so I’m listening to this interesting podcast…

[sciatrix]

…and it’s a two-parter, over on Criminal, and the first piece is about a woman who found out after her mother’s death that her mother had stolen her identity and behaved very strangely before said death. It’s a neat case, but I’m thinking more deeply at the moment about the second piece, which is about (essentially) Antisocial Personality Disorder / sociopathy / psychopathy, and helping the woman from the first piece try to understand what the hell was up with her mother. 

It’s interesting to me that the authors chose to interview both Ronald Schouten, whose work I’m not familiar with but who seems to have a fairly nuanced view on the topic, and also Jon Ronson, who is a journalist most well known re: sociopathy for writing a book about the pitfalls in the diagnostic process and the treatment, once diagnosed, of sociopathic people.

I have a lot of conflicted feelings about Ronson’s work in particular, because I’ve previously read The Psychopath Test and a number of his other pieces (particularly about “callout culture”), and in him I see the germ of one good idea that’s corrupted by, essentially, an inexperienced and unwarranted over-optimism.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

He’s probably got something about the way that we use personality disorders to identify people we view as untreatable and unreachable and then, essentially, attempt to create markers of these intrinsically-dangerous humans so that we can effectively avoid them. I have concerns about that, myself: the constant use of “narcissistic” when a person really means “abusive” and the popularity of armchair diagnosing sociopathy and narcissistic PD and borderline PD bug me. In particular I am really wary of the way that BPD diagnoses are often handed out almost as a form of psychiatric abuse–once you get one, they can be like a permanent black mark identifying you as a Problem.

That’s not helpful, and we know from research on DBT and why it works that it’s kind of the opposite of what you want to do to mitigate BPD particularly–particularly because BPD, if you run down the list of characteristics, often reads like a longer way to say: “Abuse victim. Lots of trauma. No good coping mechanisms.”

Which does not mean that it’s not a diagnosis that doesn’t apply to a hell of a lot of abusive people, too. And it strikes me that what we, the community of people talking about these diagnoses and describing what abusers look like, especially serial abusers, so that they can be identified and watched for…

we’re not talking about the personality disorders, here.

we’re talking about trying to identify abusive people. who may or may not be abusive to all the people around us.

So those are the things where I probably more or less agree with Ronson. Let me get into the part where I think he’s really and truly dangerously naive:

Jon Ronson doesn’t really seem to understand abusers as a phenomenon of their own, and he is dangerously invested in the idea that there are “two sides” to any given conflict in which both are probably somehow right. For example, he doesn’t seem to understand why callout culture exists–in part, because of the democratization of marginalized voices!–and he appears to be really, really dangerously easily snowed by any person who is charming and kind to him in person, even if that person has a long and well-documented history of behaving abusively to vulnerable people to whom he has access.

It drives me nuts about his work. It’s very seductive, thinking that you’re the only person who can see the real, empathic person under the dehumanizing warning label, and given his career since writing that book–which seems to be empathizing with people who are labeled abusive, often at the expense of their victims–it really horrifies me about his choices as a person.

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[siderea]

It’s very seductive, thinking that you’re the only person who can see the real, empathic person under the dehumanizing warning label

Story a prof of mine told:

There was white man with some very serious mental health problems who lived in a group home, of which she was involved somewhere in the management chain. Said white man with a major mental illness, who was in his 50s, had made quite a problem of himself by being really, really racist. In particular, he used being racism to drive off roommates and argue he had a right not to have to room with one of those people. The staff were in a quandry, because they certainly didn't want any of the residents who were people of color to have to deal with this guy, but it meant he got his way by being abusive and racist and nobody was really happy with that.

One day, one of the staff in the residence who was, himself, black, said at staff meeting that he's had a hopeful interaction with this racist white guy. He said that the guy had stopped being so hostile to him, and they even had some reasonable conversation, and then the white guy said to him that he liked him, that he (the black staff member) was an okay guy, not like all those other n----rs, that he was the very first black person he felt safe around and like he could trust. So he'd been cultivating a relationship with white racist dude, in the hopes of broadening his mind, and was really hoping to get somewhere with him.

The prof then asked everybody in staff meeting whom the white racist had previously told was "you're the only black person I can trust" to raise their hands, and every black hand in the room went up.