Name: Confessions of a sociopath
ISBN: 9780307956651

Confessions of a sociopath

M.E. Thomas is a high-functioning non-criminal sociopath. She is charismatic, ambitious and successful. You would be charmed by her if you met her, might even be seduced by her. You would not realise that she is studying you to find your flaws, that she is ruthlessly manipulative, has no empathy and does not feel guilt or remorse. But she does like people - she likes to touch them, mould them and ruin them. She could be your friend or your boss. She could be you... Now she writes with breathtaking honesty about her life, from the confusion of trying to fit in as a child to her growing need for power over others, from her successful stratagems at work and in love to the disasters that brought her greater understanding of herself and the motivation to control her behaviour - most of the time. She also draws on the latest research to explain why at least one in twenty-five of us are sociopaths - and shows why that's not a bad thing. By turns fascinating, shocking and funny, Confessions of a Sociopath is a gripping insight into the mind of a self-confessed predator.

What Hacker News says

jseligerDec 2013

If you're interested in what life for such a person is like (or if you might be one!), check out M. E. Thomas's Confessions of a Sociopath. I wrote about it here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/summary-judgment-co... and Tyler Cowen wrote about it here: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/06/con... and elsewhere.

FWIW, from what I've read (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_...) there were (at least) no therapies or treatments that reproducibly help psychopaths:

The psychiatric profession wanted little to do with psychopathy, for several reasons. For one thing, it was thought to be incurable. Not only did the talking cure fail with psychopaths but several studies suggested that talk therapy made the condition worse, by enabling psychopaths to practice the art of manipulation. There were no valid instruments to measure the personality traits that were commonly associated with the condition; researchers could study only the psychopaths’ behavior, in most cases through their criminal records.

And now there are, at least in the sense of reducing criminal behavior:

In a landmark 2006 study of a specialized talk-therapy treatment program, conducted at a juvenile detention center in Wisconsin, involving a hundred and forty-one young offenders who scored high on the youth version of the checklist, Michael Caldwell, a psychologist at the treatment center and a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, reported that the youths that were treated were much more likely to stay out of trouble, once they were paroled, than the ones in the control group.

But note that the linked article is from 2008. Perhaps things have changed since.

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WestCoastJustinAug 2013

There are a couple good books about Sociopath/Psychopath if anyone is interested.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry @ http://www.amazon.ca/The-Psychopath-Test-Journey-Industry/dp...

Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight @ http://www.amazon.ca/Confessions-Sociopath-Spent-Hiding-Plai...

I highly recommend both of these, since they are a very interesting read.

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77pt77Mar 2024

This sounds very similar to the book

Confessions of a Sociopath A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight

Pretty mediocre book BTW.

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fasterMar 2024

When I saw the headline I thought it was from the author of "Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight".

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ahussainMay 2018

There is also this book - "Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas" which seemed to be popular a few years ago. It's unclear how reliable the narrator is but I remember it had a jarring effect on me: https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Sociopath-Spent-Hiding-Pl...

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