Psychopath

It's time for story-time!  Yay!

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, I was sitting in front of my computer, chatting to some friends online. As is the unfortunate case with many people online, one of them decided that they were insane.  They all joined in, mentioning their quirks in the hopes of appearing to be strange and "insane."  Yes, this was one of those groups where eating peanut-butter and salami sandwiches would've qualified as insanity.

This has, for a while, left a foul taste in my mouth, so I stopped talking and let them go through their little silly game of pretending to be somehow mentally different than the rest of humanity.  But I felt the need to jump in when one of the people I was talking to diagnosed himself with schizophrenia.  For those of you who are familiar with the term, but a little hazy on the details, this is the common definition:

Schizophrenia is a complex mental disorder that makes it difficult to: Tell the difference between real and unreal experiences; Think logically; Have normal emotional responses, Behave normally in social situations

As you can see, this is quite a challenge to live with and a rather severe mental disorder.  But, it is the symptoms of the disorder that make it truly horrifying.

Lack of emotion (flat affect)

Strongly held beliefs that are not based in reality (delusions)

Hearing or seeing things that are not there (hallucinations)

Problems paying attention

Thoughts "jump" between unrelated topics ( “loose associations”)

Bizarre behaviors

Social isolation

See?

This often leads people suffering with the disorder to believe that the people around them are somehow plotting to hurt them or the people they love.  It is a crippling disease in the mind.  And while you can continue to live after losing a limb, what are you supposed to do when it is your mind that is falling apart?

Back to the story.  So, I knew this guy fairly well.  In fact, I had been his roommate for half a week.  I'd spoken to him on a number of occasions before, and I knew that he wasn't the type to be trusted when it comes to behavior like this.  And so, I did what I felt was best.  I pointed out the severity of that disease and how it is totally not a joking matter.

To me it seemed (And continues to seem to this day) that joking about that is like claiming you have a brain-tumor after getting a head-ache.  Yes, you might have a shadow of what the real symptoms are like, but if you are honestly worried about you should be getting it checked out rather than making fun of it.

And he retorted that he was not joking and asserted that he really believed he had a mild case of the disease.  A case so mild, in fact, that no one would be able to actually diagnose it.  However, he felt certain that his research on the internet was more than enough to confirm that he really did have such a mental disorder.  And there was no reason, what-so-ever, that he should not share this information with a bunch of teenagers on the internet who would believe anything he said.

So, with my face firmly planted in my palm, I typed up a short response.  I said "Gregorivitch [Names have been changed to protect the identities of people involve], I know you.  You do not have any such disease."

He insisted that he did.

Nicolas Flamel, who was also in the chat room, asked why I always had to be such a jerk.

Nymphadora asked me to stop causing an argument.

So, with Gregorivitch obviously in the favor of the group, I decided to try one last-ditch effort to try to help these teenagers see how severe these disorders can be.  I said that if he had a "mild case" of Schizophrenia, then I had a "mild case" of Psyocopathy.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized primarily by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness. 

His simple response was this:  "Kyle, I would believe that even without the qualifier of 'mild case'."

Throughout my life I have been quite fortunate to meet a lot of very interesting people.  I was took writing classes with a best selling author who happened to have a passion for teaching homeschoolers to write.  I am being trained to fence by a man who was on the Russian national team.  Every week I train against a girl who is best fencer in her division in our province.

But sometimes it is the people who are less "extraordinary" who have impacted me the most.  There is one such individual who has cancer, and while it leaves him very tired a lot of the time, when he was diagnosed with it the doctors told him that if he had to have cancer, this was the best one to have.  He wasn't young, and it would not kill him.  And if it did, it wouldn't kill him for a very long time.

To a certain extent, that is how I view psychopathy.  If I had to have a personality disorder, I would probably pick that one.  Because while it certainly changes the way someone lives (as compared to the people around them) they can live with it.

But, with that said, psychopathy terrifies me.

Can you imagine living without understanding remorse?  Watching a movie and not being able to connect with the hero?  As a fiction junkie, psychopathy would change me forever.  So when I drew up that connection (Between him suffering from Schizophrenia and me being a Psychopath) I was not doing so because I wished to be diagnosed with said disorder or that I actually believed that I had that disorder.

I did it because the thought of me having Psychopathy was so strange, terrifying, and otherworldly to me that I thought it would jar them out of their state of belief in Gregorivitch's schizophrenia.

It did not.

Now, this may seem like a contradiction to everything else I've said here, but there are certain circumstances where insanity can be funny to me.  For example, go to your local bookstore and pick up a copy of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat", which details a number of true cases of mental disorders, often in a entertaining fashion.  The titular character did exactly what the title implies.  After a session with his therapist, the writer of the book, he decided to grab his hat and leave.

With a firm grip on his wife's scalp he tried to somehow "put on his hat."

While that case is obviously tragic, the way in which the writer tells the story (Balancing respect with humor) makes it engaging, interesting and a little funny.

However, when a person goes out of their way to diagnose themselves with a disease that plagues many people, I think that's screwed up.  It's belittling to the people who actually suffer from that disorder as well as being completely not funny.  It's like they're, in some strange way, wanting to see a disease in themselves.  It's almost as if they are envious towards the people who suffer from that.

And yet because the physical symptoms of medical disorders are hidden, it's rarely taken as seriously as necrotizing fasciitis or a disease like that.  (Look up images of that disease if you never want to sleep again.) But, is it any less painful to deal with?  Can you imagine dealing with someone you love whose mind isn't completely together anymore?

I remember when someone in my family saw my parents and congratulated them on their marriage.  They had been married for over twenty four years at the time (There 25th was on my eighteenth birthday a few weeks ago) and knew this woman quite well.  And yet as her memory deteriorated she'd forgotten that she'd been at their wedding, forgot all about their relationship.  Another person from the book I mentioned above was alcoholic enough to do the same thing to his own memory.

So when he saw his own brother he commented to someone else that he sure has aged rather quickly.  This was because he lost twenty years of his memory and couldn't even remember what his brother looked like.  Well, he could, but his memories were 20+ years old, so he'd say that his brother sure had aged a lot very quickly, even though the opposite was true.

Do you want to be like the guy who mistook his own leg for someone else's that was grafted onto his body?

Do you want to be like the man who can't even remember what his brother looks like?

Do you want to be the man who mistook his wife for a hat?

I doubt it.  That is what insanity really looks like, and that is what those people have to live with every day.  So please, stop making light of what these people suffer through.  Please give them a little dignity after everything else has been stolen from them.  That really is the least we can do for other humans who are going through things worse than we can comprehend.