatric psychosis, I said life long psychosis ie a life long abnormality such as psychopathy. I would also suggest that in order to make young boys sexually abuse each other out of boredom & drop breeze blocks on a child's head, they would need to have either absolutely no empathy or have a degree of disconnection from reality - which could potentially point to either.

the phrase "abnormality of mind" is very generic and covers a multitude.

psychosis is loosely described as "out of touch with reality", but it is more specific than that - it generally involves some abnormal experiences, such as hallucinations or delusions and paranoid features.

psychopathy involves lack of remorse, lack of empathy, manipulation, coldness, calculating behaviour etc

saying "lifelong psychosis ie lifelong abnormality such as psychopathy" just doesnt make sense.

its like saying "lung cancer ie abnormal respiratory system such as asthma"

the two are separate entities.

(they can co-exist, obviously, but they are separate conditions)

Ickle Magoo

The whole field is generic and covers a multitude. I think a life-long psychosis meaning a long term abnormality is quite obviously distinct from a psychotic episode.

sam34

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

The whole field is generic and covers a multitude. I think a life-long psychosis meaning a long term abnormality is quite obviously distinct from a psychotic episode.

life-long psychosis is a life long abnormality

psychopathy is a lifelong abnormality

psychosis and psychopathy are not the same clinical entity

you cant substitute the word "psychosis" for "lifelong abnormality" in my second sentance

Ickle Magoo

I didn't, I said life-long psychosis.

I pointed out the behaviours of boys who had been deemed to have psychopathic potential were unlikely to be diagnosed with any life-long psychosis.

I think you are getting your knickers in a twist over nothing - again.

Ickle Magoo

Nice ninja edit.

sam34

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

I said life long psychosis ie a life long abnormality such as psychopathy.

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

I didn't, I said life-long psychosis.

I pointed out the behaviours of boys who had been deemed to have psychopathic potential were unlikely to be diagnosed with any life-long psychosis.

I think you are getting your knickers in a twist over nothing - again.

the term "life-long psychosis" is not interchangable with "lifelong abnormality" either. while a lifelong psychosis is a lifelong abnormality, all lifelong abnormailties are not lifelong psychosis.

so just because lifelong psychosis is a lifelong abnormality that does not mean it is the same or even similar to (as alluded to in your quote above "...such as...") psychopathy.


as i said, its like saying lung cancer is a respiratory abnormality such as asthma

and you didnt say it was unlikely to happen, you wondered if it was legally possible.

Ickle Magoo

Yet again, I didn't say all lifelong abnormalities are not lifelong psychosis. Even if I had, please point me in the way of some generally widely accepted findings that categorically rules out life-long psychosis or long term psychotic behaviour as ever being part of or leading to psychopathic tendencies.

When asked their professional opinion in a court of law, a psychiatrist in connection with the case stated the younger brother "had the potential" to become a psychopath - I'm presuming that they said "potential" because they are not allowed by court or their profession to make such a proclamation about a minor despite your suggestions that psychopathy is a life-long and clearly discernible abnormality - I am open to being corrected, of course.

Are you suggesting lung cancer isn't a respiratory abnormality, or asthma isn't?

oppenheimer1

genericguy wrote: »

this is because the world is run by liberal pc pricks who think that this kind of carry on is a cry for help, rather than cutting through the shit and saying things as they are - some people are cnuts, and cnuts beget more cnuts. in cases like this, keys should be thrown away, and bastards like that should be harvested for organs.

If you really believe that is justice, well you are no better than the two torturers, however i suspect thats nothing more than typical AH keyboard warrior bull****

While what the children did was awful, to write them off from birth is a bit beyond harsh. These children had the worst parents possible, who neglected and subjected them to violence pornography and drugs. Anyone brought up in that environment is going to be severely affected and malconditioned. The milligram experiment showed all humans are capable of evil. If you are raised in the environment of a animal, is it any surprise if you display those traits?

Do I think these youngsters should ever be released? I don't know. They are possibly so damaged they could be a real persistant danger into the future.

Carsinian Thau

Biggins wrote: »

(1) They tried damn hard enough, thankfully they failed (although given possible scared mental state of the two survivors in future years to come, one must wonder is it a blessing or a curse).

It's probably a curse to be honest. As much as I hate to say it, surviving something like this is probably not a good thing.

This is mental trauma that they simply will never be able to get over. No amount of counselling or therapy can take those memories away and it's probably too big to repress (at least, not forever).


And Biggins, there is no satisfactory answer to your question. Personally, I feel that they're animals and that they should be put down. Or at least medicated to catatonia for the rest of their lives.

Carsinian Thau

Just found this: http://www.breakingnews.ie/world/child-who-tortured-young-boys-now-likeable-and-well-behaved-442976.html

Personally, I don't buy it.

strobe

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

It was an actual question. If you are going to use an alternative reality to try and prove your point, I was just curious how that works. It's easy to say if someone had X, Y or Z that whatever would never have happened but I'm not sure how you actually prove that is categorically the case - there for rendering the point moot. I suspect both upbringing and natural predilection plays a part - some people are raised in horrendous situations and abused beyond comprehension and don't go on to hurt other people. There seems to have to be a particular set of circumstances at work for these, thankfully rare, cases to occur and how a child is raised seems to be only one par of that.

Then we agree on almost everything. (sorry for dragging this thread back to page 1 with this post)

Thucydides

Strange. This case receved widespread coverage last year. I remember reading a full four page spread on it last September in The Times. No one I knew had so much have heard of it.

Understandebly, I remember being shocked, but also shocked that not one of the TV news outlets here took it up.

Yet again, people / news outlets in Ireland seem more concerned with the old chestnuts such 'a house burning down in mysterious circumstances in Longford' or maybe Padraig Walshe moaning about 'the need for more farm subsidies'.

