MAKING A PSYCHOPATH-Mark Freestone

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world's most violent real life criminals. Angela the Remorseless, a rare female psychopath casually confessed to murder on national television without a hint of regret. Danny the Borderline switched from grandiosity to rage to despair within minutes and killed his defenseless friend without explanation. Tony de Khanman preferred charm, intimidation and sexual abuse over physical violence, and once tried to

dupe someone into buying the Eiffel Tower. Jason the Lyar had a fantasy life that led to vicious murders around Europe and preyed on those who see the good in people. Case by fascinating case, get to know seven of the most dangerous minds that doctor Freestone has encountered over the last fifteen years. These are up close accounts of some of them psychopathic criminals and of what can happen if

you fall victim to their supreme powers of manipulation. Exploring the many factors that make a psychopath, the complexities and contradictions of their emotions and behavior, as well as an examination of how the lives of psychopaths develop inside and outside the institutions that are supposed to contain them. Making a psychopath opens up a window into the world of those who operate in a void of human emotion and

what can be done to control them. The book that we're featuring this evening is Making a Psychopath My Journey into Seven Dangerous Minds with my special guest author, doctor Mark Freestone. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview, Doctor Mark Freestone, closed to be here. Thank you so much, our pleasure. Now you start off the introduction in this book, you state that you're not

a psychiatrist and you're not a forensic psychologist. So tell us about your training and also tell us about biopsychosocial understanding of mental illness a mental disorder. Espone me.

So my PhD was actually based on anti globalization protests, which sounds a long way away from mental health and psychopathy.

But what I was specifically looking at was how groups of people form around particular protests organizations, and I found it, actually, curiously enough, although I was looking at anti globalization protests, there was a big shift around nine eleven actually, which took place in the middle of my PhD study, away from that sort of anti capitalist, anti globalization moments into

an anti war movement. But what I found was quite interesting was it was the same people who were organizing process who are sort of they become almost like professionalized protesters or professionalized protest organizers. And as I was reaching the end of the PhD, my supervisor said, well, the methodological approach that you used, the way that you come to understand and work with these groups of protesters would

be really interesting. In a secure hospital, Now, a secure hospital is not something that exists in quite that form

in the United States. They have these in Canada, but essentially they're hospitals that exist to house people who are already convicted criminals, or who are or would be convicted criminals if they weren't found not guilty by reason of insanity as we say right in the UK, or in other words, they're not culpable for their crime because they were suffering from a mental disorder at the time they

committed it. And one of these have been set up at a high security hospital just up the road from the university where I was working at Rampton Hospital in the UK, one of our three maxim security hostrils and it was called the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder UNI and essentially the role of this was to try and treat psychopaths or people with a level of personality pathology, so difficulties in relating to other people, difficulties and understanding

and dealing with emotion equivalent to those of somebody who was a psychopath. This was a very bold move. Nobody else really tried this before that. In the Netherlands, the Dutch have a system kind of analogois called the turber Shicking Stelling system, but it doesn't explicitly work with psychopaths in quite the same way. So this was very innovative, very cutting edge and sort of very exciting place to be.

But as I rapidly discovered, it's not as simple as that to suddenly overturn fifty years of failed attempts to treat psychopathy, and things tended to go a little bit badly wrong in those units But what I think you touched on with your question about the biopsychosocial approach is that a lot of the thinking around mental disorder in the UK for a long time. I think it's probably true of the US and Canada as well, it's based

around a biomedical model. So this is the idea that mental disorders are necessarily biological illnesses that are based in some kind of biological problem. It could be something about the neurological wiring, it could be a problem that's based in the sort of a genetic coding that leads you

to lack the emotions that other people would have. And the biopsychosocial model just sort of critiques that biomedical understanding and says, well, what about the societies that people grow up in, what about the influence of child what about the influence of attachment in the way that people develop, and trying to sort of recast mental disorders like psychopathy and personality disorder as problems that are not just medical.

