YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Am I an expert? No. Am I someone who actually has the condition the internet demonizes and mischaracterizes in often contradictory ways? Yes. As someone who actually has ASPD, and someone who is very tired of people using cliches from fiction to characterize the condition, I am here to offer my services as someone ready and willing to demystify this to at least some degree. I'll begin with some common misconceptions I want to see swiftly exit the public's perception.

Are people with ASPD sociopaths?
No mental health professional uses the term sociopath anymore and they haven't for a while. ASPD is what some people who used to be diagnosed as sociopaths are now classified as, but not all; most people who had that diagnosis are actually NPD, not ASPD. (Although some people have both.) Since sociopath is used as shorthand in media for 'villain', if you want to look like you understand fiction isn't reality, you should probably not use this outdated term. I hate to use Gen Z parlance here, but I will, because it fits: it's a bit cringe.

Are people with ASPD more likely to hurt me?
Yes, no, and not in the way you'd think. Yes, the lack of remorse means that I will do things other people will not. For instance, I got the authorities to remove me from my abusive home by downloading a dark net browser, pulling up porn they'd made of me, and showing it to my high school principal, because it was an effective way out of that situation. I do not feel bad for scarring him for life with those images. It probably hurt him mentally unless he's into kids. I have stolen from a lot of people in my life to fund attempts to get out of that hellhole. I once set my own garage on fire to try to get authorities' attention. What you will notice, however, is that in all of the above examples, there was a motive for something that impacted someone else negatively.

This is where the 'no' aspect comes in. Unless put in a situation where my brain tells me I need to start prioritizing survival, there's not really a reason to hurt you, therefore, neither I nor anybody else with ASPD are likely to do it. A lot of media portrayals of sociopaths involve sadism. The reality is that hurting someone in and of itself is not fun, useful, or something that serves a purpose. I'm not going to do something to hurt someone because the hurt in and of itself is the reward; I'm going to do it, if at all, because it is necessary to survive and I don't have that little voice in the back of my head telling me not to do it. I'm not going to feel bad about it afterwards, which I understand is offputting, but I'm also not going to do it unless I have actual reasons to do so. (This is why ASPD kids get in trouble a lot. Reasons that make sense to start shit as a kid rarely hold up when you're an adult. Did I really have to tell Mike from kindergarten that his mom was dead because he insulted my favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle? No. Do I feel bad for it? No. Am I aware I should? Yes. Did you have any better impulse control at that age? Debatable. You learn what's actually valid grounds for resorting to hurting someone as you get older (and as people recognize Donatello is the best Ninja Turtle)).

The 'not in the way you think' component is something I really want to stress, because neurodivergent people, people with NPD and people with low empathy also do this regardless of diagnosis: sometimes we just do not know what to do in the face of something. I don't know how to comfort people. I don't know how to react to venting. A lot of people with ASPD default to problem-solving and struggle with the concept that someone just needs us to vent. The end result is asking something like, "Well, what do you want me to do about it?" or saying, "I can't help you." It hurts, it comes across as cruel, and it's not helpful, but we're not actively trying to hurt you. We're just not wired to do empathy, while also being very wired to identify problems and solve them in our own ways. A good example of this for me comes from middle school, when my friend Janine was getting bullied by two girls. As I lacked the social clout needed to tell either girl to stop, I offered up solutions, which made her frustrated, and asked why she was complaining to me, someone we all knew sucked at feelings, which made her storm off. Then I broke into one girl's locker, took a necklace out of it, put it in the other girl's locker, told a teacher I'd seen the second girl take something from the former, and solved the problem by turning the two on each other. This solution is typical of how my brain approaches interpersonal conflict and also internal conflict. It's also very bad at making someone else feel seen and heard - but you can take solace in the fact that I lay awake at night unable to make myself feel any better, since my own methodology isn't any kinder to myself personally.

