tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post5973183552357014534..comments2024-03-12T22:31:46.500-04:00Comments on What Would Phoebe Do?: The parenting-a-sociopath questionPhoebe Maltz Bovyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17996039330841139883noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-59900974765076309612012-12-25T14:32:07.061-05:002012-12-25T14:32:07.061-05:00I assumed you were claiming that psychopathy is a ...<i>I assumed you were claiming that psychopathy is a constant and that somehow one could be simultaneously a psychopath and an upstanding person.</i><br /><br />I'll take your word for it, but in that case your interpretation of what I was saying just wasn't reasonable. Obviously, I could not have been arguing that people could be upstanding super-moral people while still being criminals. I don't want to make too much of this; everybody occasionally makes unreasonable interpretations of Internet comments, but I hope you can see how I came to the conclusion about your beliefs that I did. The only way I could make your interpretation reasonable was to assume that <i>you</i> believed that these diagnoses were fixed and therefore assumed everybody else believed it as well. Otherwise, it makes no sense that you would ascribe to me such a belief. Again, we all on occasion come to conclusions that make no sense and I believe your explanation of events.<br /><br /><i>Your desire for a new definition that would describe only something unchangeable about the person is actually what's going more in the direction of 'psychopathy is a psychological diagnosis that offers no possibility of change.'</i><br /><br />My hope is that psychological diagnoses will one day actually be about what at least <i>might</i> be illness or at least serious abnormality, rather than simply about moral disapproval of how people are living their lives or (particularly in teenagers) coping with the struggles of adolescence. I do not necessarily accept that the inability to make the moral/conventional distinction is unchangeable. Even if so, in normal medicine, we make diagnoses about things which can't be changed all the time. But, if we know the problem, we might be able to figure out a way to ameliorate it, even if we can't cure it. <br /><br />In retrospect, it is crystal clear that I was never suffering from an illness. (I could always make the moral/conventional distinction as a teenager or older.) I was a victim of the bad philosophy of the surrounding culture and a rational personality which actually took such philosophy seriously. (Most higher empathy people have their emotions override their foolish intellectual beliefs and have no such problems. I had to rely on my foolish intellectual beliefs.) Combine this with the usual challenges of adolescence (particularly for teenage boys) and some traumas which needed to be dealt with and the behavior I exhibited was the result. But it clearly wasn't a disease. A real disease can't be cured by philosophy.<br /><br /><i>In the absence of seeing the criteria, I wouldn't assume anything about what you'd score on items like those, unless you have clear memories about being criticized for "lacks goals" and "irresponsibility" by people who were dealing with other children of the same age who had difficult home situations.</i><br /><br />I never went to school. I skipped 80 days of school my sophomore year in high school and 140 my junior year. I'm not sure <i>I</i> would argue that I lacked goals or was irresponsible, but there's no question this was the opinion of virtually all of the adults (and peers) around me. I cannot speak, of course, for that particular psychologist. Nor do I remember the interviews or what information I might have told her. <br /><br />In any event, the two siblings I accused of lacking goals or irresponsibility are the two who would <i>never</i> have been accused of these during childhood. Both were straight A students with huge amounts of musical and other extra-curriculars. My other sibling and myself, meanwhile, were both juvenile delinquents and yet somehow both of us adapted much better to life after school. It is quite probable that the experience of my family is fundamentally unusual and this sort of reversal is actually very rare, despite my family being 4-for-4 in that regard. Nevertheless, you can probably see why I am so skeptical of any idea that we can infer the behavior of the adult from the behavior of the child.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-31566243122596285172012-12-25T12:05:58.421-05:002012-12-25T12:05:58.421-05:00Andrew,
The headline of the article wasn't in...Andrew,<br /><br />The headline of the article wasn't in this comment thread. Your remarks about the psychopathy discussion in the article were in this thread.<br /><br /><i>The last non-parenthetical sentence in particular made an implicit assumption that psychopathy is a constant, just something you're born with</i><br /><br />Not at all. On the contrary, I think many psychiatric diagnoses can alter -- whether with the application of therapy, medication, self-will or just time. Otherwise such diagnoses would be fairly useless, mere categorizations without any hope of help. I misunderstood what you said here: "but a great many psychopaths develop into perfectly pleasant and upstanding people." I assumed <i>you</i> were claiming that psychopathy is a constant and that somehow one could be simultaneously a psychopath <i>and</i> an upstanding person.