Thursday, July 06, 2006

Antisocial Personality Disorder

All Things Considered presented information on antisocial personality disorder in relation to the ex-soldier being charged with rape and murder committed while serving in Iraq. Here are the characteristics of such a person as given in the report:
  • "is extraordinarily manipulative and willing to expoit others and has no sense of guilt"
  • "to their advantage to be deceitful, and not conform to laws, and to exploit other people"
  • "don’t seem to care about other people"
  • "they don’t feel guilty about the kind of transgressions somebody would ordinarily feel guilty about"
  • "they tend not to follow conventional societal rules"
  • "most people with the condition are very good liars"
The disturbing ironies of this description were too much for me to overlook...and this man is from Midland, Texas too.

2 comments:

E. said...

Chilling, truly. Is it possible there's some implicit critique going on in presenting this story thus? Probably not. Still, the parallels are striking.

Mytwords said...

I have to admit that my post on this story doesn't exactly reflect any particular bias on NPR's part -- except that to focus on the pathology of one extreme case in the Iraq war while ignoring the pathology of the whole endeavor does further the "few bad apples" argument of the war supporter and the Bushists.