Also, your mileage may vary on how much this is reassuring, but no one with ASPD I've met via the internet has any interest in murder or rape. One, there's a lot of things that'll hurt you way more effectively without the excessive cruelty and personal physical proximity of rape. Two, if you're dead, then we'd have to hide a murder, which is damn near impossible, and frankly, we value ourselves too much to ruin our lives for someone else. Even my abusers didn't warrant me doing something that would put me in prison, even when I was undiagnosed and in a very bad place mentally, because I needed to survive and I refused to accept an existence I did not deserve. (Also, them rotting in prison is a much slower, more prolonged kind of hell on Earth than death, which is quick and painless, and not something serial child abusers deserve.)

Wait, but part of the diagnostic criteria is that you think the rules don't apply to you. Doesn't that mean you're more likely to commit crime for the heck of it?

No, it means I'm more likely to commit a crime if I have an unmet need I can meet by committing that crime. The rules may apply to me, but since guilt isn't a factor, my cost-benefit analysis works like yours does minus the 'it's wrong' component. Stealing is wrong + I'm hungry + I can take something from another kid at school = not stealing for you, probably. I'm hungry + I can take something from another kid at school = I'm stealing. I'm aware the rules exist. I just prioritize myself before the rules under most circumstances and especially when I'm having a rough time.

Doesn't having a lack of remorse make you a bad person?
My foster parents and foster brother have remorse. They raped me for 10 years. I have no remorse and have raped no one and have no desire to. People don't want to hear this, but actually, your actions determine your goodness/lack thereof, not how much you feel/don't feel something. History is full of remorseful criminals who have done things that make my abusers look like nothing. While I internalized being called a monster by them and used it as a survival mechanism, a lack of remorse doesn't equal being bad anymore than having remorse makes you good. When presented with two options, someone who stabbed you and cried about it and someone who's never hurt you who doesn't cry about anything, you should be able to, even if you're not comfortable with the person in the second option, view them as not bad inherently. Let people earn your judgment before you give it.

Do people get ASPD or are they born with it?
Yes. Both options are a thing. How the percentage breakdown works, we don't know. Science is still working on that one. I, personally, was born with a lack of empathy and remorse and it was noticeable very early on. The usual talks you give kids about how they'd feel if someone did something to them just resulted in the blankest imaginable stares. I never cried about having done something dumb/bad/that I disliked the outcome of. It was pretty obvious something was off. I will say, though, I never got into fights with people and got violent until I was in an abusive household. Until then, I'd been unruly, but not combative.

Do people with ASPD lie more than other people?
Yes, but not how you think. We have to so you'll think we're normal. We learn to fake empathy, feign being upset, figure out when we would be feeling remorse if we were normal and make apologies pretty early on. A certain level of lying is necessary. If we don't lie, then you'll start to put together that something is wrong, and I have never met anyone with ASPD who hasn't had a loved one go no contact with them or hate them upon finding out about their diagnosis. Much as the media likes to depict us as cold, badass villains who don't need people, it actually hurts when people do that. It hurts us a lot. Our solution-first approach to life fails because we can't just stop having ASPD. So instead, yes, we are lying our asses off to you, frequently and with our best acting skills fully deployed. No, we're not lying to manipulate you or make you miserable, unless you've either hurt someone we care about or are presenting an active issue to us enjoying our lives fully. I won't tell you something untrue just to mess with you. I will absolutely do it to keep you from thinking I'm weird. I might do it if lying to you about Josh from Chem II liking you means you'll be in a good mood and thus not be a miserable roommate to live with for the next couple of weeks.



That's all the obnoxious garbage I can think of wanting to debunk at the moment as I sit here in a post-Christmas dinner coma, triple-tasking because ADHD is a harsh mistress. Feel free to ask questions and I'll answer, not in the sense of 'I am an expert' or 'I speak for all ASPD people' but in the sense of 'ASPD people are not mythical murderers like Slender Man, we're right here and can be spoken to like anyone else on Earth'. I would love it if we could someday get to the point where I meet a single person with ASPD who didn't get rejected by a family member or long-term 5+ year friend for their diagnosis. Maybe this will help.

If you are a typical example of ASPD, then ASPD-people are more likely to be <my> kind of people, compared to "normies".

I am used to "normies" who can fake remorse for their own advantage, and the poor people who they have wronged drift out of heads of the "normies" at the first opportunity.

but you carry the memory of who you have wronged. which is more than the "normies" do.

i would rather break bread with you over any normie, and i would rather take a cross-country car trip with you over any normie

that is how things look from my viewpoint

please take care

manuel_moe_g wrote: ↑December 26th, 2023, 12:04 pm If you are a typical example of ASPD, then ASPD-people are more likely to be <my> kind of people, compared to "normies".