<br /><br />Your desire for a new definition that would describe only something unchangeable about the person is actually what's going more in the direction of "psychopathy is a psychological diagnosis that offers no possibility of change." Also, it would be problematic to diagnose not only in children, but also in adults who aren't very articulate. That one has difficulty describing the distinction between what is moral and what is conventional may be more about one's verbal intelligence than one's psychological state.<br /><br /><i>At that age, I would have scored highly on both "Lacks Goals" and "Irresponsibility," though not particularly on "Impulsivity." Even as a child, I was probably less impulsive than normal.</i><br /><br />In the absence of seeing the criteria, I wouldn't assume anything about what you'd score on items like those, unless you have clear memories about being criticized for "lacks goals" and "irresponsibility" by people who were dealing with other children of the same age who had difficult home situations. I remember being criticized by family and teachers for some of the noted traits, but I don't recall ever being psychologically tested; my parents interpreted misbehavior as a sign of actual moral failing, in the sense of something one could choose to do differently but consciously and deliberately doesn't, not as a quasi-medical problem. But that view might have changed if I'd responded to my mom's reminders to do things by pulling out a knife as a defense against her nagging.PGhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09381347581328622706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-86855303654487318122012-12-24T03:28:09.374-05:002012-12-24T03:28:09.374-05:00By the way, the "provocation" I was refe...By the way, the "provocation" I was referring to was:<br /><br />"I'm also skeptical of assessing whether any given pleasant, upstanding, super-moral person is a psychopath without looking at whether they have the distinctive brain anatomy or actually test on Hare's Checklist as psychopaths rather than merely anti-social. In particular, I'm curious as to how someone could be upstanding and super-moral while engaging in pathological lying and failing to accept responsibility for her own actions. (The "pleasant" is no difficulty for a psychopathic personality.)"<br /><br />The last non-parenthetical sentence in particular made an implicit assumption that psychopathy is a constant, just something you're born with, when clearly the diagnosis includes <i>behavior</i>, not just possibly fixed personality traits. This is why I proposed a new definition which focused on something like the inability to make the moral/conventional distinction. That <i>might</i> indicate an impaired moral intuition and may be something which can't be changed.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-80332051938866992272012-12-24T03:19:09.257-05:002012-12-24T03:19:09.257-05:00PG, actually the article you linked to was the fir...PG, actually the article you linked to was the first to mention it. It's in the title of the article.<br /><br />Nobody used the PPI to diagnose me. (Most importantly, because it did not yet exist. I also remained completely unmedicated because the modern pharmaceuticals that would probably be used nowadays were non-existent at the time.) I assume they used Hare's checklist, but the criteria used for diagnosis was not included in my records and I don't have very specific recollections of the battery of tests I took. At that age, I would have scored highly on both "Lacks Goals" and "Irresponsibility," though not particularly on "Impulsivity." Even as a child, I was probably less impulsive than normal. By the by, I think it's fair to say that virtually every single person in the world would score highly on at least <i>some</i> of the subtests on the Hare's checklist.<br /><br />I am not in favor of no interventions, though I am probably in favor of different interventions than we currently have, with more emphasis on cognitive-behavioral therapy and less on medications. I was capable of providing a form of CBT for myself eventually. I am fully aware that most children are not.<br /><br />Your reaction to Caryatis's comments misunderstood what she was responding to. She was responding to my <i>proposed</i> definition of psychopathy as the inability to make the moral/conventional distinction and (correctly) pointing out that this would make it impossible to diagnose in children who may not yet have learned enough to be able to grasp the moral/conventional distinction.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-46170140958514235132012-12-24T00:02:31.612-05:002012-12-24T00:02:31.612-05:00caryatis,
The Hare scale mentioned in the NYT art...caryatis,<br /><br />The Hare scale mentioned in the NYT article has a Youth Version, and I don't think it has anything to do with being able to explain some kind of morality. Most children, particularly young ones, wouldn't have any genuine explanation of morality -- at best they'd parrot back what they'd learned about the Golden Rule, etc. I went to an Episcopalian elementary school and probably parroted Christian morality as necessary despite not being Christian.<br /><br />My understanding of what Andrew meant when he said, "Because the diagnostic criteria of psychopathy is a moral diagnosis, as virtually all psychological diagnoses are..." is that one intrinsically is making a moral judgment when saying that, e.g., Lying Is Bad, or Impersonal Sexual Behavior Is Bad. It does not mean that the psychologist is evaluating one's "sense of true morality" (whatever that means).<br /><br />Instead, the child is asked questions like <br />"Ever physically hurt animals on purpose? how long ago?"