Does Pyromania Actually Exist?

ten years, Jerry said, ten long years? She did, didn't she She did the longest because I think is what she said. Do you realize if we go another ten we've been doing it for twenty years, that I'll be like approaching sixty years old. That seems weird. It's starting to seem normal to me, being old, speeding toward our ultimate deminds. I'm trying not to think about it like that.

I'm thinking more of like picking the drain of having mellowed in age like herring and a can right or um a pickle like a good pickle takes a minute, you know what I'm saying. To get just right? Sure, we're at prime pickle age right now. Speaking of pickle, Oh yeah you are pickled? Yeah? You feeling okay? We talked earlier. Emily and I celebrated our tenth anniversary of the show last night. A little too much congratulations, some a little foggy today. Yeah, I can wait to do

this Facebook live. That should be interesting. Well, yeah, we're gonna do a Facebook live. By the time this comes out, you guys will have all missed it by a couple of weeks. Yeah, and in true stuff, you should know fashion we probably should have recorded something to be released today on our anniversary. We didn't, but we're releasing it a couple of weeks after we released the Uni Bomber today, which I think was a good episode. Sure, so it

was a fine ten year anniversary. Yeah, okay, either way, ten years, ten years it happened. It's so chuck. I know what'll clearly the way, the cloudiness, the fogginess, um, some smoke, bloody Mary, okay, smoke chuck from a fire. Yes, And I have to say I admit to getting pumped up for this one by listening to deaf Leppard. I was hoping you'd mentioned def Leppard. I just did take it away if you weren't, I was going to. Yeah. The album's named Pyromania. The song is rock of ages,

but he does say, what is it? No serenade, no fiber gade, just pyromania? Come on, yeah, what do you want? What do you need? I want rock and Roll's right, man. And then after that I was like, oh, what else came from this air? So I ended up on like Steve Perry and Journey and some other stuff. But I'm pump Nonetheless, did you ever did you go to a little uh? Yes, light e face a little bit. Yeah,

I think a little boys do. This article by Craig Freud and Rich PhD uh as far as I know, the only PhD to ever write at how Stuff Works. He very wisely pointed out that a fascination of fire is basically universal among kids. It's a good It's a good way to get introduced to things you shouldn't do, is doing them early on, at a young age, before you can actually go to the store and buy gasoline and start a real fire. You know. It just kind of messing around with a little lighter fluid and a

lighter hairspray and a lighter Yeah, that's another one. Don't do any of us, by the way, kids, But I'm just saying, messing around with fire in small, basically harmless ways. It's a pretty natural part of your development. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think I remember very specifically one time when I was playing in the woods. We grew up a you know, a couple of acres in the woods, the clean woods that your neighbor cleaned up and died in. No, no, no,

that that was my friend. Oh those are different woods. Yea. Um. I remember very specifically when I was a kid, I was probably like ten, we need the Waynes world, Like I think I built. I built a thing. I don't even know what it's called, but it's you take like a coffee can and you dig into the side of a hill and you stick the coffee can in there and then put a little stovepipe in it, you know, like a chimney, right, what do you mean? Like made

from what I can't remember what I used. Might have been PBC or something, um, And then I don't know if you're supposed to cook in it. It was some sort of like legit camping thing. But I started a fire in it and it got kind of big and it was just smoking a lot, and I remember hearing a siren and freaked out because I thought it was coming for me, which it of course was not. No, so you didn't burn down the woods. No, I didn't

burn down the woods. And on looking back, it was probably a very small fire because it was in a coffee can, yeah or not, you know, one of the big coffee cans. But still I remember thinking that I did something bad and they've gotten me, right, But then you ran away, and you're like, oh, I got away scot free. I should try something bigger next. No, but I did run away and think like, oh boy, that was a close one. Did you learn your lesson? Yeah?