I am used to "normies" who can fake remorse for their own advantage, and the poor people who they have wronged drift out of heads of the "normies" at the first opportunity.

but you carry the memory of who you have wronged. which is more than the "normies" do.

i would rather break bread with you over any normie, and i would rather take a cross-country car trip with you over any normie

that is how things look from my viewpoint

please take care

Oh, we fake remorse. It's needed in order to avoid people recognizing a lack of remorse in us, as lack of remorse is directly connected to the idea of being a bad person in most people in most societies. There's a lot of feigning remorse in order to pass as normal and keep the peace. You have to determine for yourself if you find that to be taking advantage of you or not. I have lied to a lot of people in this way in order to get them to treat me as benign. That is very much in my own self-interest first and foremost, as being seen as cold is a very quick way to end up isolated. I'm not going to say people with ASPD aren't manipulative. We have that reputation in part due to honesty not being our default setting.

I do remember who I wronged. I don't feel bad about it. I think that's a very key thing to remember, since remorse is something so highly valued in discussions of who is good and bad in the world. I don't think I made bad choices overall. I made choices based on my lack of parental guidance and moral guidance that I thought would resolve the maximum number of problems in my life. A lot of those choices were environment informed and trauma informed. And all of that is very much rationalizing past actions. Mental gymnastics is a sport that ASPD people excel at. Nothing is ever our fault and if it is then it's not fully and if it is then it's not that bad. I understand why it's a valued thing for normal people to take responsibility for something and say they screwed up and I can see why it's a healthy thing. I just can't get my brain to work that way.

I'm a bit reluctant to accept praise for anything or purely positive reception if it involves ignoring the very real flaws that are present in people with ASPD. Replacing the dehumanizing stereotype of pure evil with one of inherent benign behavior is no more humanizing or accurate. Accuracy is key to destigmatization. We're not sweet, misunderstood people. But we are people*, with memories, calculations we make, feelings, passions and dreams just like everyone else. I would lie to you in person and act remorseful for things I've done. I would also sit down and try to brainstorm solutions to your problems with you. I'm not evil, nor am I a paragon of virtue. I'm just some guy. (*A lot of people with ASPD don't really identify as a person, but that's a whole separate thing for a separate day.)

Thank you for not immediately recoiling from the very name of the diagnosis and actually taking the time to read the words of someone with it and give it some thought before passing judgment on us. I don't know a single person with ASPD who hasn't had someone go no-contact with them when they trust someone enough to tell them about it. It's something that produces a lot of depression and anxiety in a lot of us. Knowing you, at least, would react to being told about the diagnosis without shoving someone out of your life makes me feel better, genuinely. Other than my therapist and my grandfather, I don't have anyone I can be completely authentic with in real life with that knowledge of what it could cost me looming over my head. I'd be more than happy to break bread with you (I make very good challah bread) and talk knowing even if we disagreed on something, even if we didn't get along, it wouldn't be because of your ideas of what I was, but based on who I actually am.

Can't speak to the cross-country road trip, though, seeing as I'm studying overseas this January and we can't road trip across the ocean... yet, anyway. If someone on the forum wants to charter a boat I'm not opposed to it, so long as everyone onboard knows how to swim.

Helo BlueGold,

Thanks for posting about this, it's interesting. In the last 10 years or so, with high tech imaging a better understanding of these kinds of mental troubles is emerging.

I remember reading "The Sociopath Next Door", some years ago, being intrigued by the seemingly incongruous title. (It's not the popular perception at all, thanks to Hollywood and many a fiction writer...)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/72536.The_Sociopath_Next_Door

(It's a bit difficult to sort out the various labels and their shades of meaning - Psychopath, Sociopath, Anti Social PD, Narcissistic PD, etc. They seem to be almost interchangeable in the common parlance).