<br />"Think a criminal record will affect your life?" <br />"Is there anyone close to you whose death would upset you?"<br />"How long would it take you to get over this death?"<br />"Did you/do you bully or threaten others often? how often?"<br /><br />Incidentally, several of the terms Andrew uses to describe his siblings show up on Hare's Youth Version, sometimes with a heavier weight in judging psychopathy than the traits he attributes to himself. For example, Grandiose Sense of Self Worth is weighted .40 and Callous/Lack of Empathy is weighted .53. Yet Lacks Goals is weighted .72, Impulsivity .33, Irresponsibility .59.<br /><br />And of course the most heavily-weighted factors are those that seem likely to have made one a criminal already: Serious Criminal Behavior, Criminal Versatility.PGhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09381347581328622706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-48455758757763316552012-12-24T00:01:53.964-05:002012-12-24T00:01:53.964-05:00Andrew,
I didn't intend to "provoke"...Andrew,<br /><br />I didn't intend to "provoke" you into discussing psychopathy. I linked the article simply to note that some parents are dealing with really scary children and that they can be concerned that this is the case before those children actually commit a criminal act such as inhumane treatment of animals, or murder, that the state prosecutes independently of family preference. (Brandishing a knife at your mother doesn't make you Jack the Ripper, but it <i>is</i> a crime in most U.S. jurisdictions; however it's never going to be reported, much less prosecuted, without family cooperation.) <br /><br />I used the phrase "really scary children" because I don't have sufficient knowledge of psychopathy outside the criminal context to refer to a non-prosecutable child as a psychopath. You were the first to mention psychopaths.<br /><br />I am a bit puzzled as to how you were diagnosed as a psychopath as a minor using the Psychopathic Personality Inventory -- so far as I knew, it's specifically for 18-65 year olds and is a self-report. A psychologist who used it to diagnose you was probably misusing it in any case. <br /><br />As for whether diagnoses do any good, that debate is played out in the NYT article, with the pro-diagnosis view being that perhaps children with a psychopathic diagnosis will be provided interventions, just as children with other psychiatric diagnoses can be. Certainly if one believes that children are best shifted from psychopathy to upstanding adulthood by being left alone, however, the availability of interventions is not an argument for diagnosis.PGhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09381347581328622706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-11362268069731400492012-12-21T11:27:30.656-05:002012-12-21T11:27:30.656-05:00Agreed.Agreed.caryatisnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-21666433846700215332012-12-20T18:18:27.982-05:002012-12-20T18:18:27.982-05:00No, that's true. You wouldn't be able to ...No, that's true. You wouldn't be able to diagnose it in children if you accept my definition. Just as well, though. That's one of those diagnoses which the profession needs to do away with. It has become synonymous in the public consciousness with "monster" and it dehumanizes the people who receive the diagnosis. Even if you accept my definition, the name should probably be changed. People without a moral intuition are not doomed to be monsters either. (After all, there are people who pretend, for philosophical or ideological reasons, they can't see the distinction either and they seem to live perfectly normal lives.)Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-47702199627103995932012-12-20T16:22:36.849-05:002012-12-20T16:22:36.849-05:00I'm glad to hear you are so happy. Certainly a...I'm glad to hear you are so happy. Certainly agree that psychiatric diagnosis is extremely inconsistent. The DSM is said to have improved diagnostic consistency, but it's still nowhere near scientific. I had eight psychiatrists/psychotherapists and seven diagnoses as a child.<br /><br />Re psychopathy, I'm not sure how we would tell whether a young child, like the one in the NYT article, had a sense of true morality. Is a young child even sophisticated enough to talk about its concept of morality? Even if it could, a child, as I think you and I have learned, can be so radically different from the adult. caryatisnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-3760887486087871882012-12-20T14:44:41.347-05:002012-12-20T14:44:41.347-05:00I question whether psychopathy is ever a useful di...<i>I question whether psychopathy is ever a useful diagnosis. Apparently no one knows how to treat it, so the diagnosis does no good, and a label like that tends to stick and hurt someone for the rest of his childhood, if not the rest of his life.</i><br /><br />I actually hadn't planned on discussing specific diagnoses, but PG provoked me into it. Having done so, I should clarify. <br /><br />1) Nobody told me this diagnosis when I was young. I found out about it when I requested my psychiatric records many years later.<br />2) There were at least four separate diagnoses. No two psychologists diagnosed me the same way. In statistical terms, psychological diagnoses are not even <i>reliable</i>, so it's not even clear that they're measuring anything, never mind measuring what they're supposed to be measuring. (I am not anti-psychology. I think psychologists often do a lot of good. But psychology is very, very far from a science.)