mauvais chance

It’s been quite a while since I made a post on this and my last one used some innaccurate language, so here we go again again. (This is gonna be a long one.)

Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) is a Cluster-B personality disorder characterised by low-empathy, violent urges, irritability, and impulsivity. People with ASPD are prone to substance abuse or other forms of addiction, self-harm, and criminal behaviour. While people tend to assume the criminal behaviour associated with ASPD is usually in the realm of assault and murder, it manifests more in theft and drug charges.

Let’s break that down even further. 

ASPD is a disorder. This seems obvious, but this is overlooked a lot as people think of ASPD as something that causes the person with it to hurt those around them, where it actually primarily hurts the person who has it. Lots of people with ASPD do end up being manipulative or otherwise mean at some point in their life - as do most people in general - but these behaviours can be unlearned through therapy and may be more a product of their environment and past trauma than the disorder itself. It’s also a chronic condition, meaning it’s not going to go away. Symptoms can lessen with time and be managed through therapy and medication, but someone who has ASPD will always have it.

The origin of ASPD usually lies in childhood trauma in combination with genetic factors. It can also, very rarely, show up later in life as a result of a brain damage through physical injury or drugs, but research in this area is recent and lacking. The vast majority of people with ASPD do not develop it later in life but somewhere in childhood or teenage years. In underage people it would be called Conduct Disorder (CD), as ASPD is not diagnosable until you turn eighteen. CD does not always turn to ASPD but ASPD always starts off as CD. (You’re not required to have been diagnosed with CD to be later diagnosed with ASPD, but you have to have had the symptoms.)

The defining symptoms of ASPD are low-empathy, violent urges, irritability, and impulsivity.

Low-empathy is fairly self-explanatory, though it is worth mentioning that it pertains to emotional/affective empathy and not cognitive empathy. People with ASPD can learn morals and can learn to recognise and understand emotions in others, but we cannot learn to actually care about and replicate those emotions in ourselves. Someone with ASPD isn’t going to feel sad on their friend’s behalf, but they can recognise that they are sad, why they are sad, and what they should do to help.

Violent urges, irritability, and impulsivity all link pretty closely together, along with substance abuse and apathy. People with ASPD can come off as very apathetic and we certainly are very apathetic most of the time. We don’t care about most things and can have a limited emotional range, muted emotions, and/or experience chronic boredom, all of which contribute to acting out and/or taking drugs just to feel anything at all. Violent urges can pop up in connection with this, with irritability, or can seem to come without any prompting them at all. It’s worth noting that violent urges are a symptom of ASPD and not violent behaviour. Of course, violent urges can lead to violent behaviour, but making broad generalisations between ASPD and actual violence is innaccurate at best and actively harmful at worst.

The reality of ASPD isn’t much more complicated than that, but public perception and stigma play a huge role in the lives of people with ASPD and therefore are worth mentioning. You may hear ASPD referred to as sociopathy or psychopathy (which is actually a separate condition though it has many more similarities to ASPD than it has differences) and it usually only comes up in reference to fictional serial killers or corrupt politicians, as well as as a casual insult to throw at people who are generally shitty. People with ASPD are told that they are serial killers, rapists, criminals, monsters, abusers, less than human, etc. and it’s tough to hear that rhetoric from every angle and not believe it just a little bit. Sadly, it’s not an uncommon sentiment for people with ASPD to hear these things and say, “Fine, I guess this is who I am and all I will ever be.” Sometimes this mood passes, sometimes it leads to that person winding up in prison or dead, and sometimes it contributes to the high suicide rates among people with ASPD.

If you want to help people with ASPD, you can give me all of your money do your best to combat misinformation. If you hear someone call the president sociopathic or armchair diagnose a fictional serial killer with ASPD, correct them. They might not listen and it may not make a huge difference, but it adds up.

-