Psychopath children

[blushing]

Taken from this thread on current events and politics - pandce.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=3216&page=1


Can a young child really be a psychopath?The groundbreaking HBO documentary "Child of Rage" years ago showed how horrific abuse and neglect could leave a child unable to bond with other people, turning them into children "without conscience, who can hurt or even kill without remorse." In other words: the child becomes a psychopath . But what about the kids who aren't abused? What about the ones who, for no discernible reason, do horrible things to other people? "I've always said that Michael will grow up to be either a Nobel Prize winner or a serial killer," his mother, Anne, tells Jennifer Kahn in a recent shocking New York Times Magazine article . At age 9, her son has an extreme temper, lashing out violently and deliberately and showing no empathy or remorse. He's intelligent, cold, calculating, and explosive. "It takes a toll," she says, explaining her comment. "There's not a lot of joy and happiness in raising Michael." Experts are divided about whether it's right to label a child as a psychopath. On the one hand, their brains are still developing; since psychopathy is largely considered untreatable, such a label would carry a heavy, life-altering stigma. On the other hand, identifying "callous-unemotional" children early could allow for successful treatment -- or at least a heads-up to society. But reaching such a diagnosis can be tricky. Certain tendencies, like narcissism and impulsiveness, that are obvious signs of a psychopath are also part and parcel of childhood. And callous-unemotional kids are often extremely intelligent; they're able to lie and manipulate without remorse, making it harder to understand what they're doing and why. "They don't care if someone is mad at them," Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans, told the New York Times. "They don't care if they hurt someone's feelings." "If they can get what they want without being cruel, that's often easier," adds Frick, who has spent 20 years studying risk factors for psychopathy in children. "But at the end of the day, they'll do whatever works best." The New York Times article mentions the case of 9-year-old Jeffrey Bailey Jr. , who in 1986 pushed a 3-year-old into the deep end of a Florida swimming pool and then pulled up a chair to watch the child drown; after the toddler died, Bailey got up and went home. It's a disturbing crime -- and there are other equally disturbing cases of young kids committing cold-blooded murder. In 1993, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both 10 years old, took 2-year-old James Bulger by the hand and led the trusting toddler out of a shopping mall in Liverpool, England. Once away from the mall, they spent hours torturing him before beating him to death, reports said .In 1984, Joshua Phillips ' mother was cleaning his room when she discovered the dead body of their 8-year-old neighbor, Maddie Clifton, under his bed. The 14-year-old Phillips says he accidentally hit the girl in the eye with a baseball bat and then panicked when she screamed, so he took her to his room and beat and then stabbed her until she stopped. Alyssa Bustamente was 15 when she confessed to luring her 9-year-old neighbor Elizabeth Olten into a nearby forest and killing her in 2009. "I strangled them and slit their throat and stabbed them now they're dead," Bustamante wrote in her diary at the time. "It was ahmazing. As soon as you get over the 'ohmygawd I can't do this' feeling, it's pretty enjoyable. I'm kinda nervous and shaky though right now. Kay, I gotta go to church now...lol." In February, she was sentenced to life in prison.Eric Harris -- who, with his friend Dylan Klebold, killed 13 people and injured 24 others when they opened fire at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 -- had several of the hallmarks of being a psychopath. As ABC News points out, he was described as "controlling, manipulative, and sadistic, but very much in touch with reality." "Psychopaths don't feel guilty because they are blind to guilt," Frank Ochberg, a former FBI psychiatrist who led the counseling team after Columbine, told ABC News . And, unlike with psychosis (when people are delusional or out-of-touch with reality), psychopaths know exactly what they're doing -- they just don't care how it affects others. It's not as if these kids simply lack a moral compass. In "Child of Rage," 6-year-old Beth opens her blue eyes wide and calmly tells her psychiatrist how she'd like to hurt, and even kill, her adoptive parents -- a Baptist preacher and his wife -- and her biological brother. She's calm and conversational as she describes how she has deliberately harmed and killed animals, how she drives pins into her brother and sexually molests him, how she repeatedly slammed his head into a cement floor and only stopped because someone caught her. Beth suffered extreme physical and sexual abuse and neglect by her biological parents, which experts say could explain her detached, calculating demeanor and her lack of "a sense of conscience." (She now claims that she was "healed" by the time she was 7 or 8, thanks to intensive therapy.) But Michael, in the New York Times Magazine article, seems to have grown up surrounded by love and affection. So if nurture (or a lack of it) isn't the only way a person becomes a psychopath, how much does nature have to do with it? Some experts say that psychopathy, like other mental illnesses, may have a genetic component; others think that it is a neurological condition all its own, like autism is, though it's not part of the autism spectrum. Though some psychologists believe one can start seeing psychopathic traits as early as age 5, there is not yet a definitive test for children that young.
"You're not born a psychopath but the foundation is there," Robert Hare, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of British Columbia and author of "Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us," told MSNBC . He has developed specialized checklists to determine whether people age 12 and older show psychopathic tendencies. "We're all born with temperaments that can be shaped by the environment."
What do you think? Can a young, seemingly innocent child be a psychopath -- and are they just born that way?

(http://us.m.yahoo.com/w/ygo-frontpage/lp/story/us/2282664/coke.bp%3B_ylt=AuR8qkbfnffkq6dXBkbMhKOx.tw4%3B_ylu=X3oDMTFzaHZ0NG1mBGNwb3MDMwRjc2VjA21vYmlsZS10ZARpbnRsA3VzBHBrZwNpZC0yMjgyNjY0BHBvcwMzBHNsawNpbWFnZQ--?ref_w=frontdoors&view=today&.intl=us&.lang=en&.tsrc=yahoo)

[blushing]

Just so you all know, this freaks the hell out of me. How do you raise a child that you suspect to be a psychopath? Or suspect will grow up to be one?