<br />3) To the best of my knowledge, none of these diagnoses were even communicated to my mother, though I haven't ever bothered to ask her to find out for sure.<br />4) The only useful definition of psychopathy that I can think of is making it synonymous with a trait which is highly correlated with psychopathy or sociopathy. To wit, the inability to make the moral/conventional distinction. People without this ability may have been born with an impaired moral intuition. Such people would have very special challenges in life, since we take for granted the ability to distinguish between what is wrong by morality and what is wrong by social convention (even people who deny that there is such a distinction are quite clearly capable of making it). Under such a definition, I would never have qualified for the diagnosis. I have always had a functioning moral intuition and the ability to make this distinction.<br />5) The statute of limitations on my childhood traumas is long since expired. None of what I say anywhere should ever be taken as trolling for sympathy. Not only would I not know what to do with it if I had it, but I am, I am reasonably sure, the happiest man I know, which is far more than adequate compensation for any difficulties I may have had in my childhood. My father and mother had tragic lives; my own life has been a very long way from tragic. I am one of the luckiest people on the face of the planet.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-58500948772072251742012-12-20T09:49:50.699-05:002012-12-20T09:49:50.699-05:00PG,
With regard to defensive use of the knife, a...PG, <br /><br />With regard to defensive use of the knife, as Andrew said, there are all sorts of reasons the child may have felt threatened by his mother. She’s willing to commit him, for one thing, and we don’t know what else she may have done. Or he may feel irrationally threatened. Being 13 is a very stressful time, and having a mother who can’t stand you doesn’t help. You keep mentioning the library books, but as I said, we have no idea whether that was really what triggered the knife. We’re not getting the whole story.<br /><br />And one instance in which “Michael” didn’t change because of a change in circumstances doesn’t prove he never would. We can’t say he will grow up to be an upstanding citizen, but we can’t say he’ll be a murderer either, both because we only have his mother’s word and because no one really knows what kids will grow up to be.<br /><br />I question whether psychopathy is ever a useful diagnosis. Apparently no one knows how to treat it, so the diagnosis does no good, and a label like that tends to stick and hurt someone for the rest of his childhood, if not the rest of his life.<br />caryatisnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-88679282887631633762012-12-19T23:46:36.084-05:002012-12-19T23:46:36.084-05:00Just to be clear, by the way, the argument that la...Just to be clear, by the way, the argument that lack of empathy can often lead to supermorality comes from Simon Baron-Cohen, in his observations of autism and Asperger's Syndrome and comes from the systematizing nature of their information processing.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-61472097052023032182012-12-19T22:24:59.067-05:002012-12-19T22:24:59.067-05:00Perhaps, yet according to the NYT they're also...<i>Perhaps, yet according to the NYT they're also more likely than non-psychopaths to be criminals: "Psychopaths are estimated to make up 1 percent of the population but constitute roughly 15 to 25 percent of the offenders in prison and are responsible for a disproportionate number of brutal crimes and murders." I'm also skeptical of assessing whether any given pleasant, upstanding, super-moral person is a psychopath without looking at whether they have the distinctive brain anatomy or actually test on Hare's Checklist as psychopaths rather than merely anti-social. In particular, I'm curious as to how someone could be upstanding and super-moral while engaging in pathological lying and failing to accept responsibility for her own actions. (The "pleasant" is no difficulty for a psychopathic personality.)</i><br /><br />You are misunderstanding what I'm saying here. I am saying that many people who would be diagnosed as psychopaths in their youth grow up to be non-psychopaths in their adulthood. Because the diagnostic criteria of psychopathy is a <i>moral</i> diagnosis, as virtually all psychological diagnoses are, the person would cease to meet the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath. I was diagnosed with psychopathy as a child and I don't think the diagnosis was necessarily inaccurate at that time (using Hare's checklist anyway). I still would score relatively well on the Psychopathic Personality Inventory, which avoids using criminality as an indicator. Of its three major scales, I would still score very highly on "Fearless dominance" (social influence, fearlessness, and stress immunity) and "Coldheartedness." In my youth, I would have scored very highly on the third scale, "Impulsive Antisociality" (Machiavellian egocentricity, rebellious nonconformity, blame externalization, and carefree nonplanfulness) as well, but, with maturity and moral philosophy, this is no longer the case.