I don't remember. I mean, you know, I told the story about lighting coat hanger and rings on fire for the evil knevil jumps and things like that, but that's all, you know, pretty run of the mill stuff. I don't, right, So I agree it's fairly running the mill. Imaginative, but still fairly running the mill. Right, What about you? I feel like I remember a fire of some sort, but the fact that I blocked it out makes me think it may have been a big fire. But you didn't

try to like burn down a house being built or anything. No, no, no, And I was never like I was, you know, kind of fascinated with fire and everything, but you didn't dabbling Arson. I just I feel like I feel like in time one almost got away from us. And of course it was the woods. Yeah, I mean that can happen. But I think our fascination with fire, my fascination fire quickly

translated into using lighters to light cigarettes in the woods. Again, yeah, mine did not so, but there's a fascination with fire that people go through. According to our buddy Sigmu Freud, if you go through a weirdo psycho sexual development, which is to say, not exactly like what Freud thought you should go through, you could conceivably come out the other side hanging on to that fascination with fire, to where it is an outlet for your stress, okay, your impulsivity.

It can become a central focus of your life, like what you think about is fire. And if you check these boxes and some other ones, you could conceivably be considered a person with pyromania, which we have reached the pinnacle of political correctness now because I refused to say pyromania, it's a person with pyromania. It's entirely possible. There is not a single person alive on planet Earth who is a true person with pyromania, but we're still going to

say person with pyromania just in case. Yeah, I mean, it's um after reading through this stuff and doing the research, it's a little squirrely to pin down for sure, because well, for a lot of reasons. But the d s M four five, they do have some criteria that goes as follows, and with each one it really whittles down like just regular, Hey, I'm drunken and I'm starting a fire to uh to I want to collect on this insurance. Yeah, so here we go. Number one. They must have set fires deliberately

and purposefully more than once. So that's a lot of people. That's pretty baseline. Yeah, and don't think they're talking about fireplace fires. Uh, we'll get into that, Okay. Must be tens or exhibit outward emotional behaviors before setting fires. It's excitement, facial expressions, changes in voice, that's you may have like you must have your tongue sticking out of the corner

of your mouth while you're lighting the fire. Uh. Must be interested in, curious about, fascinated with, and or attracted to fires. But but there's a big one that we have to add here. Attracted to fire should not have anything to do with sexuality. That is apparently an entirely different disorder that is even rarer called pyrophilia, and that's a sexual arousal disorder from fire. Interesting. Yeah, people are so interesting, So we need to do a paraphilia episode

at least in necrophilia episode once. Yeah, there's like a lot of Surprisingly, there's a decent amount of research on that UM number four experience. It's pleasure, tension, relief, or gratification after setting the fire or watching the fire, but not sexual gratification. No, God help you, right, it's not a person with pyrophilia in that case. Uh So, like, if you start a fire in the woods and you get an erection, it's in your pyrophiliac. If it goes born,

then you're a pyrophiliac. Other psychological disorders cannot account better for the behavior. So in other words, if you have a manic episode and you start a fire, it's due to the manic episode and not pyromania. Which now we're getting to the point where you start to wonder, like is there such a thing as is true pyrophilia? Well, especially with this last one, no other motivations for setting the fire um like collecting insurance, um. Like burning down

a political rivals office. Yeah, you can't shout like anarchy, right, or being just angry at somebody or burning a body, that doesn't count, uh, improving your living circumstance. So I found something about that. One there was back in the medieval times, not the one where you can go to today,

but like the real one, not the restaurant. Right, there was like this this kind of thing that like if you hired or basically kidnapped a medieval servant girl, there was a good chance that she was going to burn your house and your children down so she could go back home. So that would be an example of that interesting, uh, responding to delusions or hallucinations and then finally impaired judgment. And that's what I was talking about, being intoxicated or

if you have dementia or something like that. Right, and even chuck, from what I understand, even if you are doing this, if you're starting fires just to start fires for fun, that would technically not qualify as pyromania. You

you would basically just be an arsonist. Like there's there's actually so there's an umbrella term fire setting, which is a behavior arson is a crime, Pyromania is a psychological diagnosis, and they're all kind of wrapped up together, which is why it makes getting things like how common is it?

