Tag: mental illness

Popular Psychology

Is Your Child A Psychopath? Signs You Should Be Aware Of.

by Torey C. Richards, LMHC93 Comments on Is Your Child A Psychopath? Signs You Should Be Aware Of.

istock_000006360956xsmall-150x150As we continue to look at, investigate, try to understand and prevent tragedies like the mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School, I thought it would be a good ideal to look at the three categories of people the usually commit mass murder:

  • Those who are delusionally insane
  • Those who are deeply and suicidally depressed
  • Psychopaths

In rare occasions there are combinations of the three or substance users or in extremely rare cases, brain tumors that cause mental and behavioral changes such as in the case of Charles Whitman.

When it comes to psychopaths however, they are the easiest to explain, and yet often go the most unnoticed.

Psychopathy is a type of personality disorder.

Many people think that they can identify a psychopath by the way they look and act, but that is not usually the case. Most psychopaths are very charming and very good at hiding their psychopathic tendencies until pushed or cornered.

Psychopaths seem to be born with an inability to empathize or feel sorry for other people. They have a complete disregard for other peoples feelings and suffering and can commit horrible crimes, or tell painful lies without so much as batting an eye.

Most psychopaths don’t know that doing something is wrong because they seem to lack the gene that makes us feel bad, or guilty, when we do something wrong such as lying or hitting someone for no reason.

They often have to be taught and reminded over and over again that something is bad or wrong, and then they have to remind themselves that it is bad or wrong, because they can do it and not feel bad about it at all.

They just don’t seem to be able to feel or care about other people or living things and may go on to torture animals in childhood if they are the sadistic type of psychopath and enjoys seeing/thinking of torturing other living things.

Eric Harris, one of the Columbine shooters seemed to fall into the category of a psychopath (also called sociopath). He once wrote that humans were as disposable as fungus in a petri dish.

His journal was littered with remarks about how much he hated people and wanted to kill everyone (I have a letter from a teenager I suspect may be a psychopath or budding one I will share later).

However, most psychopaths hide their hate or careless disregard for others and are usually witty, endearing and charming.

Psychopaths with high IQs often become criminal master minds, politicians, successful business people, etc. while ones with poor intellect and education tend to end up in jail more.

Levi King is a psychopath who went on a killing spree in 2005 that ended with him killing five people in two different states including three people in one family and the family dog (he thought he had killed the whole family, but one little girl managed to survive by playing dead). He reported killing these people because it relieved tension he had been feeling and gave him a sense of peace for the first time in his life.

As a child, Levi King once set his sister’s bedroom on fire because he was mad at her. As a teenager he even shot his cat to the point that it was literally blown to pieces.  He also had broken into a home and sat it on fire just because he could.

As a child, he had all the signs and symptoms of a budding psychopath.

At the age of 15 he dropped out of school, started having run ins with the law and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 20. He was 23 when he committed the murders and expresses no remorse whatsoever. He is currently serving a life sentence.

Like all psychopaths, Levi King is unable to relate or feel for other people, although he is intelligent and charming enough to hide that flaw just like Ted Bundy was so successful at doing.

General Characteristics of a Psychopath

  • self-center and self-important. Almost anything they do for anyone is only because they see a benefit for themselves it.
  • need stimulation and are easily bored.
  • deceptive behavior and lying
  • conning and manipulative
  • little remorse or guilt
  • shallow emotional response
  • callous with a lack of empathy
  • living off others/ predatory attitude
  • poor self-control
  • promiscuous sexual behavior
  • early behavioral problems
  • lack of realistic long term goals
  • blaming other for their actions
  • short term relationships
  • juvenile delinquency
  • short term relationships
  • breaking parole or probation rules
  • varied criminal activity

