this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
257 points (98.9% liked)
Europe
8484 readers
2 users here now
News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe πͺπΊ
(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, π©πͺ ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures
Rules
(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
- Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
- No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
- No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.
Also check out !yurop@lemm.ee
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Prevalence of psychopathy is estimated at something like 5%. In Russia we're talking at least 7.5 million psychopaths. Add to that those who suffered neglect or abuse and have a lack of empathy, not exactly given Russian history, and I doubt it'd be that hard to find the kind of person willing to rape or murder for a mars bar.
We usually don't use the world psychopathy anymore in this context. It's now referred to as anti social personality disorder.
Not in the DSM, I know. Here's the article I took it from after a quick google:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661044/full
Wikipedia suggests that ASPD can be three times more common than 'psychopathy', because they're not entirely the same thing. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, which causes confusion. So I used the term used in the article I found, rather than assuming they meant APSD.
TLDR: people who lack empathy are not particularly rare.
Psychopath isn't a diagnostic term in the DSM. It's more of a colloquial term we use in common language. But I get what you're saying. The figure I read after I saw your comment was between 1-3%. I think the statistic has pretty high error bcz you can't sample the entire population.
I know it's not in the DSM and that it's also a colloquial term, but the article cited doesn't use it as such. They're suggesting the prevalence of psychopathy, as diagnosed by the PCL-R test, is 5%.
As the article is the first I found, I used the term psychopathy, rather than using APSD and confusing the terms unnecessarily. They're arguably not synonymous. It's likely that the prevalence of APSD is not the same as that of psychopathy, as diagnosed by the PCL-R.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_Checklist#Comparison_with_psychiatric_diagnoses