As regards dealing with the perpetrators, well they need to be punished -severely. However, they also need a chance to redeem themselves. Changing their names (with conditions) etc is an essential tool to acheive this.

The alternative is the mob - and the tabloids - never leaving them alone again.

sam34

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

Psychosis translates as abnormality of mind. I didn't say having a psychosis or a psychiatric psychosis, I said life long psychosis ie a life long abnormality such as psychopathy

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

Yet again, I didn't say all lifelong abnormalities are not lifelong psychosis.

.

the part of your post which i have bolded above indicates that you think lifelong psychosis and psychopathy are interchangeable by virtue of them being lifelong conditions.

thats simply incorrect.

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

Even if I had, please point me in the way of some generally widely accepted findings that categorically rules out life-long psychosis or long term psychotic behaviour as ever being part of or leading to psychopathic tendencies..

nobody is saying they cannot co-exist in teh same person. of course they can. as can any physical or mental conditions. however, that does not mean one is part of the other or leads to the other.

if someone has diabetes and epilepsy, that doesnt mean that epilepsy is aprt of the diabetes, or vice versa.

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

When asked their professional opinion in a court of law, a psychiatrist in connection with the case stated the younger brother "had the potential" to become a psychopath - I'm presuming that they said "potential" because they are not allowed by court or their profession to make such a proclamation about a minor despite your suggestions that psychopathy is a life-long and clearly discernible abnormality - I am open to being corrected, of course..

a psychiatrist or psychologist (as you initially said)? those terms are not interchangeable either

psychopathy is not generally diagnosed in minors. howeve, there are some conditions and personality traits in minors which are viewed as potential precursors of adult psychopathy.

you speculated in that post if they ahdnt been diagnosed as psychopaths yet because one couldnt make a diagnoses fo lifelong psychosis in a minor -
again, that just makes no sense! its like saying they havent been diagnosed with emphysema because you cant diagnose asthma yet. they are separate clinical entities.

Ickle Magoo wrote: »

Are you suggesting lung cancer isn't a respiratory abnormality, or asthma isn't?

no, dont be ridiculous.

im using the analogy to show that because they are both chronic respiratory conditions does not mean they can be equated and interchanged, similar to psychosis and psychopathy

Dubit10

genericguy wrote: »

this is because the world is run by liberal pc pricks who think that this kind of carry on is a cry for help, rather than cutting through the shit and saying things as they are - some people are cnuts, and cnuts beget more cnuts. in cases like this, keys should be thrown away, and bastards like that should be harvested for organs.

+1

miss_shadow

sam34 wrote: »

.

the part of your post which i have bolded above indicates that you think lifelong psychosis and psychopathy are interchangeable by virtue of them being lifelong conditions.

thats simply incorrect.




nobody is saying they cannot co-exist in teh same person. of course they can. as can any physical or mental conditions. however, that does not mean one is part of the other or leads to the other.

if someone has diabetes and epilepsy, that doesnt mean that epilepsy is aprt of the diabetes, or vice versa.





a psychiatrist or psychologist (as you initially said)? those terms are not interchangeable either

psychopathy is not generally diagnosed in minors. howeve, there are some conditions and personality traits in minors which are viewed as potential precursors of adult psychopathy.

you speculated in that post if they ahdnt been diagnosed as psychopaths yet because one couldnt make a diagnoses fo lifelong psychosis in a minor -
again, that just makes no sense! its like saying they havent been diagnosed with emphysema because you cant diagnose asthma yet. they are separate clinical entities.





no, dont be ridiculous.

im using the analogy to show that because they are both chronic respiratory conditions does not mean they can be equated and interchanged, similar to psychosis and psychopathy

I think he is missing the point..

Ickle Magoo

You are making your own inferences.

sam34 wrote: »

a psychiatrist or psychologist (as you initially said)? those terms are not interchangeable either

:pac: God al-feckin-mighty. I said IIRC and commented based on my memory of the piece, seriously now. This is after hours, not a psychiatry paper you are marking for clinical inaccuracies.

sam34 wrote: »

psychopathy is not generally diagnosed in minors. howeve, there are some conditions and personality traits in minors which are viewed as potential precursors of adult psychopathy.

you speculated in that post if they ahdnt been diagnosed as psychopaths yet because one couldnt make a diagnoses fo lifelong psychosis in a minor -
again, that just makes no sense! its like saying they havent been diagnosed with emphysema because you cant diagnose asthma yet. they are separate clinical entities.

Speaking of not making sense, I'm not sure I even understand what you are writing now. I have already pointed out I said psychosis as defined to my layman terms as an abnormality of mind, you intentionally rubbished that, substituted my intended definition with a specific psychiatric term and have been jumping up and down about the inaccuracy of using a specific psychiatric term er after.

sam34 wrote: »

no, dont be ridiculous.

Yeah, cos jumping on one word in one post in after hours that was prefixed with IIRC could never be accused of ridiculousness.

sam34 wrote: »

im using the analogy to show that because they are both chronic respiratory conditions does not mean they can be equated and interchanged, similar to psychosis and psychopathy

It was a terrible analogy - you cannot say being short of breath is definitely asthma and not lung cancer, or visa versa when you haven't the evidence for full diagnosis to rule out either or both. I was using life-long psychosis as a very general blanket definition as the boy had clearly been diagnosed with something which one day could be classed as psychopathy - the point I was making was to those who were already labelling these two as psychopaths or inferring their personalities were complete. My use or blanket definition of psychosis obviously irks you personally but other than a little boring too'ing and fro'ing about the accuracy or inaccuracy of specific clinical definitions used very much out-with a clinical setting, it adds precisely zero to the general discussion.