They involve the input from a lot of other kind of professional disciplines social work, probation officers, prison officers, potentially nurses, and maybe even wacky sociologists like me to try and understand them and cast them in a way that says, these are problems that can't just be solved by medicine. And that's particularly true of psychopathy. Of course, because we don't have a drug to treat psychopathy. We don't even

have drugs to treat the symptoms. We have to approach it in a biopside a social way in order to manage people with a diagnosis of psychopathy.

Hare's Psychopathic Checklist.

this is what Cleckley means. Psychopaths have the ability to pass themselves off quite competently as a normal, adjusted, functioning,

empathic human being over short spaces of time. So that's the idea of that the sort of the mask that psychopaths were, and beneath that mask is a sort of a very sort of a seeding mass of very confused morality and a real absence of a connection to other human beings, which looks like insanity in many ways, because it's impossible for us without being psychopaths, I think to understand the sort of the absence of a moral code

on moral compass that psychopaths have. And I think that's one of the reasons why psychopaths in fiction are so compelling, because it's really really difficult to think, what would my world be like if I simply didn't care about other people? And then Bob Hair, the Cladian forensic psychologist, sort of realizes her Cleckley's vision into a number of testable traits that psychopaths have. There's twenty traits and psychopathy checklists, and

it very quickly becomes, particularly the PCRs. The secondition that you mentioned, the Psychothy Checklist revised that was probabished in ninety eight, that quickly becomes sort of the only accepted way of identifying and clinically assessing for psychopathy in just about any developed country. It's been translated into i think eighteen languages, and there's a youth version as well, and a screening tool that sometimes use so many many different versions,

many many different languages. So the exclusion of anything else, and I think that the issue that I have is that nothing that's what is it now twenty four years old, is ever going to represent the state of the art in research. It just isn't. And I think, just to take an example, something that coleckly noticed was that psychopaths tend to have much much lower thresholds of anxiety than

people who weren't psychopaths in a usual way. And Bob has always been very resistant to including anxiety in any shape or form in the Psychopathy checklist. But actually the latest research suggests that people's levels of anxiety of what we call, I guess just sort of general dissatisfaction with the world. That are a pretty good way of distinguishing, certainly primary psychopaths from secondary psychopaths, which might learn too later,

but would be a really good trait to add. But bop Air isn't interested, I think, in changing it now because it's adopted by most of our legal systems and we use it in the courts very very regularly, so why change it. But I'm not sure that that's the best way of thinking about it, And there's been a

lot of alternative assessments put forward. There was a sort of a cross atlantic one called the CAP the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality that was proposed by Stephen Hart in Canada and Caroline Logan and David Cook in the UK, which looked at psychopathy without the forensic element. So if you take away the antisocial features of the Psychopathy Checklist, you're left with an assessment that could accurately predict psychopathy

in people who weren't criminals. Whereas a weakness of the Psychopathy Checklist, in my opinion, is that it contains a very large number of items that relate simply to antisocial or offending behavior. So this wonderfully fascinating idea of a sort of successful or non criminal psychopath is not something we can add ass for using the pcl art. So lots of other reasons that I won't go into now, but I think it's maybe time for us to rethink the way that we measure psychopathy.

He recruits people who have either been pre screened as having psychopathy or are currently offenders on parole, and then he recruits a control group are just people on the street or his grad students. And he realizes that he's not been putting enough effort into recruiting the control room. And I can totally relate to this because it's so time consuming difficult to recruit offenders and psychopaths into any study.

There's a lot of ethical loopholes you have to go through, a lot of people don't understand it, so you put a lot of effort into that, and then it's like, well, where's your control group? And oh god, I've got to find some people to come do my research stump. So he scans himself just to sort of fill in, and then he's looking through the slides and he's pretty much, you know, it's actually a really interesting and influential study.

