Reviewing: The Psychopath Whisperer by Kent Kiehl

The Motive:

“Psychopaths. Sociopaths. Osteopaths. Writing what you know isn’t your most exciting option.”

The psychopathic serial killer is a staple of crime fiction. But what’s the truth about the man behind the shower curtain?

The Evidence:

When I said man behind the shower curtain, was that a sexist assumption or a mashup reference to The Wizard of Oz? These days it was probably both, so I might as well own it. However, since this book suggests psychopathic males outnumber females ten to one, I’ll forgive myself and move on.

For me, the main question I hoped this book would answer was a basic one: what is psychopathy? For while narrative storytelling has given us concrete representations, replete with hockey masks and fava beans, an agreed clinical definition of psychopathy has been somewhat elusive. It isn’t a condition that has ever been defined in the manual of psychiatric diagnoses for instance, although it is considered related to antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). Some experts even disagree on whether psychopathy exists or whether sociopathy is a synonym or something else entirely. Researchers arguing over basic terminology like this is seldom a good omen. The author’s mentor, Robert Hare, created a controversial psychopathy scoring questionnaire, the PCL-R to give clinicians a basis for diagnosis, and amongst other uses, predict recidivism amongst prison inmates. The PCL-R remains in use, but as this book points out, it is tricky to apply, with variable results reported by different psychologists.

Against this background, Kent Kiehl’s academic and professional mission has been to find and refine a neurological basis for criminal psychopathy.  So while the PCL-R had established this population of criminals tended to be glib, callous, unemotional and lacking in empathy, the question remained: why? This book documents how Kiehl’s work found answers within the paralimbic area of the brain, as measured by functional MRI scanning. By interviewing prison inmates to identify those with psychopathic traits, scanning their brains and publishing the results his research team evolved a hard definition for the condition and a potential biological basis for certain kinds of criminal behaviour.

A hopeful, and for me unexpected finding reported by this book was that the once irresolvable problem of psychopathy may in fact be proving amenable to certain kinds of treatment. Since previous research indicates psychopathic personalities neither fear punishment nor positively modify their behaviour in the face of it, the MJTC Decompression Program sets out to reward any and all examples of positive behaviour, attempting to educate young inmates towards different outcomes. This may be an uncomfortable idea – an expensive regime where the worst violent offenders can earn treats and entertainments for flashes of basic decency seems inconsistent with traditional ideas of judicial punishment. However, early evidence suggests that this program may reduce future violent offending, and thus justify itself both economically and emotionally in avoiding future loss of life.

While It is beyond doubt that the author has the knowledge and experience to explain his work in this field, a couple of concerns surfaced during reading. First, the author’s research was driven from working with a select group of violent criminals. Since we don’t generally require diverse groups of non-criminals to complete the psychopathy checklist or take brain scans to measure their response to emotional stimuli, there remains uncertainty around projecting these results onto other populations. This niggle resurfaced with every chapter, where a jaunty strapline would announce something like “Fact: There are over 29,000,000 psychopaths worldwide”, leaving a footnote to describe an approximation calculated around one or more assumptions. Doubtless, the word estimate is less punchy than fact, but it would have been more accurate.

My second issue was more philosophical, questioning the significance of psychopathy in our consideration of violent crime. This is more about our societial and media fixation on the criminal psychopath as an archetype. The fascination is understandable, but might it distract us from looking at the causes of violence in ourselves? Given that we know some of the worst human atrocities were not exclusively committed by people with mental aberrations afflicting less than one percent of males, we need to avoid making one condition, however dramatic, any kind of scapegoat for violent human behaviour. The true significance of psychopathy may be as the canary in the coal-mine: criminal psychopaths demonstrate behaviour under relatively ordinary conditions that other people may exhibit only in extremis. They force us to consider human capacities we might otherwise prefer to ignore.

The Verdict:

This is a well-written book documenting valuable research within an interesting field, however, like all science, it won’t be the whole story. I’ll very likely keep digging, just not under the patio of a glib, callous, unemotional neighbour. Safest to leave that to the professionals…