It's really tough to kind of pinpoint that, right. So Freud and Rich says, if you are a diagnostician and you're presented with the person who sets a lot of fires, and they're like, they don't drink, they don't even purchase insurance because they consider it a form of gambling. They don't have an erection, no erection to be found. Um. They like, once you whittle all this stuff away, you'd be like, oh my god, this person is making my career right now, I found a genuine person with pyromania.

Very rare. Yeah, And through the years it's been really uh, it's kind of gone on a roller coaster ride as far as uh. The definition of pyromania said, during the hundred and fifty years span of legal and medical literature, sometimes people were frequently diagnosed, sometimes they weren't at all. Uh, And it doesn't seem to be any change in behaviors. Rather, um changes in shifts in psychiatry and what we think is diagnosable, right, and what how much personal accountability we

ascribe to mental illness. Right. So like with with there's just this constant evolution and it's actually just kind of a circle. It's not really evolving, it's it's when you think about pyromania, UM, the question is is it an on the result of an uncontrollable impulse or is it the result of an impulse that wasn't properly controlled. So

is the person culpable or not? And over this one study that you mentioned, over like a hundred and fifty years, they saw it just bounce back and forth and back and forth, and it corresponded to the attitudes of society and psychology of whether or not a person's responsibility for

their own actions. And in court also, if you were holding court today, if you said, well, I plead not guilty to that arson by reason of insanity, um, because I have pyromania, that that you would just have automatically shot yourself in the foot right there in the middle of the courtroom. Because part of the criteria of pyromania is that you're not responding to a delusion or any kind of severe mental illness um. So by definition, you would be lucid and know what you're doing. Is wrong,

or else you wouldn't be a person with pyromania. Yeah, I didn't know. This is complicated. It's very complicated. Should we take a break. I think we should. All right, We're gonna entangle this a bit more and come back and speak to um. How common this stuff is? So Chuck? Yes,

how common is that? Well, like we said, it's kind of tough to say because it's all wrapped up statistically in and arson statistics, and we've already determined this not necessarily the same thing, right, And so consider this, if you are an investigator, a psychiatrist, or a psychologist who's like trying to figure out how many people with pyromania there are, you have to go find people who are in jail for arson. So, by definition, your population sample

is skewed one way. Right. What about people who may have pyromania but have have said like, well, I'm not going to jail, I can just start fires in my fireplace, like you were asking, Oh, well, they would still qualify as a person with pyromania. They're just not a criminal arsonist because arson is a criminal act. They're smart enough to not do this. Yeah, And there was Now that I look back, there was no distinction that you start a fire like on someone else's property that becomes dangerous.

You literally could start a fire in your own fireplace and make an excited face and feel relieved afterward, not get an erection, and uh, I mean that'd be a great way to I mean, all things being equal, that's not a bad not bad at all. You know, kind of control control your own urge, especially considering that um pyromania is a it's an impulse control disorder, so it's in the same class as like pathological gambling addictions. If you're starting fires in your fireplace and that's it, you

could be a lot worse off. Oh yeah, for sure. There was one study though, psychiatrist named Nina Lindbergh in Finland reviewed twenty years of um medical records and psychiatric evaluations of six hundred arsonists, all men, and it's definitely skewed more heavily towards men. Yeah, is that right? Overall? Supposedly so, Freud thought it was a expression of misdeveloped

or yeah, misdeveloped male psycho sexual um urges. All right, But they found that most of these arsonists, you know, again they started chipping away, most of them had mental disorders. Personality disorders. Sixty eight percent of the arsonists were drunk, which is really interesting. I think it is so that that whole thing about not being drunk and not being uh considered to have pyromania. Some people reported their sense of the like the arousal was um excited by drinking,

So how is that work? And they also were choking themselves out with a belt, right, They're going for the full Montya, the trifecta. Uh. Then they separated the group into two things, criminal arsonists and pure arsonists. Um, these are people, like you said, that had not committed a crime of arson. Um. Well, but it's interesting. I thought they started out as arsenists. Now, oh no other criminal activities. Okay, yeah,

all right, that makes sense. And then finally they applied the old d s M at the time for criteria and only twelve of these six hundred dudes met that that criteria, although it says that nine of them admitted to being drunk. So how did they fit that criteria?