Signs Your Child May Be A Psychopath

  1. Setting fires
  2. Severe cruelty to animals such as killing and torturing them
  3. Persistently hurts, bullies or violates the rights of others by stealing or vandalizing their property.
  4. Continuously breaks major rules such as running away or breaking curfew despite knowing the consequences.
  5. Shows no guilt when confronted for doing wrong (i.e., pushing another student down the stairs).
  6. Shows a persistent callous disregard for other people’s feelings, not just siblings (i.e., pushing another student down and being unmoved by their crying or distress).
  7. Persistently doesn’t care about how well they do in school, even when they know there are clear expectations and they are capable of doing better.
  8. They appear cold and unmoved, only showing emotions to intimidate or manipulate others.
  9. Blame others for their mistakes instead of taking responsibility.
  10. Fearless, doing new and reckless/dangerous activities.
  11. They are unmoved by threats of punishment.
  12. They are highly motivated by reward and what they will get out of doing something, even if that act will hurt others (i.e., stealing, lying)

A combination of many of these signs alone are not enough to be worried about, but if there are enough signs and you are alarmed by your child’s behavior, I would recommend having them seen by a mental health professional as they could be signs of something else, such as childhood trauma and PTSD.

As always, if you believe your child has behavioral problems, have them evaluated by a qualified professional instead of attempting to self-diagnose them which can have damaging effects on your child.

*EDIT: Just yesterday (9/25/13) I interviewed a 7th grader who has been making his own explosives, threatening to blow up himself and/or other people, blowing up random things, tortuing his mother’s cat, kicking and hitting other students and teachers at his school so much that he has gotten kicked out of school several times and his family is currently looking for a new place to stay because they got kicked out of their apartment complex for his behavior and the fact that he has killed several ducks around the lake at the apartment complex. His mother brought him in because she was scared of him and he had recently attacked his 4 year old sister for taking too long in the bathroom. When I asked him if he had any remorse for attacking his sister, hitting other people, having his family kicked out of their complex or killing the ducks, he flatly answered “no”. Nothing seemed to affect him, even the threat of hospitalization and jail. Without intense therapy at the least, I see this kid growing up to be not only a menace to society, but potentially a psychopath. He stated clearly that he doesn’t care about other people or their feelings and he has exhibited that on several occassions.

Below is a short documentary done in 1992 about Beth Thomas, a child who suffered from sexual abuse and reactive attachment disorder (I’ll write about that in another post soon) and seems to show early signs of psychopathology.


Psychopaths are all around us in one form of another. Read: The Psychopath Next Door by Martha Stout and Dr. Hare’s book, “Without Conscience” for more detailed information about psychopaths.

Popular Psychology

The Sandy Hook School Shooting, Mass Murder And Mental Health Reform: Parts 1 and 2

by Torey C. Richards, LMHC5 Comments on The Sandy Hook School Shooting, Mass Murder And Mental Health Reform: Parts 1 and 2

istock_000005543513smallWhen I was in undergrad, I took a class called Mass Murder in the United States.

I picked up that book today and perused through it. It was published in 2000 and due to the number of mass murders that have taken place over the last

12 years, it felt severely outdated (although much of the psychological information in it remains relevant).

Unfortunately our country has a long history of mass murder with the number of incidents and victims increasing over the years, especially in the last 10.

After tragedies like the one that happened Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it’s common that many people start wanting gun reforms and bands on assault refiles. Something that often gets overlooked, but now is finally getting some attention, is mental health reform.

According to research done by Mother Jones in November, no less than 80 percent of mass shooters obtained their guns legally.

In the 61 cases they looked at in the United States over the last 30 years, at least 38 of the shooters displayed signs of mental problems before the shootings.

This happens way too often. While assault rifle bands get the attention during terrible mass shootings, the mental health component often goes largely ignored, despite the fact that it often plays a crucial role.

Many of these perpetrators in the study done by Mother Jones had acute paranoia, delusions, hallucinations and/or depression.

At least 35 of the 61 perpetrators killed themselves at or near the scene with 7 others appearing to have committed suicide by cop.

Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 and injured 23 during the Virgina Tech shootings in 2007, was found mentally ill and in need of hospitalization during a psychiatric evaluation in 2005.