And looking around just now, I see a number of documentaries on the topic, like this -

https://watchdocumentaries.com/i-psychopath/

And the story of a neuroscientist and professor who discovered *he* was a psychopath when he recognized the neural signatures in his own PET scan that was sitting in the stack he'd taken for a study he was doing!

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/impostors-1.4695876/how-a-psychiatry-professor-accidentally-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-1.4705718

https://www.smh.com.au/national/this-neuroscientist-accidentally-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-how-can-you-pick-them-20220608-p5asat.html

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/

I would love it if we could someday get to the point where I meet a single person with ASPD who didn't get rejected by a family member or long-term 5+ year friend for their diagnosis. Maybe this will help.

Can you elaborate on this a bit? If someone has come to know you after some time, how does a label like ASPD or NPD change things? Why would someone go no-contact on the basis of that without anything further? How does that work?

(Perhaps "sociopath" or "psychopath" might elicit some consternation, but that's due to a misperception and lack of nuance on their part....)

Can you elaborate on this a bit? If someone has come to know you after some time, how does a label like ASPD or NPD change things? Why would someone go no-contact on the basis of that without anything further? How does that work?

Why wouldn't it change things? The person thought they knew you, they thought they understood you, and then you reveal to them that 1. you kept something from them, 2. it's that thing everyone on social media from tumblr to Reddit to TIktok to Instagram to Twitter uses as shorthand for 'abuser' and 3. you don't think, fundamentally, the same way that they do. There are entire guides online to identifying possible NPD and ASPD people in your life and cutting them out. (My favorite is the one on tumblr that suggests people with NPD are more likely to be into cottagecore, because trying to draw a connecting line between internet aesthetics and mental illnesses is just funny to me. Ah yes, that famous diagnostic criteria: wanting to own a small house in the countryside.) There's an entire subreddit dedicated to bashing parents who the users believe might have NPD. I think because I'm not yet 22, we have very different internet experiences, but growing up in the generation and in the context I did, I genuinely can't fathom a world in which the stigma of the diagnosis didn't outweigh personal experiences entirely.

It's hardly limited to ASPD or NPD, either. I know someone with schizophrenia whose now ex boyfriend basically stopped treating her like an adult capable of making her own decisions once she was diagnosed. A friend of mine had his girlfriend leave him when he was diagnosed with BPD and go no-contact that very day. So my gut instinct is to go, "Well, maybe knowing people who are young more than I do those who are older has skewed my anecdotal data." Unfortunately, I am a member of some Discord servers for people with ASPD and other mental illnesses, and from there, I've made contact with more than a few people older than I am. Actually, since you have to be 18 to even get diagnosed, I'm not actually sure I've met someone with a diagnosis younger than I am, so all my observations on ASPD being the kiss of death for at least one social connection are based in a wide age range. My personal perception of the world aside, even outside of my generation, people tend to not be great on this.

From what I've observed, the reasons for this 'screw you, I'm out of here' reaction have a range of causes: mental health stigma, fear you're secretly abusive the way all those horror movies said nice people might be, anger that you lied to them, distrust coming from the fact that if you lied about this then you might absolutely be lying about other things, family members of the person you told finding out and pressuring them to get away from you, your past actions being recontextualized and reevaluated in a less charitable light, and that old classic, the fear that you opening up means you're about to start venting and wanting them to listen to your problems/comfort you.

There is, of course, lots of overlap on a Venn diagram between all of the above. Pick some, discard others, mix and match until you get someone deciding to cut you out of their life like they're a main character in a horror film trying to evade being in the villain's inner circle.

Common consensus among ASPD people is that even if your diagnosis slips, always lie and pretend to be one of "the good ones" that feels empathy. (That's not a thing, of course, but a few lies salvage most relationships.) Lack of empathy is shorthand for evil in everyday conversation. People accuse everyone who does something violent or fatal of having no empathy. Lack of empathy is used to point out which people are "bad" in a group of friends; as early as fourth grade I can remember listening to other kids talk about how they didn't like a girl in my class because she didn't feel anything for the main character of a book we were reading in class, and the vibe wasn't accepting when they did so, the vibe was wariness mixed with contempt. People like Putin, Pol Pot or Mussolini get called devoid of empathy. Lack of regret straight up had my first grade teacher call me a serial killer in the making directly to my face, and I was only six. We get it drilled into us as children that certain traits are not acceptable, are automatically evil, are stated to be present in people devoid of goodness, and even one of my college professors this last semester said he doubted sociopaths could feel love or would mourn losing someone. (I actually tried to kill myself after my mother died, but, y'know. Why let facts get in the way of a good villain bashing? It's not as if those villains are people or are in the room with you right now.)

