Oh so it’s not FASCINATING I see, and I don’t even get an exclamation point. NOTED

*snerk* The system doesn’t like it if I submit the same comment twice in a row, nor do I. I wanted it to be custom, just for you. 😛

I’m only speaking of fictional characters, who need the necessary requirement of “existing” before they could even be diagnosed by professional therapists.

I’m saying all this because I don’t want to discourage the discussion of this topic by laywoman like us when it comes to representation of victims of abuse with mental illness in media, the “let’s not diagnose mental illnesses” is a rule with a lot of IF this THEN that to get out the most of the discussion and challenging the culture of bias against them.

Here it is in logic form.
SHOULD YOU DIAGNOSE THIS PERSON?
IF {certified professional} THEN {Yes}
IF {layperson} THEN -> IS PERSON REAL?
IF {Yes} THEN {No}
IF {No} THEN -> IS REPRESENTATION CLICHEDLY NEGATIVE AND VIOLENT?
IF {Yes} THEN {No}
IF {No} THEN {Yes}

Oh, that’s interesting, it’s almost like it says so much about the US justice system and the very cultural bias I am warning about and pretty much nothing about people with mental illness.

I’m turning up about 20% of the prison population in norway, and maybe 30% in sweden. The nordic countries are much bigger on rehab vs. punishment, and there’s an argument to be made for that, but the stats aren’t a million miles away. And one should bear in mind that as rehab efforts improve, one would expect *only* the hopeless cases to be left in the system.

http://sciencenordic.com/no-we-are-not-swimming-psychopaths
https://www.thelocal.se/20041104/582

“Morgan Allen is saying I somehow have the power to end any and all wordwide conversation about the violence they may cause and that’s super flattering but wildly exaggerated.”

Also egregiously misquoted. …In that I never said this.

Something of a tangent, but since we touched on black incarceration rates earlier…

For the life of me I can’t find the source, but I remember reading an analysis that indicated that 3/4 of the black-white incarceration gap in the US disappeared once you controlled for two factors: Age and IQ. And there’s a pretty tight correlation between general mortality and SES regardless of racial group in the US, (which as it happens I can dig out the source for):

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851186/

That’s not to say that racist and/or actively murderous cops don’t exist- it’s a big country, of course they do. And again, we could have a long conversation about the ultimate causes of racial disparities in SES, age demographics and measured IQ. But nearly everything I’ve heard coming from BLM advocates reeks of statistically-illiterate scapegoating of law-enforcement combined with the usual media circus surrounding atypical freak events. And since police killings correlate pretty well with both general mortality and incarceration rates, I would say that until you fix the black/white gap in SES- which in turn will probably require fixing the gap in IQ- the rate at which blacks are shot and killed by police will most likely be largely unaffected.

I’m “pretending” I find it very insulting of you to correlate intrinsic moral deficit with mental illness.

Say, another better answer to your previous comment I realize would have been to say that well, since you seem to think prison population demographics has anything to tell us about said populations, you must have /grand/ opinion of, for instance, black people.
I don’t know, maybe it would have triggered a sudden realization of the enormities and awful, harmful, criminal oversimplifications you’re saying?

Does psychopathy imply an intrinsic moral deficit? I mean, clearly it’s correlated with such, but that’s not the same thing.

Well, I definitely shouldn’t have said “intrinsic”, but… the whole phrase is one of those things where I know what it is supposed to mean, but I have no idea what would actually constitute such a thing.

Given that morals and compassion are massively linked with empathy, and Sociopathy is characterized by an inability or significantly reduced ability to feel or understand the mere concept of empathy,………yes. It can be said that sociopathy=intrinsic moral deficit. Sociopaths who appear capable of morals in any study do so only by noting that is is inefficient to not ape such behaviors and are termed “high functioning sociopaths”. It’s not uncommon to find people diagnosed with “high functioning sociopathy” at high levels of business, politics and banking. This isn’t to say they aren’t violent psychopaths either, as a number of them have been jailed for torturing or murdering spouses, lovers and business partners. Male and female, victim and perp.

*Sigh* You’re one of THOSE people then? You can reject anything you like, it doesn’t make what you’re rejecting any less valid.

Morals, like ethics, are based on people saying, if I were in this position, I would not want this done to me, and this protects me, my group and our interest so it is good, this hurts me, my group and our interest so it is bad. These three judgements build up over long periods of time and repetitions to become moral systems and are broken down by philosophers, businesses and governments to be used in miniature as Ethics.

The important bit is, of the three basic questions that create morals and ethics, each of them requires you, or at least thousands of people before you, to be capable of empathy.

Pure logic and reason would not have abolished slavery. Pure logic and reason would not resist Tyrany. Pure logic and reason would not come up with capitalism and machines which have been THE driving force behind moving 5 billion people out of abject poverty in the last 50 years.