That's what I'm saying. Like even confusing, even if you look at the history of the d s M, the d s M one, it starts out as being listed as an obsessive compulsive disorder doesn't make any appearance at all in the second edition, and by the third, fourth, and fifth it's considered um an impulse control disorder. So just from to you know, the current time, there have been all these different bouncing back and forth about what

it is and they still have no idea. Well but anyway you slice it, it looks like it's a very small number of people. Yeah if, like you said, even if it's a thing at all. Right, So there's another study, um by these two researchers, Grant and Kim. They sound like a folk duo. Two Yeah. Um. They got their hands on i think twenty one or twenty seven, twenty one subjects who had been clinically diagnosed with pyromania okay um, and strangely, eleven were male, ten were female, which is

kind of surprising since this is supposedly excused. Eleven male, ten female. Um, And they found some really interesting stuff. They said that um MO to them, the onset began an adolescence or early adulthood, and supposedly that's like the risky time for a lot of impulse control disorders. UM that they basically all reported feeling arousal or excitement not necessarily aroused like you think, like sexual arousal. No, can't

be right. It's just got to be like you're you're just wound up, and the only way to get unwound, and you know it is to start that fire. And then when you start that fire, you feel a tremendous sense of relief, you may feel excited. And then from what I understand, and this really goes with kleptomania, you remember kleptomania or episode about that it was like that you could not not steal. The only way to to to turn the switch off in your brain was a steel.

In this case, the only way to turn the switch off in your brain is to start a fire. But you immediately regret it, Like, but I think of them reported immediately having verer distress after starting a fire, so you know it's wrong. And this is this is probably

the saddest thing about the whole thing. UM one third, which is so seven out of twenty one, that's still a significant number reported UM considering suicide as a means of controlling their fire starting Like they felt that bad about this that they wanted to just kill themselves so they wouldn't start fires anymore. So there is like a real there's a real cost to it, in addition to the fact that this is a really dangerous impulse control of the story. I mean, gambling is bad enough, but

what are you doing with gambling. You're ruining your life. You're ruining your family's life, maybe your parents. It has a finite amount of reach with with fire setting. It's that's like you could kill any number of people. Yeah, offend it interesting to that. Uh, they're kleptomania, like these impulse control disorders. We talked about, you know, being a little kid and stealing something. I think a lot of kids go through playing around with fire, playing around with

stealing things. I guess gambling is sort of the only one that's really not I don't know a lot of ten year olds that are, you know, playing three card money. I got in trouble for gambling in elementary, but we were playing with skittles or whatever. And even at the time, I'm like, come on, we're playing for skittles here. This is ridiculous. This is an outrage giving my cards back. But I do remember feeling bad when I stole something once when I was a kid, and uh, but I

think that's the point of doing all that. Yeah, but I don't Yeah, maybe so, but I don't remember feeling bad about the fire. I just remember feeling like when I heard that siren, like crap, I'm in trouble. Right. So what you're learning by testing boundaries uh and and following your impulses is oh, doing this makes me feel really bad, or oh, doing this scares me to death because I can get in big trouble for it. And and you get that emotional limbic system learning, Um, yeah,

SmackDown exactly, And that's how you really truly learned. Your parents can tell you all day long, right, but you unless you're like al Gore, you're not gonna listen to it. You know, you're not gonna listen to your parents like that. You gotta go test it out yourself, right, Or you're budding sociopath and you don't feel bad, you're like, I want to do this, and that limbic system doesn't smack

you down. It says, maybe you should. You don't like that kid down the street, Maybe you should set par to his house or steal his stuff or mistreat that animal. You shouldn't do that. You shouldn't do any of this stuff. Well, that's true, but especially the animal thing. Yeah, but that's like one of the early signs of you know that is that is um of psychopathy. Psychopathy um, that is uh,

that is debated. What you're talking about is the McDonald triad. Yeah, I mean I don't I don't think it always does. But a lot of times when you look back at the history of serial killers and things that they started with weird animal things. But I think the problem is