Jared Loughner, who shot 19 people including former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, had displayed signs of mental illness many years before the shooting, including yelling out in class and complaining about hearing voices. Still, he was able to purchase a gun and ammunition without a problem.

One of the bystanders who helped subdue Loughner that day after he stopped to reload, Patricia Maisch stated, “That beautiful day, our mental-health system failed us.”

Could many of the mass shootings we’ve seen over the past few years (at least 26 in the past seven years alone) been prevented with better mental health reform?

That’s not an easy question to answer because it takes into account the issues of civil liberties, medical ethics, and gun laws.

In our country, we want to make sure that everyone has the same rights to bare arms, even those with mental problems, but we have to try to figure out a way of keeping guns out of the hands of those likely to use them to inflict horror on our society.

At the minimum we need to look at how we are treating those with severe mental problems.

Our mental health system is broken, plain and simple. I’ve worked in many facets of the mental health system to know that it’s the truth.

Look around you. I am sure you know someone who has fallen through the system, needs help and is walking around with a mental illness that isn’t being addressed properly if at all. If not, just take a look at our staggering homeless population, many of which suffer from mental illnesses that are not being treated.

Too many states are cutting funding for those with mental illnesses and many people that need to be hospitalized, simply aren’t because so many mental institutions have been closed down due to lack of funding.

In the United States you are allowed to be mentally ill, which means that you can be diagnosed with a severe mental illness and allowed to not take medication, not see a psychiatrist/therapist and pretty much be ignored unless you draw attention to yourself.

It’s your right.

As a licensed mental health counselor in the state of Florida, I have the right to involuntarily hospitalize someone that is an imminent danger to them self/others or is at risk of self harm (i.e., running through traffic in a manic rage), but not the right to involuntarily hospitalize someone who is actively hearing voices or hallucinating, as long as they are in touch with reality and aren’t a danger to themselves or others, even if I know that person needs treatment.

Of course not all mass murders are done by people who are mentally ill. Some do it to seek revenge or have other troubles, but I can’t ignore the role that mental illness, including depression in young men, plays in mass murders.

Part 2: Stima Associated With Mental Illness May Increase Chances For Violence. depressed-teen-istock

I hate when tragedies like this happen because it often puts a stigma on those with mental illnesses who already have enough stigma.

Most people with mental illnesses, including schizophrenia are not violent. However, having schizophrenia makes a person twice as likely to be violent than a person without schizophrenia.

A person who has schizophrenia and a substance problem is about 20 times more likely to kill a person than someone without schizophrenia, so we can’t ignore the statistics.

The stigmatization of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, often make it worse for those with it, causing exacerbation of existing symptoms of delusions, disconnection from reality, social withdrawal and lack of emotions.

I’ve talked previously about how many men with depression don’t seek help because of the stigma that goes along with a man seeking help for his problems (check out my post on Javon Belcher) and how that can turn deadly in the form of suicide, murder or in rare cases, mass murder.

A patient with schizophrenia, a former academic wrote anonymously about her experience with social stigma from her disease (via writer David Dobbs at Wired):

“I was diagnosed with schizophrenia just a month after Steven Kazmierczak (quickly identified as “schizoaffective”) shot six people to death on the campus of [Northern Illinois University] … Undoubtedly primed by this shooting, wary, uncertain, without enough time to think, my doctoral adviser suspended my graduate assistantship, banned me from the university, and alerted all faculty, graduate students and staff to forward all emails [from me] to her and, under no circumstances, respond.”

Her adviser unfortunately thought that she was planning to plant a bomb on campus, and although the decision to suspend her was reversed in about a week, the damage was already done:

“Friends — my doctoral cohort, as is often the case, were a close and tight-knit group — abandoned me overnight. Students and faculty passed me in the halls, staring ahead blankly as if I were an undergraduate they had never seen and would never see again. Parties were announced, talked about, and I was never invited. Never again.”