By Naturalistic and logical reasoning, your freedom is based solely on your ability to enforce your will. Anyone who cannot enforce their will deserves to suffer the consequences. Tyranny and slavery.

To say that slavery is bad you need to be able to understand first that they have value as a person despite their weakness and second that going out of your way to protect, support and provide for someone who cannot do it themselves is not a massive loss and burden to yourself.

This requires Empathy. Sympathy and compassion would merely have you treating your slave well. Logic would not free your slave unless you already knew about capitalism and would only have you treat your slave well if you already knew that someone with a positive outlook and good health worked harder. Hard enough to justify the exta expense.

10,000 years of recorded history. Millions of Philosophers. And still we only got rid of slavery a few hundred years ago because of a moral argument made by a bunch of christian fundamentalists in England.

Psh, “high functioning sociopaths” would have increased morality compared to non-psychopaths. Not making people sad because empathy makes you feel sad is pretty selfish. Psychopaths deciding not to hurt people because they realize it’s logically wrong seem like they’re intrinsically more moral.

Jeez, it’s like those religious people who think you can’t possibly be a good person if you don’t think you’re going to heaven/hell based on your actions.

I have at least one friend who is probably something approximating a sociopath, and I trust them more than I trust most people.

When they were young, they decided to define success for themselves as “being honorable.” Making lots of money didn’t seem interesting. Making other people happy didn’t seem interesting. Physical comfort over a basic level didn’t seem interesting. They decided that what sounded like an interesting challenge in life was to be as honorable as they possibly could. They decided that having a code of ethics sounded like it would be a pretty good way to help make decisions.

So, this sociopathic friend of mine is the most honorable, and one of the most ethical, people I’ve ever met, because they decided to be.

Holy crap, it sounds like you just described a regular person. You’re literally on the internet where kys has become a message commonly left to “cringey” people. Where female gamers get the most horrible things said to them. Why? Because the anonymity means they can get away with it. And I doubt the millions of people that do that sort of thing are all psychopaths – they’re just assholes. Heck, there was a movie (and a sequel) about 3 regulars guys getting together and deciding to kill their bosses because they decided they were to horrible to put up with.

Meanwhile there’ve been multiple posters on this comic talking about either being or knowing clinically diagnosed “sociopaths” who’ve decided “their serotonin and endorphins aren’t more valuable than anyone else’s”, etc because it doesn’t require empathy to realize that you shouldn’t be a dick to other people. They just have to try harder.

I’m not the one who started the intrinsic moral deficit thing, I just said it wasn’t a particularly bad analogy. Sociopathy is an intrinsic part of your being and presents in an abnormal lack of the ability to understand the emotions and experiences of others and in most cases, severely stunting your own ability to feel most emotions. The important part of empathy here is the ability to mentally place yourself in another persons position and get an idea of what they’re feeling.

While it is true that you can have ethics or morals drilled into you, the greater majority of it comes from being able to say, If I was that person, I wouldn’t want that done to me.

While I am perfectly aware that correlation does not _NECESSARILY_ equal causation, the greater the correlation, the greater chance that one is cause and the other is effect. Sociopathy in particular has been studied for nearly a century and in great depth.

It’s important to distinguish between cognitive and affective empathy here. Most ASD individuals have affective empathy intact- they care how others feel, they just don’t anticipate behaviour very well. And most psychopaths have cognitive empathy intact- they anticipate how others will behave, but they just don’t care about their feelings. It’s the difference between ‘don’t know’ and ‘don’t care’.

I would not say that empathy is the be-all and end-all of virtues, but you can’t use the non-criminality of ASD individuals as evidence for that. Because they’re sort of the inverse of psychopaths in that regard.

Not a correlation. You may say “most violent criminals are mentally ill,” while certainly not meaning “most mentally ill people are violent criminals.” But anyone who has had mental illness in their family knows that poor decisions on the part of their loved one can easily veer into illegal activity. Mental illness can make a poorly functioning person feel desperate and that desperation can lead to acts that could be judged immoral.

Diagnosis is never final – it’s a starting point. It allows the person doing treatment a place to stand while they decide on what treatment avenues to reject and to provide a basis to weigh treatment options. Question, hypothesis, prediction, experiment, analysis. Diagnosis is the hypothesis/prediction part.

Labels are only useful insofar as they increase understanding and decrease misunderstanding. If the reverse is true, then yeah, labels need to be tossed aside.

Mental disorders are nearly always a a description of maladaptive behaviors, rather than a description of causes, although sometimes the primary difference between two very similar conditions is essentially a description of differing medically verified associated manifestations (Alzheimer’s syndrome versus dementia is the one I grapple with in my daily life). Correlations with underlying life experiences are often made but correlation isn’t the same thing as causation (which is a tough thing to keep in mind, considering our brains are hard wired to make that link).

All that said, a rush to diagnosis is usually always a mistake.
Considering the person we’re contemplating is a fiction, your point has a certain cogency – let’s treat real people well whenever possible.