Why Do Psychopaths Exist? - Mark Freestone

1. 0:00 – 0:53

   Intro

   1. MFMark Freestone0:00

      There are heritable characteristics in psychopaths. Psychopaths don't really seem to feel any remorse for what they do. They struggle to have empathy with other people, and they can be very callous. They can do things that, and not really feel sorry for them. They don't have the connection between the prefrontal cortex of the brain and the amygdala that the rest of us do to identify things like disgust, fear, anger. The psychopaths don't really interpret those signals in the same way. (wind blows)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:23

      Mark Freestone, welcome to the show.

   3. MFMark Freestone0:26

      Thanks, Chris. Pleasure to be here.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:27

      For those people that are watching on YouTube, you may notice a, uh, slight change in my usual recording setup. I'm still here in Guatemala. Uh, it's taking a little bit longer than expected to get my visa back from the US Embassy, so this is the hotel room locale, uh, and I've brought a, uh, coconut from downstairs at the breakfast buffet. So, all is not completely terrible. Uh, but today, speaking about psychopaths,

2. 0:53 – 7:29

   Working with Psychopaths

   1. CWChris Williamson0:53

      why is it that you got into working with psychopaths, Mark? I don't know what compels someone to think, when they're in their youth, that this is the road that they want to travel down.

   2. MFMark Freestone1:05

      Well, that's a re- really good question, Chris. I think lots of people do wanna be forensic psychologists. I think, you know, crime scene and CSI and all that stuff has got the word forensic into peoples' brains as something glamorous maybe, and there's never a sort of shortage of people with an interest in serial killers, quite a few of whom tend to be psychopaths, although by not all means all. But I, I didn't... I, I kind of didn't really have any of that. I just sort of fell into it. My, my, my job was as a sociologist. I was a, a sociology PhD student and, and the way that I, um, practiced was, uh, using a technique called ethnography where you basically put yourself in with a group of people doing something that you think is cool and interesting. You watch them do it, you do a little bit yourself maybe, participant observation, and then you write about it. And my PhD was on anti-globalization protest, which is miles away, but just as I was finishing, the local mental health trust opened a new wing in Rampton Hospital, which is one of the three maximum security mental hospitals in the UK, uh, for people that were called dangerous and severe personality disorder. So that means basically people who are psychopaths or people who have very, very complex and, and, and usually, uh, high-risk personality disorders such as antisocial or borderline personality disorder. It means that they're at risk of committing a crime. And, and the opportunity came up to do an ethnography there and I was like, "Yeah, that sounds great. Cool. Sign me up. What's a psychopath?" And I just sort of (laughs) I just sort of stuck there. So I really did honestly fall into it. Um, and I think early on in my career, I was a little bit kind of running from pillar to post, being manipulated, confused, and, and not generally getting the whole thing. But with time, you know, it, it sort of comes, I guess.

   3. CWChris Williamson2:46

      Was there a harsh learning lesson early on in your career? Did you, uh, with wet behind the ears and naive, was there anything that you came up against?

   4. MFMark Freestone2:56

      Uh, definitely. Definitely. I think two, two classic ones is, first of all, um, psychopaths are very manipulative. You know? So when you meet a psychopath for a short space of time, you often experience what we call the glib and superficial charm. So, I often say to someone, "If you had to have a 10-minute conversation with a psychopath, you probably wouldn't notice anything untoward. You might actually find them quite warm and, you know, pleasant and certainly charming." Because that's part of the disorder. I think it comes from the way psychopaths learn about other people by observing what other people respond well to, but without having that sort of sense of wanting to please others, but simply aping the behavior that they see around them. So when I was working in the prison service, there was a very, very charming and very, very manipulative psychopath, and I think I wasn't the only person to be deceived by this man. But he was also playing in the guitar club where I, I played the bass guitar myself. So I'd come to the guitar club and provide a bit of bass backing for all the prisoners doing Leonard Cohen and White Stripes songs, and, uh, we'd meet there and we'd talk about music and things. And, um, I was, uh, uh, sort of... I found this guy very intimidating. We'll call him Paul for the sake of argument. It's also his name in my book. But he... I found him quite intimidating at first, but over time, we kind of got to know each other and we bonded a little bit over music. And he asked me, sort of towards the end of my time at the prison, whether I'd bring him in some, um, sheet music from the internet. Now, you think about something like this and you're like, "Well, you know, what's the harm, right?" It's a few pages printed off of, you know, guitar tablature or something. What could possibly be done with it? Could someone-

   5. CWChris Williamson4:33

      Not gonna attack anyone with it.

