Sky

I’m Sky. I mainly but not exclusively post here about ASPD — my experience with it, the concept of it and facts about it. I am a massive nerd in general including about psychology lmao.

I made a discord server:

Callousness means here: lack of guilt, lack of empathy, lack of strong loving feelings for others

Conduct disorder as in at least 3 symptoms in one year.

I personally appreciate that the approach is more about "disordered personalities", rather than a disorder of the personality. It's treated less as some kind of illness with a set list of symptoms and more as a list of personality traits that developed as a result of trauma that hurt the person who has them. I think people with Cluster B disorders in the DSM-5 who are seeking treatment would benefit from this approach being taken on by more American psychologists.

The camp that argues ASPD and NPD shouldn't be considered forms of neurodivergency would unfortunately try to use that to their favour, since they seem to struggle with understanding that your environment affects your brain structure and endocrine system, lol.

Personally, I think under the ICD-11 framework for personality disorder, it's possible. Under the classic DSM-5 framework for ASPD, I'm not so sure. The DSM-5 is more restrictive by design and whether that's a good thing or not is entirely personal opinion.

I have never had an exception personally. Though I don’t think you need to have absolutely no concern or remorse ever to be described as antisocial/psychopathic, just very little. But that could just be my reading. I also would like to note that a lot of descriptions specifically describe a lack of concern including for people close to them, which flies in the face of exceptions as I’ve heard it described. I would say in that way, exception could work only if the guilt and compassion towards exception is still mostly lacking in an objective sense.

I have major issues with both criteria though honestly. Also there are two ASPDs in the ICD-11, conduct-dissocial disorder and personality disorder with dissociality. I think the dissociality thing is too vague and puts too many things under the criteria of lack of empathy to make it hard to say (like manipulation and aggression iirc, etc, like those are several different things); and also requires you to have traits of NPD, its not just aspd, its like a weird mix of both that leaves out a lot of essential traits imo. I would like to hear your explanation though. The conduct-dissocial criteria is solely about antisocial behaviour, and has a specifier of having limited pro social emotions or not, so CDD with LPE is probably a the best ASPD equivalent in the book, and the lack of empathy and remorse can be limited OR absent, so exceptions to a minor degree sound reasonable there. Honestly my favourite criteria in any of these books is probably the ICD-10 dissocial personality disorder (still has issues imo), and the alternative dsm 5 criteria for a somewhat overly restrictive version. Regular dsm aspd can easily be met without any lack of concern or guilt, in fact only half of people who meet that criteria have a lack of remorse.

i once trained/onboarded a guy at my last retail job. shift 3 of me working with him: things were conversational and he seemed like a genuinely decent dude who wanted to work with our tiny team (rebuilding after higher-ups purged any 'weak-performers' for sales :/). when the store is finally empty of customers, he turns to me with a big grin on his face, saying he's incredibly antisocial, diagnosed sociopath, and a narcissist.

i was like. um ok? that's fine, u seem nice enough and u work with customers well, that's basically all u need to do here. the rest of the team is some flavor of ND, queer, or disabled so we have a lot of diversity! and he goes 'cool, glad to hear it' and then he dropped the subject to finish his job training.

we spent a good amount of time, chatting during slow hours, but all he was interested in talking about was his ex-wife that left him for his 'mental issues'. i'm kind of a pushover so i just let him vent if he needed to, but since i didn't have any qualifications i let him know i couldn't help him through it as a coworker, and he should probably talk with a therapist if he needed help. i thought he received it well bc he didn't ask me for advice after that

our schedules made it so everyone had at least one shift with each other every week, so everyone had the opportunity to meet him and we all got generally positive vibes from him and it seemed like things were going well. he was getting praise from the higher-ups for being good with sales as well!! i like sharing whatever rare positive things they say bc it's just nice to hear after all the annoying stats. he seemed proud of it!

couple weeks later I get a text from our boss, asking me to come in and take his shift that day bc he called out last minute. i agreed bc sure, money is nice, not a huge deal (not the important part)

guy never came back, and blocked everyone's contact info and the store's number. we kinda just went 'oh well, nothing we can do' and started trying to find someone else to hire bc we still needed help

like a month later, our boss got a huge, all-caps text from him, cussing all of us out for being pieces of shit, among other things. unsure if slurs were involved but bc we're all aforementioned queer/disabled/ND, it was a possibility 😬 i was shocked -same with my boss- bc we both thought we were getting along with him great :(

tbh i dont even know if this is even related to mental health or if he was just an asshole 😓 sometimes i rethink about what i could have done or said instead bc i have incredibly bad obsessive-compulsive tendencies but otherwise it's water under the bridge.

he is still alive though, bc i randomly found his facebook profile while browsing and he was still posting. it was kind of a relief bc my boss and i were worried smth happened to him after that rant text.

anyway sorry if this is a weird message to get. i didnt mean for it to get so long 😔