that's like so sexy and so made the news. The idea that if a kid um is a bedwetter, starts fires, and mistreats animals, that was two out of three, Right, You're close that you you can basically say, well, there's a serial that kid's going to grow up to be a serial killer, which is not the case. I think it's it's um is that reductive or deductive? Where really it's if you look at serial killers, they tend to

have they they check those three boxes. But just because you check those three boxes doesn't mean you're going to be a serial killer. No. But let's say this, if you're a parent and your kid is doing all three of those things, you know, just keep a little eye on them. And eye on the right. Just give him a chipmunk and see what they do. Test them out, give a chipmunk in a match, and just lock them in a room and see what happens. We should probably take a break after that one. Yes, we'll be back

right after this. All right. So let's say it turns out that you may be part of the one and not in a good way where you're super rich. Yeah, did we say that that? Like they think one percent of Arsons is pyromaniac, not even one to four percent of the population, not even so. But let's say you are one of those rare people. Um, how would you

treat this impulse control disorder? So one thing I saw was, as with any impulse control disorder, but particularly because this is such a dangerous, threatening impulse control disorder, you basically need to keep in touch with a psychiatric caregiver your whole life. That there's remission, there's relapse, and that even if you get your pyromania under control, that it can pop up in other ways like gambling or addiction to alcohol and drugs or whatever. So you really need to

have some sort of psychiatric presence in your life. It's just part of your life. Sorry, that's just that. But you can be treated. Sure, there is treatment for it. It can be kept under control. Yeah, behavioral therapy. Of course. They've had some success with s SR eyes selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that we've talked about a gazillion times on the show, and with anti convulsants too, right, Yeah, this was super interesting to me. This was in two thousand six.

There's a letter to the editor of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, and there was a dude psychiatrist named John Grant who said he had a case of a patient who said, this person fits this whole the criteria of a person in pyromania. And I examined this guy's brain with uh what's called spect imaging. I've actually never heard of that. No, it's like wonder machine plus or is it minus? Maybe it could be light l I T eh maybe it. It's like I had this machine in

here that I made. It's just like a calendar with some tinfoil over it. Uh. Yeah, that is weird. After ten years in and I've never heard of a spect machine ten years to the day. S P. E. C T. I think I just made it it. Uh. So he found a region in the left interior I'm sorry, inferior or frontal portion that had low blood flow. He uh, put this guy through a few weeks of behavioral therapy and this anti convulsant drug for twelve months. This guy lost the urges or had a really big decrease in

the urge to set fires. Brought the guy back in, put him in his tinfoil calendar machine, and there was no problem in that front A portion of the left inferior lobe right cleared it right up. Blood flow is fine, which makes sense because the left inferior gyros, I believe is one of the regions associated with impulse control. So it makes sense. Sure. I mean, there's a there's a whole school of thought out there that all psychiatric conditions, all are are biological. We just don't know how to

how to catch them or point them out. And we also don't know how most of like the drugs that we use to treat them actually work. We just are like, well it works, kind of you know, really interesting. So I've got another one for you. I'm surprised this is the only kind of good example of that, though. But it's so hard to find the thing that gets me is like, why why if it's co morbid with some other kind of disorder, why is it not pyromania? Is?

I think that's what's that's what's confounding everything is. It's like kayatry and psychology have said it's its own thing. I don't know if it is necessarily its own thing. Um, but one one thing that has the one study found and I couldn't find who conducted the study, but there was a study that found basically, if you've ever seen a volunteer firefighter, you've seen a person of pyromania. Yeah, they say that that's a there's a strong association with Hey,