[americaninoz]

have you read the book 'We need to talk about Kevin'
it deals with the same sort of issues

I do think it's scary - but on the other hand I think there's always a reason why I kid would end up that way - I don't believe it would just happen out of the blue when a child was raised in a stable loving environment....

[dulcemariamar]

One would wish that a kid who suffers such extreme mental disorder is because of nurture and not nature. However, I remember watching a few years ago about this loving, normal family who had a 6 year old girl who suffered from schizophrenia on the Oprah show. It was so heart breaking because the family did everything in their power but they were prisoners in their own home. I think they ended up having a son and had to live in two homes so that their son wouldn't be in danger.

Anyway, I used to work in a charter school back in the State. I had one student that received private classes. He couldn't be in a classroom with other students. He was about 8 years old and the family refused to have him diagnosed. However, it was quite obvious to everyone at the school including the psychologist that he was or at least in the future be diagnosed as a psychopath. I know this sounds silly but you can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voice. Anyway, in one moment he could be there, talking to me and everything seemed okay. And in the next second, something could go off in his head, and he would start throwing the books, the table and basically attacking me.

With students with behavioral problems, it is actually pretty easy to pinpoint the moment they are going to go off on you but with this particular boy, you would never know.

[bugabean]

Along the same lines… I met a guy who, long story short, did not have a great childhood, and he remembers the moment when he realized for the first time that other people and their feelings matter. He was 16. He supposed other people were younger when they had that epiphany and the rest of us were like… um, I don't remember NOT knowing that. We had an interesting conversation about when you stop blaming the parents for the kids being messed up and start blaming the kids for their own actions. It's really hard to draw these lines. I'm curious about this intensive therapy that healed Beth. If there is some way to identify and 'fix' these kids, that's huge!

I don't know much about a case like Michael where there's no abuse. It makes sense to me that this wouldn't be a 100% 'nurture' instead of 'nature' thing. People react differently to abuse, so there's probably some tendency to become violent or tendency to become depressed, etc. I can see how it's possible for there to be extreme cases where someone doesn't require as much to tip the scales, but that must be rare.

[dulcemariamar]

chilerellanos:

I am so sorry you are going through this. My mother works with adults who are bipolar. If you dont mind me asking, where are you located?

[crimsonandclover]

Ok, that story about the 9 year old who watched the 3 year old drown? I think that's going to give me nightmares now.

My parents' neighbors have a boy my age and a girl my brother's age. The boy (ok, man now, but he still lives at home) has had a friend since school who creeps the hell out of me. A few years ago when I was back visiting my parents, I was laying in the sun out in their (my parents') yard. The guy was over visiting my neighbor and must have seen me across the field. He came over to talk to me, which made me kind of uncomfortable because I was laying there in my bikini, and then proceeded to tell me about his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and some of the horrible things he did or was commanded to do. The way he talked about it - absolutely emotionless - sent chills down my spine. I'm sure some of it is PTSD, but he was always a creepy guy, and I honestly have a bit of a fear that one night he will just come over and kill my parents for fun. My amateur opinion is that in his case, there was already a foundation for this kind of emotionless behavior set in childhood. He had a rough time of it on the bus and in school, so maybe it was even partially learned - not at home, but by shutting out his emotions when being bullied. I don't know, but I think what happened to him overseas just reinforced that: don't think of these people as people, think of them as objects you have to destroy or conquer. I'm not saying that that's what his commanders said, but his descriptions of how he treated people and what he had to do in the mountains in Afghanistan screamed that sort of attitude.

Anyway, I think quite a bit of the emotionlessness associated with psychopathy is learned, but that's a completely unscientific, unresearched opinion.

[clickerish]

May 15, 2012 6:32:45 GMT -5 chilerellanos said:

This scares the hell out of me because I have an 11 year old daughter who is bipolar and extremely hard to raise. She has been hospitalized, and we do a lot of therapy, and it doesn't matter, as soon as the therapist leaves, she's right back to making our lives hell. There's no real good resources, and my huge worry is that she is going to do something awful.

I'm sorry. It must be really hard. But if it gives you any hope at all, my brother is a paranoid schz. It was really bad for a few years (REALLY, like locking doors to be able to sleep, worrying he was going to burn the house down, endless trips to hospitals). But he is so much better now. He is married, has a job, causes no harm to others and, while he is still an arrogant asshole IMO, he is a contributing citizen to humanity.

[Deleted]

I believe that sometimes the behaviors develop after head traumas as well. Obviously somewhere along the way something is miswired whether by abuse, natural defects, or trauma.

[lolo]

I found this article fascinating (and also terrifying). There has been so much research recently into what's really happening in our brains, and whether for instance, serial killer brains differ from 'normal' brains. They've found decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex in serial killers. The difference between a 'normal' brain and the serial killer brain is really shocking.

However, I think the key part of this is the whole 'necessary but not sufficient' idea, that a kid who has a predisposition has the 'necessary' biological wiring to be a psychopath, but that this in and of itself isn't always 'sufficient.'

There was a BBC documentary a while back that looked at a guy who had a serial killer brain and who had a history of really violent family members. He was disturbed to find out that he was predisposed to it, but had been fortunate to have a really affectionate mother who gave him a nurturing and secure childhood. Psychologists thought that overrode his predisposition to calculated, violent behavior.

Brain scans and fMRIs seem to be another form of information similar to genetic counselling in implication. It does enable interventions and potentially more personalized medicine or therapy, but it can also lead to detrimental effects, like being treated differently, that can sometimes perpetuate the very behavior that one is hoping to avoid.