The social rejection exacerbated her illness. She became afraid to be around people, stopped attending classes and functions on campus:

For a while I struggled through classes, overwhelmed, perhaps in equal measure, by delusions and this new and unprecedented isolation. Voices took the places of both professors and friends. Following a hospitalization (and consequent withdrawal from a semester’s worth of classes), I descended into a state of the most stunning dysfunction, unable (or simply unmotivated) even to walk from my bed to the bathroom.

Eventually she was dismissed from her program:

Everything I have ever been told was a lie. My one way out — of poverty, desperation, madness — was never more than an illusion. And then disbelief. And then, how will I ever explain this to anyone, to family, to old mentors? And then betrayal. No language this time, no thoughts; crying, crying for hours. Alcohol, unconsciousness, unbidden dreams. Even there: repeating their words, over and over and over again. Isolation so intense, there is no way I will ever bridge it. I am lost. Days go by, weeks.

Eventually her thoughts turned to violence and self-destruction:

I fixated on a single vision, me, sometimes hanging, sometimes with gun in hand and a pool of blood on the floor, outside [her former adviser’s] office. Suicide, yes, obviously, but also something more: revenge.

This person never went through with murder or violence, but she says that she understands how someone in her situation would want to commit mass murder. This is sometimes the spiraling down process of someone with a mental illness who commits mass murder.

We have to do something about our mental health system if we don’t want to see a continuation or rise in the amount of mass murder in our country.

Maybe we need stronger gun laws that don’t allow someone who has been involuntarily committed to a hospital because of a mental illness or found mentally incapacitated to purchase guns without a thorough psychiatric evaluation and extensive cooling off period, if at all.

It’s time for the leaders of our states, our country, to sit down and have a serious conversation for the well-being of our nation’s mental health.

For more information on the Mother Jones research, check out the site below: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map

Popular Psychology

Clearing The Air: Mental Illness In Relation to Smoking

by Torey C. Richards, LMHC1 Comment on Clearing The Air: Mental Illness In Relation to Smoking

The other day I was at a sports bar people watching, something I commonly do, when an attractive waitress caught my attention. I watched as she went outside on her break and then did the most disgusting and disfiguring thing, she put a cigarette between her lips and lit it.

I was shocked as I watched her inhale and then exhale a white puff of smoke. She had to be aware of the astounding amount of health issues related to smoking from cancer to cardiovascular disease, and she was smoking by herself so there weren’t any apparent social benefits, so how could someone so young and beautiful be putting that carcinogenic smoke into her body?

I immediately started thinking that she had to be self-medicating for one reason or another and that got me to thinking, is that why so many people are still smoking, can they all be self-medicating with nicotine and if so, from what?

The first obvious answer to me was stress. A lot of people smoke because they are stressed out and use nicotine to help calm their nerves. A study I read said that approximately 30% of people who smoke do so because they are depressed. For these people, nicotine actually helps them feel better, if only temporarily. These people instead of learning how to deal with their depression through counseling and appropriate anti-depressants if needed, have learned to depend on nicotine. Evidence of this came from U.S. clinical trials for Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant. During the trial to see how effective Wellbutrin was on depression, a fair number of participants who smoked suddenly stopped smoking. With drug companies being as clever as they are, Wellbuturin was soon not only sold as an anti-depressant, but was repackaged and renamed as Zyban and sold as a treatment to help people quit smoking.

Also, in an article called “Smoking in relation to anxiety and depression: Evidence from a large population survey: The HUNT study” published in European Psychiatry, it was shown that anxiety and depression were the two most common complaints in people who smoke, with anxiety being the highest complaint, followed by anxiety and depression combined and then depression by itself.

People with mental health issues, even if they are underlying, are twice as likely to smoke as the rest of the population. So it is possible that the people around you who smoke, your spouse, your friend, your family member, (or even you if you smoke) may actually be self-medicating for an untreated and undiagnosed issue that needs to be attended to. With proper treatment, they may lose the desire to smoke altogether. Encourage them to talk to their doctor, health care provider or other mental health provider about how their mood factors in with their urges to smoke.

