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It’s easy to imagine that Machiavellians are some sort of geniuses, so the conflation by association.

One can be high Mach, yet neurotypical average.

There are professions that require this, within a narrow context, such as hypnotherapists.

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Never heard of the fifth one but I'm not surprised. I liked the point about ASPD being a diagnostic label and the DSM pretty much being an insurance repayment manual. I'm diagnosed with ASPD and I'm definitely not a psychopath, the fact that the two terms are conflated annoys the shit out of me. Sociopath is more likely, though I see myself as someone who is relatively neurotypical with character flaws such as anger and addiction which by the way, is correlated with both psychopathy and ASPD. Not sure why, it's surely not for emotional dependence reasons but both psychopathy and ASPD have poor impulse control so that is probably what leads to the chemical dependency aspect.

You're actually the first person I've seen tell the truth about Ted Bundy for example, not being a psychopath. Dahmer it's a little more obvious but Bundy clearly wasn't either despited being touted as the "prototypical psychopath" it just goes to show that most people glaze over Psychology as a whole and throw words around without understanding what they mean. As for Robert Hare and the PCL-R, I can't fault the guy for conducting research in prison because it's where you have a good chance of finding a concentration of psychopaths - but it's obviously going to yield results that show off the dumber ones.

Overall good read and useful information, these myths are indubitably the reason most psychopaths don't reveal themselves.

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I'd seen the cancer and disease thing before. It makes psychopaths seem like they're some sort of shadow knight from a fantasy roleplaying game with dark powers to destroy

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deletedNov 20, 2021Liked by Athena Walker
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