<br /><br />I have an older brother who is nearly my exact opposite in all these things. Generous, kind, loving, empathic to a fault, and generally marvelous. Everybody loves him. All my happy childhood memories are of him and a lot of my troubles started when he went off to college (though this was also the time my father was removed from the house, so who knows what the cause was, if any). My mother still doesn't like me very much. And yet, when she's in trouble, which is not that uncommon, she never calls my older brother or my other older brother or my older sister. She always calls me. For all his empathy and kindness, my brother is fairly useless. He may want to help, but his general ineffectualness and laziness means he's rarely actually able to. My sister who is similar to my brother, though not nearly so nice, is also useless, terminally flighty and irresponsible. My other brother, who is much more like me, has the ability to help, but can only be bothered if it's convenient to him. But my mother knows that, because of my sense of duty, I will move heaven and earth to make her life easier and more comfortable. Even though I know that she rather resents me for it, granted because my help comes with nagging and lectures. And it is because of my lack of empathy that I don't care or mind that she resents me and doesn't like me much. I simply note these things; they do not make me want to help her less.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-29665957217227886692012-12-19T22:24:25.594-05:002012-12-19T22:24:25.594-05:00That seems to be the case for the family in the NY...<i>That seems to be the case for the family in the NYT article, but not for all families. For example, Long says her husband had "Michael" incarcerated and an older son put in a mental hospital.</i><br /><br />I have read enough of Ms. Long's blog to be very sure that I can't trust her on the subject of her ex-husband. She doesn't even make a pretense that she is giving anything like an objective account of him. But, of course, statistical probabilities are just that. Even if Ms. Long and her ex-husband didn't qualify, I'm absolutely certain you could find a case where the man took these sorts of things more seriously than the woman. I am, forever and always, only talking about statistical probabilities, not universal laws.<br /><br /><i>It may just be that men are more likely to see violence as not that big a deal.</i><br /><br />No, I don't think that's it. I'm not saying you're not right here. I'm sure men do on average take violence less seriously than women do. But I think there's more to it. Men know what it's like to have been teenage boys. Now, we can pretend that the two sexes are exactly the same in every way from the neck up all we want, but any pre-op transsexual will tell you how important sex hormones are to moods. Teenage boys are suddenly flooded with androgens and have to learn how to handle them. A great many of them act out in all sorts of inappropriate ways. Most of them are easily civilized, some of them take longer, and some of them die before they get there. I'm sure not <i>all</i> of this difference in the behavior of teenage boys and teenage girls is biological in nature. I have no doubt some or much of it is cultural. I also have no doubt that some of it <i>is</i> biological.<br /><br /><i>However, in a gender-equalized culture, where there's no longer a traditional dynamic in which a son comes to blows with his old man while still treating his mother chivalrously, the violence isn't going to be contained only among those who don't see it as a big deal.</i><br /><br />I am totally in agreement here. I have no blame or judgment to attach to Ms. Long if she eventually decides her son is too big a risk to her and her younger children. I'm much more likely to judge a strong, capable man in the same situation harshly if I believed he was giving up on his child too early. But for Ms. Long, I have nothing but sympathy. Even if, you might be surprised to learn, "Michael" pulled a knife on her because he <i>rightly</i> believed she was a physical threat to him. Many parents succumb to corporal punishment, sometimes very harsh punishments, simply because they are at their wit's end with a child. I have sympathy for these parents as well.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-58721321770879173622012-12-19T22:23:17.438-05:002012-12-19T22:23:17.438-05:00That you think he may have had it for "defens...<i>That you think he may have had it for "defensive purposes" implies that you believe Long is a physical threat to her kid.</i><br /><br />Actually, no, Caryatis did not so imply. All she's implying is that she believes he might have believed himself to be using it defensively. (Even if it was a "I don't want you coming over here and physically forcing me to do something even though you might not be planning to hurt me.") There is a strong basis for the belief that "Michael" believed he was using the knife defensively and that is her silence on the subject of any attempt to use it <i>offensively</i>. If I'm picking up a knife to use offensively, there's no reason not to start stabbing and slashing right away. If I'm using it defensively, there's no reason to do so. This isn't saying that his defensiveness is <i>rational</i>; it probably isn't, but brandishing a knife does not make one Jack the Ripper.<br /><br /><i>Given the inability to judge what other people's actual desires are, and the resulting necessity of going by their manifested words and actions, I don't think your mother or sister would have been somehow unjust to you if they said, "Andrew wants to kill me," if you had, in fact, said you wanted to kill them.