He notices that the activation of the amygdala, which is a lobe in the middle of the brain just above the limbic system, so just above where the brain stem meets the gray matter of the brain itself, is much much much lower in one of his controls, and he thinks, oh, that's on. This looks like a psychopath. What am I going to do with this one? So he says, well, I'd better find out who it is so I can

call them and tell them there a psychopath. And he cross matches it to his master key list of participants and realizes this is his own brainscat well, and he's very He describes this beautifully and his Ted talk and his book. He says, I just sort of, you know, I had this Eureka moment where all of these these difficulties and this lack of understanding I've faced when dealing with other people in my life suddenly made sense. It's not because I was going about it wrong, where there

was anything wrong with them. It was something about the way that I am that made it very difficult for me to relate to other people. And this is a successful man with a you know, a very high profile career at a you know, an Ivy League university in the USA, with a family, and this is something else that's very odd for a psychopath. They tend to have marital type relationships, so they can become very intimate with people,

but only over a short space of time. After about sort of six to twelve months, they tend to break up with their partners, usually due to infidelity or simply boredom on the part of the psychopath, and move on. And Jim has you know, three kids, successful family life, and he sort of, you know, he thinks to back all the times where he's had people over to entertain them for dinner and he just sits around, sits at

the table. They throw all these people around eating my food in my house, just gets on and he thinks that a well that you know, that's the psychopath in me talking. But at the same time, it doesn't inhibit him from having a you know, fulfilling family life right right.

And the context is important here because this is in the context of a prison where prisoners have virtually no power at all. They're completely beholden to the staff, the prison officers and the governors, and to an extent, psychologists and people like me who sort of work in clinical roles.

And yet virtually every meeting I went to in the prison he was able to sort of control the room, and you always thought, well, who among the prisoners does he have something on that he can basically recruit them to his cause and get them to devote his way on any issue that may come up. And his offending history was, you know, he just sort of enforced nasty debts for drug dealers. So sure, if you've ever seen a British crime film Lockstop and Two Smoking Barrels, but

there's a hit man. They're played by Vinnie Jones, who's actually known in British culture as a bit of a scary character. He was a footballer, but he was known for sort of instance on the pitch, so he was sort of the kind of enforce who go around break people's kneecaps, tie them up and torture them or in some cases kill them. But all was such an effective psychopath that rather than having to often having to kill people directly, he would just get other people to do it.

People who are owned money or people who he hadn't under his thrall, and you could just just sort of sitting in a room with him and having him hold court and you know, sort of manipulate people into answering questions. You had a real sense of like, if this man asked you to do something in the community, what would you feel your options were to say no? And this isn't sort of thinking about is he going to be violent?

This is just his sort of personal gravitass is sort of feeling that the way he woulded his sentences and the way he spoke, and the way he'd look at you when he was sort of suggesting that you do something kindly for him, which he did quite a lot. To me, I think because I was new, really carried a lot of weight and it was difficult to sort of think how you could get out of doing things for him. But over the course of working with him,

it transpired. You know, he'd actually embedded himself more sinisterly into the culture of the prison that there were a lot of people doing favors for him, including some of the staff, and it actually caused quite a major scandal, which I detail in the book.

and published because it's clinical material. But we have this idea of something called boundary violation where when you're working with people with severe personality disorder or particularly psychopathy, because you know, one of the constituent parts of the psychopathy checklist is manipulation, so the ability to con and manipulate people into getting your own way, and it's actually there's a constant pressure to give way to people like Paul's,

you know, attempts to sort of manipulate you, to control you, to get you to do what they ask. And I think in this case, Louise the prison officer had fallen into a sort of a state where she was able to actually enter into an sexual relationship with Paul on the wing, which is absolutely taboo in every single sense. And I think, you know, if you think about this, just interpersonally, you can easily think, well, you know that

that could happen. He could sort of corner you in a room and then make a sort of inappropriate proposal, and you know, something could happen, but then you probably go and report it. But what seemed to have happened in this particular case was that there were quite a few staff who were aware that this was going on.

I must have sort of had that, you know, we call a false consensus, that everybody thought this was okay, because you know, it was only Paul and he's very charming, good looking, and you know, Louise must know what she's doing or something like that, and that the worst part of this is that I was away from the prison to visit another hospital at the time, and I missed

sort of the playing out of this. But eventually, the reason that the affair is discovered is not because somebody sees them, you know, having you know, an intimate moment somewhere in the prison, but rather that Louise tries to challenge some other officers with bad behavior elsewhere in the wing, and that the officers threatened to reveal her affair with the prisoner, which they were already aware of so a large proportion of the staff in the wing already knew

about this affair and it only came to light when she challenged them, and another officer who wasn't aware of it walking past her what was going and reported it to a governor. So it just shows you how deeply the sort of the roots of the psychopaths minipulative power can extend into a structure like a prison, however tight and tightly controlled, and this is what we call this

is what we call a category. A prison in the UK was you know, you couldn't go anywhere without having helicopter wire above your head in case somebody tried to airlift a high risk prisoner at so it was one of the most secure places in the country and actually quite a well respected jail as well, so with a good reputation for security. But nevertheless this happened. And my contention is it wouldn't have happened if Paul hadn't been such an effective psychopath.

