A 1990s television advertisement was one of the first indications that American lawyer Jamie L. – who uses the pseudonym ME Thomas – might suffer from a personality disorder.
“When I was 8 or 9 years old, I was watching TV with my father and saw an advert for a fundraising campaign to fight hunger in Africa. The images showed a very skinny boy. In the next scene, a fly landed on the boy’s eyes, and he didn’t react at all,” he describes.
“I commented: ‘What a silly boy…He can’t even keep a fly out of his own eyes?
Thomas’s father was shocked by his daughter’s reaction and wondered if he lacked empathy.
“I didn’t know what that word meant.”
“When I understood what empathy was, I realized that maybe I didn’t really have that feeling”, says.
Thomas shared this story during a talk organized on August 12 by Psychopathy Is, an association created by researchers in the United States to promote studies on this psychiatric disorder.
The group – the first and only one in the world dedicated to this topic – also offers support to families with cases of psychopathy and carries out awareness campaigns about this disorder.
A few days after the conference, Thomas accepted an invitation to speak with BBC News Brazil, where he shared some other episodes he has experienced in recent decades and his journey before and after his diagnosis.
Unnoticed violence
Before going into the details of the interview, it is worth making a brief technical explanation.
Today, psychiatry textbooks no longer use the terms sociopathy either psychopathysomething that generates much controversy and endless debates among experts in the field.
These two conditions are somehow encompassed under the term “antisocial personality disorder”although there are tests that specifically evaluate psychopathic traits.
The American Psychiatric Association classifies this condition as “one of the most misunderstood mental illnesses, with little diagnosis and treatment”.
It is part of a broader group of personality disorders that also includes borderline personality disorder, narcissism, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and paranoia, among others.
As can be seen in several parts of the interview, Thomas herself uses all the terms – sociopathy, psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder – to describe her condition.
He begins by recounting an episode he experienced during the transition from childhood to adolescence.
“When I was about 12, a friend’s father came to see me. He told me that his daughter adored me and appreciated our friendship, but that she would like me to stop hitting her,” Thomas says.
“I was very surprised, because I had never realized that he did that.”
The lawyer also recalls some episodes from her childhood and adolescence in which she would break into the homes of people close to her.
“The idea was just to play a joke on them, like moving some things around. I thought it was funny, but Today I realize that it was a huge invasion of privacy.“.
During his school years, Thomas also experienced episodes of agitation, where he might, for example, throw books or dictionaries at his classmates during a particularly tedious lesson.
“We also played football without any rules. I would grab some of my teammates and punch them over and over again.”
Still a teenager, Thomas says she made bets with a friend to see who would kiss a boy they both liked. The problem was that she knew in advance that the boy liked her.
“I didn’t take into account my friend’s feelings, I was just opportunistic. At that moment, I was only thinking about the twenty dollars I was going to earn,” he says.
“On the other hand, I always did very well in class and got good grades. So the teachers didn’t really know how to deal with me.”
Thomas understands that he always felt a certain “insensitivity, a lack of awareness of what was happening” around him.
However, this was not something that caught his attention during childhood and adolescence.
“I didn’t consider myself different from others. Maybe he suspected that he was simply smarter”, says.
“Plus, I have a big family, we’re Mormons and we all have musical talents. So, in some ways, we were already a bit of an odd family,” he notes.
“Are you a sociopath?”
Thomas confesses that he always noticed a “difficulty in dealing with certain situations” in which I had to pretend to mask what I really felt.
“I have also always found it very difficult to commit to something if it doesn’t provide me with a direct benefit.”
One activity that fit this requirement of offering a reward was law school, where Thomas graduated as a lawyer.
It was during his university studies that he heard the first hint that he might suffer from a personality disorder.
In her second year, in mid-2004, she interned at a government agency and shared an office with another woman.
“There wasn’t much to do, so we talked a lot. And I started to realize that this colleague had several vulnerabilities that I could use to manipulate her,” she recalls.
“She spoke openly with me and told me that she had been abandoned by her parents and adopted by another family, that she was homosexual and at the same time super religious.”
Over time, Thomas became very interested in his colleague, and she herself began to open up more and tell him personal details.
“I felt that this colleague did not pose any kind of threat to me. He was practically a wounded bird.“, he explains.