</i><br /><br />I never said that Ms. Long was acting or speaking unjustly. I am saying that it is my considered opinion that "Michael" is more likely to be fairly harmless, if not provoked than the reverse. The basis of this belief is the lack of evidence that he has ever harmed anyone and is otherwise statistical in nature. He is not exhibiting violent behaviors; he is exhibiting <i>threatening</i> behaviors and there is quite a bit of difference between the two. Now the latter can escalate to the former, but future serial killers are by his age usually slaughtering animals and setting fires, not merely threatening to do things.<br /><br /><i>Maybe someone who has done such a thing can explain it, but at the moment it's pretty incomprehensible to me that someone would go after her mother with a knife, even if she didn't plan to use it, if that mother posed no physical threat to her.</i><br /><br />I never pulled a knife on my mother either, but I certainly did physically threaten her and my older sister in, as you say, "non-delusional self-defense." It didn't take very long after my physical superiority became apparent to them that I no longer had to do this and pretty much all attempts to discipline me ceased. By the time I was 13, my mother would never have dreamed of insisting I return an overdue library book or change my pants because they were the "wrong color." (I am not saying that Ms. Long is not perfectly well within her rights to ask these things of her child, of course. I am not endorsing my mother's parenting style. She is a very good woman, but there's no question that she made a lot of mistakes.) Ms. Long does not give her stand on corporal punishment, but I would not assume that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It is possible "Michael" viewed her as a physical threat. It is also possible that he did not and simply didn't want to be forced to do something he didn't want to do. Keep in mind, please, that in no sense am I defending "Michael"'s behavior. What I am saying is that, based on her blog post, I would hardly be willing to write him off as a lost cause.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-28575663330590742672012-12-19T16:01:35.472-05:002012-12-19T16:01:35.472-05:00Regardless of which one of them is right, I note t...<i>Regardless of which one of them is right, I note that the mother is much more concerned for and frightened of her 9 year old son than the father is.</i><br /><br />That seems to be the case for the family in the NYT article, but not for all families. For example, Long says her husband had "Michael" incarcerated and an older son put in a mental hospital. Also, the way the father in the NYT story describes himself is basically as a Springsteen song or James Dean movie: “I didn’t listen to adults. I was always in trouble. My grades were horrible. I would be walking down the street and I would hear them say, in Spanish: ‘Ay! Viene el loco!’ — ‘Here comes the crazy one.’” He doesn't say that he was randomly violent (eg biting people, as his son did to a camp counselor).<br /><br />It may just be that men are more likely to see violence as not that big a deal. However, in a gender-equalized culture, where there's no longer a traditional dynamic in which a son comes to blows with his old man while still treating his mother chivalrously, the violence isn't going to be contained only among those who don't see it as a big deal.<br /><br /><i>Psychopathy is a scary word, but a great many psychopaths develop into perfectly pleasant and upstanding people.</i><br /><br />Perhaps, yet according to the NYT they're also more likely than non-psychopaths to be criminals: "Psychopaths are estimated to make up 1 percent of the population but constitute roughly 15 to 25 percent of the offenders in prison and are responsible for a disproportionate number of brutal crimes and murders." I'm also skeptical of assessing whether any given pleasant, upstanding, super-moral person is a psychopath without looking at whether they have the distinctive brain anatomy or actually test on Hare's Checklist as psychopaths rather than merely anti-social. In particular, I'm curious as to how someone could be upstanding and super-moral while engaging in pathological lying and failing to accept responsibility for her own actions. (The "pleasant" is no difficulty for a psychopathic personality.)PGhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09381347581328622706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-6024504326477207532012-12-19T15:59:51.696-05:002012-12-19T15:59:51.696-05:00caryatis,
if he did have a knife, was it meant fo...caryatis,<br /><br /><i>if he did have a knife, was it meant for aggressive or defensive purposes</i><br /><br />That you think he may have had it for "defensive purposes" implies that you believe Long is a physical threat to her kid. Not sure of the basis for such a belief. If it's that in the kid's own mind, being told to return library books is a threat against which he must defend himself with a knife, I think this is a sign that the kid has serious problems, not that "very little can trigger [Long's] fears of violence."<br /><br /><i>Sometimes children seem very violent and very crazy, but somehow, remove them from their family and they magically become normal. Circumstances change people's behavior.</i><br /><br />If that were the case for "Michael," then presumably this wouldn't have happened: "Several weeks into his new junior high school, Michael began exhibiting increasingly odd and threatening behaviors at school."<br /><br />I definitely know kids who misbehaved only at home and were largely fine at school -- some of my relatives were just like that. But with a kid who is threatening both to family and at school, I don't think you can say he's of this "Circumstances change people's behavior" type.