more from him than anyone else, I don't know. I necessarily learnt a great deal about psychopathy because I was really confused by the idea that this man was a psychopath. I think I just learned more about working with people with very disordered personalities and about myself as well, actually, because I think that plays a major part of it. Whenever you work with people with severe personality disorders, you start to think about, well, what is it that what

is my emotional makeup? What is it that makes me function with other people in a way that these people, these men and women can't. You know, what is it that makes us people with functional personality as opposed to dysfunctional ones? And they also have an and I think this is where Danny is really an in in case. It's the ability to get under your skin, to say things or to do things that pull you into directions at once. And one of those directions is to sort

of think, oh, you know, you need help. You're a person who's suffering and you need my help and care, and at the same time do something that's utterly revolting in many ways, and that could be violence towards other people, it could be valanced towards themselves, and I think Danny's will Danny had been other people in his past, certainly, and he had a very unpleasant index offense of stabbing

somebody who trusted him in the back. He is the main reason that it was so difficult to work with him was that his force of aggression was direct in tire it himself. So he used to just do the most awful acts of self harm to himself. The way exceed anything I'd ever seen in any prison or hospital before or after. And I've been around, so yeah, I

do tell a little bit more on the book. I don't know if it's something that we want to go into too much detail, but I think what you learn from that is how to sort of sort out a genuine concern from a sort of feeling of I guess, a sort of natural response to care and to provide your care in a way that never colludes with the

person's their disorder, if you like. So, if somebody has a diagnosive borderline personality disorder, for example, part of their issue is that they are constantly looking for ways to find an identity that makes sense to them. And I think with Danny what he was looking for was some sort of core part of his being, probably a spiritual one that made sense to him, and what he would often do is try to associate with people who had

a spiritual background. So there was a chaplain in the hospital who was very attached to and we became a little bit worried because of course his index offense was against somebody from the clergy as well, and that relationship had to be monitored very carefully. But then halfway through that he decided he wanted to affiliate with Wicker Sorry, which is a much more pagan religion in the UK, and the chaplain was trying to support him with that.

But this constant flitting between spiritual identities between sexual identities between gender identities was something that really defined Danny in quite a sort of a I think the word I'm looking forward. It's like vitiginous, Like the shifting was so quick and so unexplained that it made you feel a little bit of vertigo, Like you're like, well, you were a Christian yesterday and you're a Wickan today. Now, how does that work? Because those things are opposed in my mind?

And what it does is that sort of throws your logical train of thought, and it throws your natural human responses like empathy, into a sort of spiral where you're not sure whether you are zentful of this person for deceiving you, or whether you feel more empathy for them because they clearly need more help than you thought, or whether you should just reject them because this is so much, so much to take in and absorb at once, that it's

just impossible and you should give up now. And that huge combination of emotions, which can shift very quickly within the course of avice a week, is a lot to deal. And I think that's why I say I learned the most from that case, simply because it learnt It taught me a great deal about trying to manage my expectations and my own emotional states whenever I go into work with people in these kind of these kind of settings, and with this diagnosis.

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one of the book chapters. You call Angela the Remorseless. Okay, let's talk about Angela the Remorseless.

