Understanding Psychopathy: A Complex Mental Illness

Psychopathy is a mental illness that is categorized as a personality disorder. There have been different conceptions of the definition of psychopathy and what it represents. The conceptions tend to overlap and seem to be contradicted by each other. This mental illness is a mixture of violent behavior with no moral and antisocial personality disorder. It is said that in the general population the psychopaths are only one percent. However, if you want to look at just the adults in prisons and the youth in juvenile detention as opposed to just the general population, thirty percent of psychopaths.

One of the things that characterize a psychopath is their lack of empathy. Psychopathy has been also called sociopathy but, there is a slight difference.

A sociopath has a conscience they know right from wrong but its weak. The guilt and remorse wouldn’t stop them. They are said to be hot heads and disorganized when acting out, they don’t think they just do. Sociopaths have been known to be able to create attachments to people yet volatile, easily agitated and emotional. On the other hand, psychopaths are not able to form those attachments with people as they have no conscience. They can be manipulative and have a way of mimicking emotions even though they can feel any. Psychopaths are very charming, organized, and emotionally stable. psychopaths can be a result of genetics while sociopaths are a result of the environment.
Psychopathy is an important mental illness to get aware of because it’s good to know if there is another reason why some people are criminals. It isn't just because of the criminal acts they commit, it is because they have a mental illness and something in their life has turned them into people without consciences or a weak conscience. Psychopaths are a little tricky to notice because it can be any person around you and you might not even know. However, people must understand that some psychopaths are violent. When one hears the word psychopath, one might think of the way the media portrays them. From the media, we see psychopaths as just serial killers or a criminal with a twisted mind who have no morals. However, we can't be so ignorant. An implication that has raised is the fact that this illness is rare and not something you can see in everyday life. Yet people use the word loosely. As you can tell two things stated have contracted themselves. The mental illness is rare yet it can be anyone around you. Victims can be blinded why those acts and psychopaths because they are able to hide you they are. "Psychopaths are usually only diagnosed if and when their behavior is so far outside of the bounds of societal norms that they end up in prison."
As stated before, there are contradictions which cause controversies.

One ongoing controversy is whether if psychopathy is a genetic trait or if it is caused by environmental factor either trauma or the community. Researchers have said that those who have experienced child abuse and victimization have the likelihood of being violent and express sexually offending behavior as those traumas are considered risk factors. Empathy can be a genetic attribute or can even me progressed over time. In other words, it can be a motivated process that can be voluntary, which is why some suggest therapy. They also have said that therapy can help "rewire" this trait, yet it's counterproductive for many and can increase such behavior. Psychopathy has been associated with the antisocial disorder. Nevertheless, it can also consist of narcissistic, histrionic, and borderline disorder, which makes it difficult to categorize. Another thing researchers have noticed is that some psychopathic characteristics are adaptive and can be seen as helpful in society. What is meant by this is that having too much empathy can impede politicians' and police officers' ability to carry out their duties. Many in society have shown the opinion that those with mental illnesses have a clouded judgment and can't technically know what they are doing. Knowing this, some believe that those with psychopathy should excuse criminal responsibility and of course other say there is no excuse for committing a crime.

These characteristic that a psychopath has have said to be demonstrable in a brain pathology or as developmental impairments.
Franz Joseph Gall, a german physician in the late 1700s, came up with the theory that human behavior was controlled by twenty-seven different tendencies, each located in a specific part of the brain. Also, he said that the outer one structure of the skull showed which of those tendencies were exceedingly developed and which were degenerated in any individual. Three of these tendencies have been linked to criminal behavior if they are over developed. Greed is one of these tendencies and it could lead to theft. Another is the instinct of self-defense that has been seen to lead to violent fights. The third could lead to murder and this tendency is what some call the "carnivorous instinct.” Overall, Gall helped publicize to society that many criminals committed crimes as a result of innate tendencies.
Moral insanity was the term use before psychopathy.

English physician James Pritchard define moral insanity as "the moral or active principles of the mind are strongly perverted or depraved." As a result, Pritchard identified two types of insanity. One type is the that which affects the intellect and the other that affects emotions and will. This term was mostly designated for emotional-volitional disorders in general. However, in France and Germany, moral insanity had a more specific definition that referred to immoral, violent, and criminal behavior that was attributed to an isolated defect of one's moral sense. Maudsley, a British psychiatrist, expanded Pritchard's concept further by recording that some individuals seem to lack a moral sense, no empathy. Pritchard helped differentiated personality from a mental disorder "by distinguishing between more transient symptomatic states and those that are related to more enduring characteristics." This was a significant distinction as it contributed to the development of the idea of

personality.
Phillipe Pinel was a french physician, in the early 19th century, who is credited for being the one to recognize psychopathy as a mental disorder and known as the founding father of psychiatry. He described the individuals to be victims of "moral character defect or insanity without delirium." Pinel said that these individuals showed bouts of extreme violence without any sign of psychosis.
Another german psychiatrist named Julius Koch was the first to use the term psychopathy which comes from the word psycho pastiche. He believed that psychopathy came from a flaw in our constitution at birth. Koch developed the degeneration theory where he proposed a system to classify those psychopathic traits. He said that those traits do not represent a mental illness but also don't let the individual have a normal mental capacity. He called these traits defects and those defects into three categories: psychopathic disposition, psychopathic taints, and psychopathic degeneration. Koch recognized that in order to assess psychopathic traits, it was required to look at the patient’s life history as a whole instead of just the sum of its parts. The term psychopathic replaced what society knew as moral insanity. Though Koch's psychopatische construct was more focused than the moral insanity concept, it was still too broad to comprehend personality disorders in general.