<br /><br />Andrew Stevens,<br /><br /><i> I never said I never threatened people (or myself). I said I never had any desire to harm people.</i><br /><br />Given the inability to judge what other people's actual desires are, and the resulting necessity of going by their manifested words and actions, I don't think your mother or sister would have been somehow unjust to you if they said, "Andrew wants to kill me," if you had, in fact, said you wanted to kill them.<br /><br /><i>arguably, he was acting in self-defense (trying to stop her from institutionalizing him).</i><br /><br />That would be true in the instance where she was driving him to the mental hospital. It does not explain or justify grabbing a knife when told -- even meanly, naggingly, "if you don't you're gonna be in trouble mister" -- to return library books. <br /><br />My mother and I fought plenty, but I never physically threatened her. That's what makes the difference. I did all kinds of awful things to her: said I hated her, even once cut her out of a family photo that was in my bedroom. That expressive behavior probably would have been interpreted as a sign of a serious mental problem, rather than "my adolescent daughter is kind of a bitch," if I'd ever physically threatened her. Maybe someone who has done such a thing can explain it, but at the moment it's pretty incomprehensible to me that someone would go after her mother with a knife, even if she didn't plan to use it, if that mother posed no physical threat to her. (Incidentally, my parents believed in corporal punishment, so arguably I could have physically threatened my mother in non-delusional self-defense.)PGhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09381347581328622706noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-31192077932563804882012-12-19T12:56:59.322-05:002012-12-19T12:56:59.322-05:00Britta: Phoebe is correct. I haven't had any ...Britta: Phoebe is correct. I haven't had any criticisms for Ms. Long. I have far too much sympathy for her plight, given what I put my own mother through. And, yes, there is no question that my mother and my sister were frightened of me at times.<br /><br />PG: Got around to reading your link on the 9 year old psychopath. He's not that disturbing or scary to me either. (Some of the kids mentioned by Paul Frick in the article were genuinely disturbing, but the main kid in the article was not.) I think there's an excellent chance he'll grow to be able to control his difficulties just like his father did. <br /><br />I think this might be a gendered thing. I am simply not frightened of a 13 year old boy with a knife or a 9 year old psychopath as I suspect many women, quite understandably, are. Regardless of which one of them is right, I note that the mother is much more concerned for and frightened of her 9 year old son than the father is. I suspect that's the typical dynamic.<br /><br />Psychopathy is a scary word, but a great many psychopaths develop into perfectly pleasant and upstanding people. Empathy is not the only route to morality; it's not even a particularly good or reliable one. You often see unempathic people behave with a sort of super-morality as they develop an intellectual code that they rigidly follow. This is seen frequently in Asperger's and also in psychopaths.<br /><br />MSI: An easy misunderstanding. Sorry if I sounded a bit curt above. Don't know if I was publicizing it exactly, but I thought I had a perspective on her blog post that many people lack. I have the luxury of not having to be too concerned about what people think of me, so I tend to be pretty open about such things. I'm much more circumpsect about my wife and daughter.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-6127196325140493572012-12-19T09:15:30.162-05:002012-12-19T09:15:30.162-05:00Britta,
That was me (Phoebe), not Andrew, I think...Britta,<br /><br />That was me (Phoebe), not Andrew, I think. Anyway I just looked a bit more closely at the offending post, and I'm not sure what to make of it. On the one hand, the author (Sarah) seems to be missing altogether the <i>tone</i> of Long's blog, which was not so far from standard-issue parental venting. But even so, I do think it's valid to point out that when parents say the kinds of things they would in private, but on the internet, the equation changes. The tone changes, even, because not everyone will be in on exasperated-parent-mode. I'm sure all parents have reason to complain, and by all means ought to vent, but once the venting goes online, where the kids themselves can not only find it but find it and realize just how many others have as well, it's a different story.<br /><br />Mark,<br /><br />I was wondering what you meant here: "Confidentiality is as much of a problem as it is helpful." Do you mean that it's a problem that staff can't tell police who's a threat? Phoebe Maltz Bovyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17996039330841139883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-90993606359014542542012-12-19T05:10:54.149-05:002012-12-19T05:10:54.149-05:00Best discussion I've read/heard yet. There are...Best discussion I've read/heard yet. There are places, residential treatment centers (RTCs) for kids. I worked 5 yrs in them. Are they effective? Sometimes. Expensive? Not considering the long term. Confidentiality is as much of a problem as it is helpful. Drugs sometimes help, a little. Professionals are guessing, too. The system as it is, is a "dysfunctional pipeline." You would not believe how violent some of these kids are - and there are thousands of these kids. I had no idea until I got into it. The pay for the caregivers, staff, professionals is pathetic. Family dysfunction is always a factor - abuse & neglect, poverty. Sometimes brain damage.