My father is a total dick

Ha ha, brilliant. I love what your son was actually trying to say. Your last line made me nod in agreement #fridayfrolics

A great cartoon and an interesting post. It got me thinking. Alison x #AnythingGoes

Great read. I know a Psychopath and they really dangerous people. The fact they hold no guilt is quiet scary #eatsleepblogrt

Haha – loving the German homework! I always thought that Ich liebe dich, whilst a lovely sentiment in German, sounds rather insulting when you are English!

I used to work with prisoners, mostly life sentenced ones, and did a lot of work about personality disorders and psychopathy. Here we don’t actually use sociopath – it’s an American concept, and not a diagnosis. I’ve always found it interesting because, although technically it doesn’t really exist as any actual disorder, we all in fact know exactly what it means and people we would apply it to! Psychopaths are interesting. Most psychopaths are not dangerous at all. Certain jobs (upper management, politics, military) will attract unusually high numbers of people with high psychopathic traits. And in certain circumstances, psychopaths are extremely useful, because they will take risks and be unclouded by emotion. In inter-personal relationships they are, of course, difficult in many ways. But violent or dangerous? Not usually. Because part of the assessment for psychopathy includes anti-social and illegal behaviour, offenders will always score higher than the population at large, though that is not to say most pass the threshold for psychopathy. Where the dangerous aspect comes in is when people have psychopathy combined with certain personality disorders, generally those falling in the anti-social group. Most commonly it is anti-social PD with psychopathy or narcissistic PD with psychopathy. Here we took to referring to that as Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder. A controversial ‘diagnosis’, and the management proposed for it was even more controversial. But it essentially refers to a very small proportion of people who are also the most dangerous. Serial killers would mostly fall in the category, for example. The reason it was very controversial is because it is a tiny number of people and hard to accurately detect, but because they are likely to be very dangerous there is an appeal in the idea of ‘if we could identify these people, could we hold them indefinitely for what we believe they are capable of, rather than what they have yet done?’ Obviously ethical issues to that. As for Trump, narcissistic PD seems the most commonly held view from psychologists and psychiatrists, and he certainly fits that profile. Psychopathic too? Could well be. Either way, hard to reason with, lacking in empathy & conscience, superiority complex. Not really good! It’s an interesting field though! (You can probably tell I feel that from my rambling – sorry about that, I never get to talk about personality disorders and forensic psychology any more!)

Interesting that you found Trump was referred to more in the terms of those disorders by people who had difficult fathers. It does make sense though, doesn’t it?

Well, I’ve rambled enough. Found this very interesting. Laughed a lot at German misunderstandings. Thanks so much for joining us on #FridayFrolics

An engaging read and great cartoons as always. #BigPinkLink