And obviously they have a lot of experience of working with male psychopaths, but not a great deal of working with women, for reasons that I actually describe a bit in the book. But the closest I've sort of come to that work is we had a sister prison, a sister jail next to us in the jail I was working in at the time, and they were a female prison. They had female prisoners only. They also had a smaller

dspd wink for women. It was actually intended to be for forty women, but they only managed to find twelve women to fill it because there simply weren't that many diagnosable psychopaths in the UK female prison population, which was interesting in itself, I think, but one of the particular cases was causing them a lot of managerial problems because this is somebody who had a lot of experience of

mental disorder. They were practicing mental health professional and they'd become I think they developed what we call morbid jealousy which is where jealousy becomes so powerful and so overparent that takes over sort of your emotional response and all of your energy becomes directed in this one one sort of jealous fascination with their i think ex partner who'd become who'd set up with another partner, And their crime was actually against a bystander who got in the middle

of this, and they killed the bystander by by actually thinking they were going to shoot the new partner. And they needed some help from us in terms of how to accommodate somebody who had a very intimate knowledge of the mental health techniques they were using, and also the structure of mental health services within prison, things like that.

But when the producers of killing were developing the character they'd actually found this case of Angela Simpson, who was a woman who was a resident of the southern United States, who'd she committed a really it's one of those really sort of stomach turning crimes where they targeted somebody quite vulnerable and they manipulated them in a very psychopathic way

into a situation where they were even more vulnerable. So what angel Simpson had done, she targeted somebody she actually knew socially a little bit and knew that this person was attracted to her, so it invited him into to sort of spend an evening of Netflix and chill, if I can put it that way, for want of a better expression expression, and then during the course of that evening confronted them with some allegations that it seems were

entirely fabricated about being a snitch for the police force. I think what had happened was the victim had actually said whilst they were in prison some years before to somebody else that they'd informed on another offender at some point. But this was ancient history and somehow it had come through the chain up to Angela. So when she'd got

this man, who was actually quite disabled. He was he could walk, but he mostly used a wheelchair, so he wasn't really able to fight back, but she tied him to his chair and tortured him over the course of almost a twelve hour period, eotentially sort of driving nails into his skull, another sort of really just unnecessarily gratuitous things to do to another person, all in the sort of the vein being a vigilante to sort of exterminate snitches and pedophiles from the world, which there was really

no supporting evidence for. I mean, it's almost like she could have picked anyone and found a reason to torture them horribly. And that was all pretty pretty spectacularly dreadful.

But what was so interesting was that at the end of this process she goes to court, she's tried, and she's found guilty and sent to prison in the United States for I think a life sentence without parole, and then gives a number of interviews about it, where she absolutely I mean when I talk about sort of the characteristics of the psychopathy checklists, if I could get somebody on camera acting out as characteristics, it would be actually

not a man, but Angela Simpson. Because she's so remorseless. I think there's at one point the interviewers is thing like, well, you know, this was a terrible thing to do. Would would you ever consider doing something again? She's just absolutely you know, why not fewer niches in the world. That's great, Yeah, as if this sort of that the crime has had no impact and no, she's made no attempt to establish embathy or remorse or what she's done at all. And

it's actually so that there's a lot of this on YouTube. Actually, everyone's welcome to look it up. It's really fascinating to watch it. For a little bit difficult at times. She actually uses this to kind of control and manipulate the interviewer, to sort of wrongfoot the interviewer at times and make them think that maybe they're asking the wrong thing, or maybe that they haven't really properly understood the person that they're talking to, just to sort of intimidate, control, manipulate,

all the sort of classic psychopathic things. And I think what's most interesting about this is that typically we've researchers always assumed that female psychopaths would be quite different to men. And when I was talking to the Killing writing team, one of the things was, well, how do they differ? And one of the sort of central assumptions is that female psychopaths, often in fiction and from the limited number of case studies that we have, tend to use other

people to do the dirty work, do the vince. So they're very good at emotional manipulation and emotional aggression. They're not so much at the physical stuff. And Simpson, this has sort of turned on its head. She is, to all intents and purposes, are very high scoring male psychopath

and the absolute classic sense of the term. And I think that was that was very influential with Villanel because we felt it gave us license to present a character who was female, glamorous and attractive, but was also able to portray very very male psychopathic characteristics, which is just really interesting case that sort of I think took us on a little bit off guard, and yet illustrates that psychopathy isn't always a variant or certainly a personality type.