<br />It's a mess. One thing I know for certain - shooting guns is not helpful therapy for troubled kids. What were the adults thinking? All of them. mark jabbourhttp://markjabbour.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-36843678874858703492012-12-18T23:17:35.159-05:002012-12-18T23:17:35.159-05:00Andrew: Yes, sorry, fair enough. My point was simp...Andrew: Yes, sorry, fair enough. My point was simply that this is an example of publicizing your own story rather than your children's.Miss Self-Importanthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04477849823290773026noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-33232934210475538772012-12-18T22:49:43.461-05:002012-12-18T22:49:43.461-05:00Andrew,
I don't think questioning Long's ...Andrew,<br /><br />I don't think questioning Long's decision to write about her son and post presumably a real photo shouldn't be criticized. It's rather that some of the blogs Rosin linked to were purposefully misreading Long and taking her out of context. See <a href="http://sarahkendzior.com/2012/12/16/want-the-truth-behind-i-am-adam-lanzas-mother-read-her-blog/" rel="nofollow"> this</a>. Every claim in this post is either a lie or a borderline trollish interpretation of normal parenting exasperation. If anything, I'm more sympathetic to Long after reading this. <br /><br />This isn't Rosin's claim, but she quotes a lot from it, and even linking to stuff makes me question the validity or impartiality of anything else she mentions. It may very well be the case that Long is unstable and a terrible parent, but this isn't the way to go about showing that.Brittahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02224221011978374915noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-27374068608061518152012-12-18T16:49:14.543-05:002012-12-18T16:49:14.543-05:00Andrew,
Glad things worked out well for you!
Bri...Andrew,<br /><br />Glad things worked out well for you!<br /><br />Britta,<br /><br />There's a lot I disagreed with in Long's post, even apart from the question of, her son's a real person who had no say in the matter, whose photo the entire nation (and I believe it's made the Belgian news as well, so, world) has seen, and will now equate with a mass murder that this boy, however troubled he might be, <i>has nothing to do with</i>. In terms of those who'd judge Long's parenting, this is, alas, one of the problems with parental overshare. One is allowed to comment only to praise. And one only gets the parent's side. If one responds wondering how the kid (who has no voice) feels, one is accused of, I don't know, concern-trolling, or being insufficiently sympathetic to the author. <br /><br />Anyway, it hardly seems mutually exclusive that this kid is troubled and that his mother is as well. But it's not character assassination to question this mother's choice to put up a photo of her identifiable-enough son and equating the boy with a mass-murderer. Questioning this and sympathizing with her predicament: also not mutually-exclusive.Phoebe Maltz Bovyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17996039330841139883noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-35680967424637191052012-12-18T16:18:38.046-05:002012-12-18T16:18:38.046-05:00PG
Not to mention, adults DID rush the gunman as ...PG<br /><br />Not to mention, adults DID rush the gunman as soon as they found out about him, but we've known since WW1 that rushing a person with a semiautomatic or automatic weapon is total suicide. There's no way to stop or even survive long enough to get close to someone who can release a continuous spray of bullets, rather than someone who must aim, shoot, and then reload.<br /><br />The Hannah Rosin article immediately became suspect when I read some of her links and they appeared to be blog posts which were willful misreadings and purposeful character assassinations of Liza Long. No matter what someone's issues are, if the critic has to lie, twist someone's words, or take things in obvious bad faith to make the argument against them then in my mind they don't really have a valid point. Long may be melodramatic and high strung, but her son seems to have legitimate issues. It appears he was expelled from school and is already in the legal system, so clearly it's not just the mom who thinks he has problems. Brittahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02224221011978374915noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7146512.post-68679729019321507662012-12-18T14:36:45.760-05:002012-12-18T14:36:45.760-05:00PG: I never said I never threatened people (or mys...PG: I never said I never <i>threatened</i> people (or myself). I said I never had any desire to harm people. And I doubt Michael does either. Presumably she has given the worst stuff he's ever done. At no point does she say he has, for example, harmed his siblings or any pets or even set a fire or something. He has attacked his mother, but A) he wasn't really able to harm her and probably knew he wouldn't be able to going in and B) arguably, he was acting in self-defense (trying to stop her from institutionalizing him). I'm not trying to diagnose the kid from afar. It's quite possible that there's something seriously wrong with him, just not that I can tell from her blog post. In any event, I haven't said she's a bad person for any reason.Andrew Stevenshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13453328821252013152noreply@blogger.com