“Today I realise that this was not the case, and that this assessment came from my psychopathic prejudices,” he says.
After a few weeks of chatting, that coworker asked Thomas a decisive question: “She said to me: ‘Have you ever considered the possibility of being a sociopath?“
The word did not arouse any special emotion in the then law student.
“As a Mormon, I had not seen any of the more famous and violent movies that deal with these disorders, such as American Psycho“, says.
Thomas then decided to look up the meaning of the term on the Internet and found some information, including a list of 20 symptoms compiled by Canadian psychologist Robert D. Hare, which is still considered one of the main tools for diagnosing psychopathy.
The traits listed by the expert include charm, a grandiose sense of self-esteem, a need for constant stimulation, a tendency to boredom, frequent lying, an ease in manipulating others, a lack of remorse, an absence of empathy or impulsiveness.
“I came to the conclusion that These characteristics described me very well.“, says Thomas.
“But at the time I didn’t think much of it. I thought this information was just a curiosity, like finding out you’re related to a former queen of France,” he jokes.
Around 2008, with a degree and experience working at a prestigious law firm, Thomas began to see his life falling apart.
“The company started to suggest to me that there was no future for me there. A very close friend of mine found out that her father had cancer and I decided to distance myself from her because I felt that she was placing too many emotional demands on me.”
“I also faced a number of problems in my romantic relationships and with my family.”
At that time, Thomas realized that his life was marked by cycles of more or less three years. After that time, everything I had built—in terms of personal, romantic, and professional relationships—was falling apart.
“It was like I pressed a ‘fuck you’ button” and I could no longer continue with my role“, he explains.
“There always came a point where I didn’t like the job anymore, I got tired of pretending to be a good friend… I had to give it all up, because I wasn’t interested in anything anymore, it was like those things weren’t worth it anymore.”
In those moments of depression, Thomas felt exhausted from having to maintain a certain “mask of normality” before others.
“That’s when I thought: ‘“Could it be that this is happening to me because I am a sociopath?”
The diagnosis
In the midst of this sea of uncertainty, Thomas decided to recover a habit from his childhood and adolescence: write in a diary.
But this time he decided to do it in the digital world. To do so, he created the blog Sociopath World.
“As I used a pseudonym and never identified myself, many people always thought I was a man. Nobody thought there was a woman behind the blog,” she says.
After sharing texts on the Internet for a year and a half, the lawyer received a message from a literary agent, who invited her to write a book on the subject.
The idea materialized in 2013 with the publication of Confessions of a Sociopath: A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight (“Confessions of a Sociopath”A life hidden in plain sight”
However, before starting that project, Thomas felt the need to confirm that she did indeed suffer from a disorder – until then she had strong suspicions, but had never been evaluated by a health professional.
“By then, in mid-2010, I had already recovered and was working as a law professor. If there is one good thing about being a psychopath, it is the ability to quickly return to your peak.”
A psychologist asked him to undergo a series of cognitive tests. The conclusion was clear: Thomas did indeed suffer from a personality disorder.
He says that receiving the “official” diagnosis did not mean anything special in his life.
“For me, the diagnosis was similar to when women somehow feel that they are pregnant and only take a test to confirm what they already knew,” she compares.
“But on the other hand, I was hoping that I would be diagnosed with some other disease, because then things would be much easier for me.“.
“If health professionals had detected brain cancer, for example, their responsibility would have been to remove the tumor from there.”
“Now the personality disorder It’s a job that I myself will have to deal with for the rest of my life.“, he adds.
However, even with the diagnosis in hand, Thomas did not begin treatment immediately.
“Here in the United States, health insurance only pays for therapies that health associations consider effective. And, interestingly, There are no treatments that fit that criteria for the disorder. non-antisocial personality“.
“Many specialists also do not feel comfortable treating patients who suffer from sociopathy or psychopathy,” he adds.
A high price
After the book was published in 2013, Thomas participated in a few television interviews and was recognized by a few people.
“One of the students on the law course wrote to the faculty administration to say that he felt threatened by the fact that he had a sociopathic professor,” he says.
“The university security team sent me an email to tell me that I could no longer come to campus.”
“I replied that it was about a serious act of discrimination and that I sympathized with the fact that the student felt threatened, but that I never did anything directly against him,” he says.