It doesn't really vary that much between men and women, right often that sort of the real interpersonal and emotional characteristic psychopathy are constant across both men and women.

psychopathic behavior. Now it's really important to say that these aren't traits that will necessarily mean that these children will be become psychopathic. But they sound like, you know, the adult definition, so cruelty to animals, cruelty to other children, lying, stealing, a lack of remorse of bad things that you've done, telling lies repeatedly to other people. Things like that, so much more serious than just being a little bit uncontrolled

or difficult. That the heritability of that is pretty good. If you look at twin studies, you find that around about there's around about a seventy percent heritability of these callous on emotional traits in children, even at quite a young age. So they there's clearly a genetic component to

the sort of precursors of psychopathy. But I think what, first of all, with these twin studies, never one hundred percent, which seems weird if we're saying there's a genetic causal mechanism and play here right, there should be there should be one hundred percent or ninety nine percent with a little bit of gray area. So clearly there's something more

going on. And I think that what my experience certainly is that nobody I've worked with, nobody i've worked with in prison or in hospital who's been diagnosable as a psychopath, has had what I would call anywhere an easy ride through their childhood. They've often been adopted, they've been abused, neglected, and even the people from reasonably middle class backgrounds, like Tony in the book, for example, there's been something very

odd going on. And I think in the United States you have, for I think it's ed Ed guyin who's a very charming, very charming guy, apparently normal family background, but within this is this terribly controlling, almost demonic figure in his background. And it makes you think of Tony has this this father and his grandfather who have a

history of manipulating other people. Is said, they're calling basically they are convent and those what they do, and they hand this down in a sort of an authoritarian paternalistic way to each other and then eventually to Tony. So he becomes a common as well, because what is the family calling? You know, what else are you going to do?

and lack empathy, and what was called a sociopath. And that's not a term we really use anymore, but the idea of a sociopath was somebody who society had made morally insane, so they become anti social through neglect, abuse, bad luck, you know, repeated social failure, things like that. And I think it's more complicated than that, because I think that sociopaths actually can be functionally identical to psychopaths

in many ways. They can have that sort of callous and emotionality, they can be manipulative, they can be liars, but the cause of it is different. Because these are people who'se sort of psychopathic presentation comes from neglects and abuse and sort of trying to just find a way to survive in a very aversive environment, whereas the sort of more primary psychopaths, the character logical psychopaths are inheriting

something that's been passed down. But I think the differentiation that's important here is that the character sorry the secondary psychopaths are it's a defense basically against a nasty situation that they've acquired in childhood and can't let go of, because it's so difficult to drop your guard if you like to start feeling emotions when you know that you've been abused, you know that you've abused other people, and now your life is basically about violence. It's so difficult

to let go of that. So it functionally looks the same as primary psychopathy. But I also think there's a little bit more, a little bit more hope for people who've acquired these sort of psychopathic characteristics, as I try to draw out in the final chapter of the book on Eddie.

him a chance of redemption. And in this case, it was a very a very experienced psychoanalyst, not me, but my supervisor, doctor C, who was I guess, somebody who had decades of experiences and analysts, but also a real, you know, sort of anti psychopathic empathy for people, regardless of how unpleasant or how sadistic, or how a manipulative or how aggressive they may appear. She was always able to find something within people that was worth holding onto,

worth sort of treasuring and trying to encourage. I think with Eddie what she'd identified with somebody who had exactly as actually I was just explaining, developed this kind of psychopathic defense. So his defense against the terrible experiences he'd had of being abused by his stepfather, of growing up

in a childhood in East London. Which it's a different world nowadays because I actually live in East London, but back in the sort of nineteen fifties and sixties, just after the Second World War, a lot of the older industries in Eastunmon had left, particularly around the docks, so the shipping and fishing industries were really dying out, and it became a very poor and a very aggressive, violent

place to be. And this is where the sort of classic the London the classic guide of the London gangster comes in the Kray Twins. The sort of the older guy Ritchie move is that it was a very boor and a very very crime ridden area. This was the

area that Eddie grew up in. And I think that the combination sort of the abuse in the family and particularly the really terrible abuse against his mother, who he thinks was raped at least twice by his stepfather, led him to develop a sort of very callous, very psychopathic type personality, and that then drew him into behaving in a very psychopathic way. I mean, he's in a way,