Uncategorized

Parents Denial of Their Child’s Mental Health Issues Doesn’t Make It Go Away

by Torey C. Richards, LMHC31 Comments on Parents Denial of Their Child’s Mental Health Issues Doesn’t Make It Go Away

ImageThe more family sessions I do, the more concerned I become at the astonishing number of parents who are in denial of their child’s mental health issues.

Recently I was dealing with a teenage girl referred to me by her mother because she was scared to be by herself, “acting weird”, talking and laughing to herself.

After meeting with the girl twice I got her to tell me some information she had ever told anyone else. She was hearing voices and having extreme paranoid delusions of someone putting “voodoo” on her and making her do things against her will.

After further sessions and gathering more collateral information from her mom and sister, I diagnosed the girl with a psychotic disorder, with a rule out of paranoid schizophrenia.  I referred the mom to a local psychiatrist so the young lady could be evaluated further and the mom was extremely hesitant. She questioned my every judgment, and while she was very concerned for her daughter, she hoped that it was “all in her head”. I tried to convince her mother that it wasn’t “all in her head”, but an illness, that according to her records, seemed to run in the family.

Their family history was peppered with undiagnosed mental illnesses.

Needless to say, the mother didn’t follow up on my referral until a few weeks later when her daughter had a psychotic episode that truly scared the mother. It was then she came back and thanked me for recognizing this when I did.

And then last week, I had a girl come to me extremely tearful. She had old and new self-inflicted cuts up and down her arm. She told me that she was suicidal, tried to walk out into traffic the day before but a friend stopped her. She had thoughts that day of hanging herself or jumping off the third floor of the school building.

I called her dad to have a conference and recommend that she be taking to the nearby psychiatric hospital for her safety. I didn’t need his permission to do that, but I thought it would be better for her.

When her dad showed up he was extremely annoyed, yelled at her for not being able to communicate with him, and said that she wasn’t suffering from depression, she was just “lazy”. He said she was failing school because she slept all the time, didn’t do her homework, didn’t want to be involved with her family and seemed aloof.

The more he described her “laziness” to me, the more he re-affirmed my diagnosis of his daughter being depressed. He argued with me that she was depressed because of her failing grades and being behind in her school work, even though she and I both tried to explain to him that the depression is what caused her to start failing school and get behind in her work in the first place.

He didn’t want to hear or believe that his daughter was depressed and suicidal. He said that it was a cry for attention, and it very well may be, but as a mental health professional, my job is the evaluate the situation and keep my client from hurting themselves or other people. I had her involuntarily hospitalized to a mental health facility for her safety. Her dad left with angry, probably thinking we were wasting his time, but I’d prefer him to be angry with me for being overly concerned than to be mad at me for not trying hard enough to prevent her suicide.

Even just recently I have been working with a girl suffering from severe depression and suicidal thoughts. She confessed to me that she had attempted suicide last weekend by taking 18 sleeping pills and was disappointed that it didn’t work. I convinced her to allow me to call her father so that I could recommend psychiatric help, possibly hospitalization. The first thing her father said to me over the phone was, “No, I don’t believe it. We are Christians, we don’t do things like that.”

It took me while to convince her father to actually come into my office so him and I can sit down and talk with his daughter, and even then it took nearly the whole session before he started to accept that his daughter was indeed depressed although he was still in denial about her suicidal thoughts or previous attempt.

Parents can be my biggest allies or worst enemies when it comes to dealing with children and adolescent clients, and their denial of their child’s mental health issues only complicates everything. I see so many kids who can benefit from intense therapy and maybe even medication, but their parents ignore the seriousness of the situation and write it off as defiant behavior, active imagination or they just hope their child will grow out of things such as torturing animals and setting fires. Denial is a defense mechanism and while it’s okay to be skeptical, being in denial is almost always unhealthy in the long run.