There is, of course, equal stigma attached to lack of remorse. I lost one friendship to that. I don't feel remorseful for anything I've done and frankly if I did feel remorse it'd only be that I didn't do more to lash out at the people who failed me growing up, and that is not a sentiment that plays well with people's Christocentric morality in the United States, where remorse is seen as vital in order to make amends, apologize and be forgiven. A lack of remorse is conflated with a lack of capacity to improve. Other than Donatello from Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I can't name you a heroic character that doesn't experience remorse or empathy, because not only can we not conceive of it in real life, we can't conceive of it in fiction, either. That's how ingrained it is in this society that remorse and empathy are mandatory to be good, we can't even ask ourselves what a hypothetical good person without those things would look like while playing make-believe. We can envision alien species and societies but not a human who is different being anything other than evil.

The way this usually works is that questions about the diagnosis turn into your loved one questioning you about what you feel and don't feel. They question you on if something makes you feel anything, and when you reply that no, it doesn't, that's when things usually fall apart. I can explain to you all day and all night how everything about my mind works and how I can logically understand the immoral, sick, sadistic nature of something, how unnecessary and unjustifiable something is, how there's just no reason to do something like rape or pedophilia or what have you, but all the person I'm talking to hears and sees is a lack of correct response, a lack of emotion, a lack of what they consider to be a heart or a soul, and they usually find that disturbing and/or uncomfortable.

When the entirety of someone's life has conditioned them to think of certain traits as monstrous, soulless, heartless, and evil, the fact that they know you is only sometimes, conditionally, enough to overcome that. A lot of the time, it is not. In the same way people who grew up in queerphobic families reject someone who is queer most of the time and queerphobic families reject their own queer family members, entire lives together and experiences be damned, a ASPD diagnosis is functionally an admission of guilt and a declaration of incompatibility with everything they know to be moral.

I could probably do an extra little rant here on the "accepting" people usually declaring you've been misdiagnosed because they know you and you DO feel remorse and you DO feel empathy, you just don't realize it, you're not a bad person, etc., but I think that's a side tangent that I can sum up best as: even if people say they accept you, it may only be because they're actively working to tell themselves you're something different than what you are. Which now means you have a friend, family member or romantic partner who is continually talking over you about your own experiences in order to feel comfortable around you. That's honestly worse to me than the outright rejection is. Rejection is an action of ignorance. Being told I don't know how I myself think or feel is dehumanizing. It really lays bare just how little capacity someone has to be comfortable with who I actually am if they walk around denying it to not just themselves but to me, directly, as if I might as well have kicked in the door and declared myself to be a wholesome cannibal for how incompatible they think the label and the good person they know are. (Except we do, in fact, have wholesome cannibals not just in fiction but in reality. I struggle to come up with a hypothetical example of something as inconceivable as a good person devoid of remorse and empathy, as every example that comes to mind, the human mind can already conceive of and has produced examples of, either in real life or fiction.)

If you're young and stupid and freshman college age me, by you I mean me in this scenario, you might be dumb enough to double down and really try hard to explain how your mind works to the person who is insisting you don't fit the diagnostic criteria. This is a bad idea. Do not, if you have ASPD and are reading this, do that. You're just going to come across as either an edgelord insisting he feels nothing or like a threat, because that's how most people have been socialized to conceive of someone with this diagnosis.

Alternately I've also had someone cut me out of their life because their therapist said people with ASPD are almost always abusers, so. I'd be remiss to type out this long reply without lovingly (sarcastically, bitterly) shouting out the mental health 'professionals' who encourage this go-no-contact, burn-it-all-down-and-salt-the-earth thing that's become so en vogue on social media among wellness influencers in the past six years. Thanks. Really making people's lives better, provided you don't count anyone with ASPD as a person (which some people don't, but that's another tangent for another day).