he's very very unlucky. And you know that one of his first defenses he actually kills somebody in what looks like and I know, look, I've worked in forensics for twenty two years now, I know that this sounds unlikely. But somebody actually falls on him while he's holding a knife in self defense, and there are witness statements support you know it's not and he was convicted of manage homicide. But whether so what you call murder two or murder three in the USA, there's no intent to kill, simply

a sort of a bad accident. And so he goes to prison and then in prison, I think he's given some space to think about his life for the first time, and it simply becomes too much for him, and he starts to have really terrifying hallucinations about sort of things growing in his skin classical symptoms of actually psychosis, so schizophrenia not psychopathy. Rather than seeking help, which he doesn't feel able to do because he thinks if he seeks

help then he'll be exploited again. He becomes aggressive and difficult and realizes that actually being aggressive in prison, certainly in the nineteen seventies and eighties, gets him a better response and more is more effective for him than trying to sort of try to understand his problems and seeking help for them. So he goes through prison many, many times. He's often sectioned, and often, you know, his mental health problems are addressed in various ways by drugs and other things,

but never really never really resolved. And I think he's released for one final time, and he's a very charming guy, Eddie really really or he was. Unfortunately, he passed away a couple of years ago now, which was very sad because we had hoped to celebrate the book launch together and we never quite got to do that because of COVID. But he's released in prisoner i think the third time,

and then he commits another offense. He assaults a woman in a very sort of kind of pathetic way, and disagreeing with something she's saying, he throws a bucket of water over her. She calls the police, which she was completely in her beautiplet correct to do, and I think something inside him sort of wilts a bit and says, yeah, I just at that point, I just realized I didn't

want to fight it anymore. So he hands himself into the police very very calmly, and he serves his time, and then at the end of that he decides to go into treatment. He goes into a treatment unit for men with personality, just sort of meets doctor See and I think she sees or she rather helps him to

lay out. This choice is that you can either go through the rest of your life fighting system, being broken by it, somethering more pain, coming back into prison again again, or you have a chance to this different with your life. And he really pounces on this in a way that you'd never expect a psychopath to do, because I think part of psychopathy is it's sort of very it hasn't change, it's chronic, it never goes away. Some of the sort

of more antisocial things burn out. But to develop empathy and to develop a sort of curiosity about yourself so late in life was really quite unique for Eddie, and I think he may be the exception, but I think it gives me the sense that there might be hope for all psychopaths if we can just find the right way, the right time to approach them about maybe changing their lives. So it was really I mean, it was absolute pleasure

to work with the guy. He really is. I think he's become charming in a sort of an authentic way, not in a psychopathic way that you could.

obviously involved in criminal activity to quite some degree. So we occasionally get these phone calls of them being intercepted by the police and you have to sort of give legal advice and tell them not to pay the drug dealer or pay the drug deal or whatever it was they were doing at the same time. So the criminal world was so still there trying to get in, but he was very good at holding that boundary, you know, with this is a space that we don't We're not

criminal here. You may be come up there and I'm going to tell you how to deal with that, but we're not criminal here, so don't bring it to my doorset And that's just sort of that for me, that really showed that he learned the lessons of his life.

It's developed by Anti Bateman and Peter Foneghie, who are psychoanalysts, two the bigger universities in the UK, and essentially it targets what the core element of psychopathy is, which is the inability to recognize and deal with emotions. The only difference I guess between you know, the psychopathic realization of mentalization mentalizations that this mentalization is about both yourself and

other people. It's about realizing, recognizing and dealing with mental states that you may have at the same time as recognizing dealing with them in other people. And I think one of the you know, the really sort of striking things about working with people with personality disorder and psychopathy is that their ability to recognize emotional states and certainly in other people is so limited that it's almost like, I remember, I'm not sure if this is rather thant,

but it's always struck me as the same idea. When I was working in the prison, we had offender who was probably in his mid forties and he kept ringing his cell door bell and the officers would come very often. He just wanted someone to talk to and that's not what the cell door bell is about it. But if there's an emergency, wing the bell and somebody will come