I'd like to go. And I've heard that with arsenists too. Yeah, uh that they a lot of times are volunteer or you know, regular firefighter. There was a very famous uh fire captain named John Leonard or who in the eighties in California Sparky. Basically he was a serial arsonist who killed four people and it's not like it was by accident. He would go start small fires out in like the the um the hills. Don't they have hills in California

where they have wildfires. He would go start small ones so that he could go start big fires and the fire department would be distracted out in the hills fighting the small ones when the big one went up. He would set off fires in stores they had people in it while they were open. So he wasn't doing the thing where like I want to start a fire because things are slow and I really want to fight this fire. Like he was trying to hurt people from what from what I understand, yes, um, and he was a fire

captain and arson investigator for years, so that is a thing. Uh. And some people if you aren't a firefighter or just too lazy to be a firefighter, but you still have pyromania, you might you might still go to fires when you when you see like a fire truck go by and will go to the fire and watch. Um. And I would guess if you're a firefighter, you probably see the same person here there and they are like, what's up

with you? Man? That's a movie. But supposedly like you can find people with pyromania on fire staff, which as long as they're not starting the fires, God bless them. Yeah, that's probably a pretty healthy way to get your your kicks. It's to watch fires to go to fight fires. Yeah, but people with pyromania also will pull fire alarms just to see the fire trucks. It's not just a fascination

with fire. The whole thing things associated with fire, to lighters, firefighting equipment, firefighters, and sometimes they will like as the urge is building, they will start accumulating combustibles like little pieces of fuel like paper, and oh, this will burn really well. Oh, these lighters looks awesome. Ike, can't wait to start the fire with and just keep it around and then finally they can't hold it back anymore than wow, but not burn? Right, no erections. That should be the

title of the show. I think it might be pyromania colon no erections, exclamation point right doing exclamation point? Wow? Do we just name it? Live with on a monopeia? Um? What else? Do we have anything else in here? No? That's the thing about this, there's not a lot to it. I'm actually impressed that we got thirty minutes out of it because it's so uncertain what pyromania is. Yeah. Actually, here's the one statistical percentage. It said estimated and one

point one three percent of the population. Uh, yeah, that they don't know the idea. Um, I've got one for you. Alright, arsons in the US. Supposedly there's over sixty two thousand arsons every year in the US because not a billion dollars and losses every year and um about eight of Arson's result and no arrests. And I also saw that in Australia. Apparently they like to light their fires too. There's a fire that's lit every hour of every day in Australia. Yeah, what is going on down there? Uh?

Maybe I don't know. This is hot. We're gonna find out in September and we're gonna find out what. Maybe we should do one on arson at some point because Arson investigation is something I know nothing about and it's fascinating to me. Well, a lot of it's totally made up. Arson investigation. What do you mean it's junk science? What like, Hey, it originated here, Yes, but I'm working on my intuition here and I learned it from this guy who's working on his intuition. And but we still put people to

death based on this junk science. Evans, we totally need to do one on that. I wonder if the what they say is like look for the thing that looks the most melty and that's where I started start, there's your problem? Interesting, Yeah, we'll do one on that I've been wanting to for a while. Yeah, okay, all right, okay, deal, okay, Jerry, Okay,

Jerry didn't care. If you want to know more about pyromania, you can type that word in the search bar how stuff works dot com them and it will bring up a pretty great article by Freud and Rich the Doctor. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail, no listener mail today on this one, because we just want to take a moment to say thank you, a moment of silence, okay, uh, to say legitimate, sincere thank you for ten years of podcasting. None of us thought

this would take on the life that it's had. I feel safe to say I agree with you, man, and I looked at the old podcast rankings today and we're right there at number six. What Yeah, just hanging too bad for a ten year old brand, hanging tough like the New Kids? Was it? The new Kids? Josh and Chuck and Jerry. Uh So we said it a lot. We would not. There would be no us without you, guys, and that is as true as true gets. So we still count on you to spread the word, to prostlytize,

and to tell your friends to listen. Maybe put a sandwich board on and ring about all up and down the sidewalk. Couldn't hurt. Yeah, thank you everybody for getting us to this point today. Like you were saying, Chuck, we definitely would not be here without you guys, So thank you for listening all these times. Amen, Amen, I got nothing else. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at joshum Clark and s Y s K podcast on Twitter.

Chucks a movie crush on Twitter too. By the way, Chuck's also all over Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and slash Stuff you Should Know. You can send us all an email to Stuff podcast, to how Stuff Works dot com, and as always, join us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com