“Furthermore, I had no criminal record and no history of violence as an adult. It seemed absurd to me that anyone would be bothered by my mere existence.”
According to Thomas, management upped the ante. “I was informed that in addition to being fired and banned, I was prohibited from coming within a mile of the campus or anyone associated with the university.“.
“I suffered a lot of prejudice and nobody seemed to care,” she laments.
“People treated me very badly and I developed a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder. At night, I would wake up suddenly with anxiety attacks”, account.
Around the same time, one of the lawyer’s brothers, who had always had mental health problems, began attending sessions with a psychotherapist.
“He did the treatment for about ten months and seemed like a different person. He had a lot of problems and quickly became a functional and competent adult.”
The lawyer decided to follow her relative’s example and began having sessions with the same therapist.
“Due to insurance issues, he decided right away that he would treat my personality disorder, but he didn’t specify the type.”
One of the first goals he set during his appointments was deal with his “addiction” to manipulating people.
“I didn’t know how to maintain a relationship with someone without doing that,” Thomas admits.
“The therapist would draw my attention to certain situations and suggest ways to make small adjustments in the way I interacted with others,” the lawyer explains.
He admits that he began to feel much better as the treatment progressed.
“Not only did relationships improve, but my own experience of them evolved. Contact with others became more relevant, more real, and I began to care more about people,” he says.
“Before, I saw social interactions as something similar to going to the gym. It was something I needed to do, but I I didn’t necessarily enjoy it. Nowadays, relationships are super rewarding for me.”
In 2017, Thomas started a new project: meeting and talking to other people with suspected or diagnosed antisocial personality disorder.
“The first person I visited was in Tasmania, Australia. The most recent was in Amsterdam, Holland, in April this year,” he says.
According to the lawyer, these contacts are usually of two types.
“First of all, there is a group of people who suspect they have sociopathy or psychopathy. They discover me through my blog or my book and they identify with what I tell them.”
“The second category are people who need help. They are in a period of difficulty and They don’t know what to do to change“.
A future without stigmas
Although he understands the importance of speaking openly about psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder, Thomas is bothered by the prejudices he has to face.
“A lot of people treat me badly in the name of trying to protect themselves from me”he emphasizes.
Perhaps the strongest stigma is that which links psychopathy with violence and criminal acts.
The Psychopathy Is association admits that “psychopathy increases the risk of aggressive and antisocial behavior.”
“However, Many people with psychopathy are not violent. And many people who are violent are not psychopaths.”
“Each individual with psychopathy has different attributes and challenges, and the way children or adults with psychopathy function in school, at work or in social settings varies widely,” the organization notes.
For Thomas, who continues to work as a lawyer, these stigmas related to psychopathy They come in part from science itself“through research that makes extrapolations and is far from representing the diversity of patients with the disorder.”
“There are many factors that can cause violence, and psychopathy is just one of them. The same goes for other disorders,” he argues.
But he suspects that many prejudices and fears related to psychopathy have an even deeper origin.
“Where does this strange need for people to care about how others express their feelings come from?” he asks.
The lawyer cites the hypothetical example of a funeral. Usually, everyone is expected to show sadness, cry or at least sympathize with family and friends who are going through a time of suffering.
However, people with antisocial personality disorder may not have those feelings at those times, and They often have to pretend and act in order not to be judged and criticized.
“I think that society is always monitoring feelings, and all those who have a different emotional universe, who experience empathy in different ways, are discriminated against.”
Thomas cites the movement to humanize autism: until recently, people with this disorder were excluded and there were no structures to welcome them into society.
Fortunately, that panorama is changing: in recent years, awareness campaigns and public policies have created adapted spaces so that people with autism can be included and participate in various activities.
“I hope this extends to people with conditions other than autism. As a psychopath, I want society to understand and accept my disorder“, he says.
“I dream of a future where psychopathy is not only accepted, but where people with different psychiatric diagnoses can express their emotional reactions without being judged.”
Thomas believes that “psychopaths who have committed crimes should be punished for their actions.”
“If they have done something wrong, they should go to jail like anyone else,” he stressed.
“But I don’t think it’s right that people with this disorder who have never been involved in legal problems are constantly judged, persecuted and forced to mask their feelings.”
“That requires a lot of energy on our part. It would be much better for psychopaths and for society itself if we could just be ourselves.”
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