howboutthisone_huh Review of Signs of a Psychopath

Signs of a Psychopath (2020– )

be careful who you suspect after watching this

[6/10 · 19 August 2021]

If you watch this show chances are you won't be able to spot a psychopath, sorry. Chances are that anyone on the fringe of social behavior, you'll find suspect without proper justification. Each episode of this show is a profile of a different alleged psychopath and his/her crime with actual police videos, photographs and videos. It's ideal crime porn and very interesting except each of the subjects are analyzed by a group of 'expert' psychologists after the fact; after they've committed a heinous crime and been arrested and judged in a court. That's not science regardless of what technique they use to study the individual. Unfortunately, our systems, such as the legal system has no other tools to profile these individuals except by psychologists who are not using science to base their opinions. Forensic psychologists do not usually study psychopathy in the general population but rather based their opinions on analysis of individuals like the ones profiled in this series. Clearly, the way some of these individuals are portrayed, they're dangerous and deviant but could you identify them before they committed their crimes, and how would you do that? How would you prevent one of these individuals from committing their crime before it happened? If there's no obvious sign of threat to themselves or others, the legal system can't prevent the crime. Unfortunately though, many people are misdiagnosed and end up in the legal system while the individuals that we most have to be afraid of, go undetected. And one of the reasons is because there hasn't been enough science of the general population to identify who is most likely to kill. Well, except that there is a diagnostic technique that involves brain scans to differentiate people. But there's two problems with that. You can't force someone to undergo an mri that's not in legal custody, and just because someone is diagnosed with psychopathy, you can't take away their rights, not in America. And in some cases, particularly in the military, psychopathic traits are often ignored or celebrated. And women are biologically different from men, don't fit the same brain diagnostics, and therefore most 'experts' claim women psychopaths are rare, but there's no scientific proof to back that. Nobody really knows how many functioning psychopaths there are in the general population. And that's why I'd recommend this as good crime porn but not take anything away from it as authoritative. And two of the episodes, imo, illustrate how these kinds of diagnoses have gone too far. And I take issue too with the claims that women psychopaths are very rare in the population. The analysis by these 'experts', which are very well elaborated, don't reflect anything I've seen in person. I contend that women psychopaths appear to be rare because they typically don't commit the same kinds of crimes. That is, it's rare that they're classified as serial killers but again since psychologists rarely study the general population, who knows how rare this is among women. As I was watching the episode about the woman who tried to kill her husband, I was thinking how similar her behavior was to women that I've known. Not women that wanted their husbands dead but women that exhibited the same traits. Lack of empathy, fantasy ideation, sadism, inflated self, manipulation, and so on. I've met many people, men and women, who exhibit one or more of these traits. The difference being that they didn't commit heinous crimes, or at least hadn't been caught. In general, among both men and women, in the workplace in particular, I've seen all of these traits to one degree or another. Chances are that anyone on the fringe of social behavior, is not a threat. To differentiate the threats from fringe behavior you have to be able to understand the whole spectrum of behavior and I suspect the 'experts' on this show are a bit short of that.