to you. And this is quite an enlightened prison wing because we had lots of psychologists who were trying to help the prison officers to work in a sort of an engaging and psychological way. But one of the prison officers in particular got quite irritated, and I think on the fifth bell the night he opened, all said, there's anyone ever told you the story of Peter and the Wolf? And he said, no, what's that? And of course Peter and RP isn't that we you know, we all learn

when we're sort of five six years old. In the UK, probably in the USA as well, it says if you keep asking for help when you don't need it, when you actually do need help for help, nobody's going to listen to you. And the fact that this man had never, in forty seven years of life ever heard this story, nobody ever taken the time to explain it. Sort of.

It's interesting, sort of fuel to my idea that sometimes psychopathy has actually learned rather than simply hand it down, and sometimes there's a way back from that as well. So I think the learning point for me is that the best people to teach psychopaths to live a better life, to manage themselves better, to learn how to process emotions are other psychopaths who somehow made it through this journey. And that's true in a lot of cases in prison. I think, why should you listen to me in the UK,

I'm somebody from it, probably a different class background. I'm very middle class, or that's where i'd be seen in the UK. I have a very privileged education. I probably have virtually no touching points to my childhood to most

of the men that I work with. I have what I think, what I think is a lot of knowledge about these disorders, but that doesn't necessarily give me the sort of epistemic privilege to say this is what you should do to make your life better, whereas if it comes from somebody who is like you, has the same experiences who's been to prison as a prisoner rather than as a psychologist who's suffered at the hands of the system and thought it at the same time as well.

That's going to come across as much more authentic, I think, And so places in the UK like Grendon Prison, which is a therapeutic community where the treatment is non hierarchical, it's driven jointly by prisons and staff, I think is much more promising. The reason I don't immediately recommend Grendan for other prisons is because they have a policy of not taking high scoring psychopaths, so a lot of the men that I worked with wouldn't have been eligible for it.

But I think that might be something that could be looked at again. And I also would like to see mentalization based therapy have a much bigger base, particularly in prison and forensic services in the UK, and maybe start to make the jump into the USA as well. I think it's a very interesting idea. Another great thing about it is it's mostly open source, so if you're interested in mentalization, you can actually google it and download the

training package. It's a pretty hefty slide pack, but at the end of it you get a pretty good idea about what it is and how to tell thefference between what we call pseudo mentalizing, where somebody seems to be getting the idea about calling the emotions of other people, but is doing it from the wrong standpoint, doing it from maybe an intellectual standpoint, therefore making the wrong cause.

So there's lots of really interesting resources about it on the web as well, and I'd really like to see that have more more of a standing I think in as a treatment for psychopathy.

a causal risk factor for violence. It doesn't explain why people are violent. So what I'm sort of trying to say there is that, first of all, we can't really think psychopathy doesn't explain why people are horrible to other people. You have First of all, I guess the example of James Fallon, who you know, you have to see the brain scam, but this guy has an identical brain scan to that of a psychopath. They're exposed to a very disturbing stimulus, usually something like a baby's crying, and he

shows absolutely no emotional response whatsoever. And yet he has children who would have been babies themselves. And yet he has a stable relationship, stable loving relationship with his wife, and he does have other people around to dinner. He may hate their guts for it, but hey, they come around and they drink his wine and eat his meat loaf and things like that. So why is he so different to a psychopath in prison who scores highly on the PCLR even have you know, regrets or concerns. Some

regret some concerns. So I'm against this idea of psychopathy becoming a sort of a way of explaining why crime happens and trying to put people to think a little bit more imaginatively, and not just you know, people who are interested in true crime, but particularly people who write about crime, people who write about write criminal characters, to think that the psychopathy isn't just it's not the end of the explanation. It's a factor, sure, and it's a

factor about how people reason emotionally and explain themselves. But if you want to understand why people are murderers, serial killers, rapists commit terrible crimes, you need to go into more detail in the backgrounds. You need to start that archaeological process of thinking what does this crime represent for that person? And the idea comes from psychoanalysis, sure, but I don't think it needs to be wrapped up in psychoanalystic terms to still make sense or be a worthwhile journey.