   6. MFMark Freestone4:34

      Yeah, give someone a nasty paper cut. I mean, (laughs) it's not worth the time spent in segregation for that, I don't think. So I thought, "Well, let's... You know, that's fine. Let's go ahead and do it." But of course, what... Manipulation like that doesn't sort of come, it doesn't start with somebody asking you to bring in, you know, half a kilogram of cocaine into the prison, right? It starts with little things like that. So as it turned out, I, I brought the, um, the sheet music to the prison and left it in my car 'cause I had other things on my mind. I think I also had this sort of twinge of conscience at the last minute, like, "Maybe this isn't such a good idea." And then I had to spend some time away from the prison. When I came back, it turned out that not, not only had Paul been manipulating several other members of staff in many ways, but he was actually having a sexual relationship with one of the female officers. Um, and it had all come out. And, and I think, you know, this sort of thing happens from time to time, but the problem was that it was quite clear that other officers were aware that this was going on but hadn't said anything. And when you have that kind of collusion where everyone's supporting the manipulation to take place, it, it really is quite worrying because it means the person at the center, the psychopath in this case, has fingers in virtually all parts of the organization. Everything is very compromised. So once you have that happen, Paul has to be trans- had to be transferred out, and the prison officer lost her job and was quite lucky she wasn't in mental health 'cause otherwise she would have, um, been possibly accused and convicted of sexual abuse. So that (laughs) -... that's one aspect-

   7. CWChris Williamson5:58

      Oh, my God.

   8. MFMark Freestone5:58

      ... 'cause manipulation is constantly, you know, uh, right there, uh, when you work with psychopaths. The second thing is that not everybody who's a psychopath is necessarily rock-hard, scary, and manipulative. Some of them are really, really quite vulnerable and you, you often find yourself getting into the state of feeling sorry for them or feeling what we call a, sort of, heart sink, where you go, "Oh, my God. This guy's had such a terrible life." And it's usually with the younger men. I'm a dad now and I think I may have had a bit of a, a dad-like impulse at the time that, "Oh, look at this guy. He's had a terrible life and all his, you know, all his rage is directed inwards." But the thing is that even when people are not outwardly aggressive and difficult like Paul, but maybe like someone like Danny in my book, where he just constantly harming himself and can't really see the good in himself. The problem is that is, that can actually be quite bottomless, that lack of self-esteem, that lack of, uh, uh, an identity. And if you start pouring empathy into it, which I did initially, and a lot of staff, I think, never actually stop, it just keeps being drained from you. You never reach a point where that person has, uh, filled up with the empathy and the love that they need because they haven't been able to change the way they think about other people fundamentally. So there's two things, sort of, uh, uh, you know, riding the line between being (laughs) alert to the fact you're being manipulated, but also trying to give an appropriate amount of empathy and sympathy. That's what makes their job really, really, really, really challenging, and I think pr- part of the reason that we were never able to fill the, the nursing and the, the doctor and the psychology posts that we wanted to, to make the program a success, but there you have it.

3. 7:29 – 12:39

   Different Types of Psychopaths

   1. MFMark Freestone7:29

   2. CWChris Williamson7:29

      Mm. Are there different types of psychopaths? I know that in narcissism you have grandiose narcissists and, uh, vulnerable narcissists?

   3. MFMark Freestone7:37

      That's right, yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson7:38

      Yeah. Is, is there any sort of equivalent in psychopathy?

   5. MFMark Freestone7:41

      I'm very glad you asked me that question, Chris, 'cause this is my, this is my current, um, thinking about it, because I think, uh, uh, y- if you, if you look at Paul and Danny, so we have somebody who's a, got a l- you know, history as a sort of drug enforcer. He killed a man, but he didn't do it directly. He got other people to do it for him and then denied all, plausibly denied all omology-

   6. CWChris Williamson8:00

      That was the manipulating guy.

   7. MFMark Freestone8:02

      That's right. Yeah.

   8. CWChris Williamson8:02

      Oh, yeah. As is, as is his character, evidently.

   9. MFMark Freestone8:05

      Absolutely. And-

   10. CWChris Williamson8:06

       Killed a- killed him with some guitar sheet music.

   11. MFMark Freestone8:08

       (laughs) Or got someone else to kill him with guitar sheet-

   12. CWChris Williamson8:10

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   13. MFMark Freestone8:11

       I don't know. I don't know. And then you take someone like Danny who has a much more, sort of, um, personal crime where he is, uh, he forms a, sort of, healthy relationship with the local priest and then, uh, when he thinks that the priest is rejecting him for his ideas, he stabs him in the back. Um, uh, doesn't kill him, but, you know, it's a really horrible thing to do to somebody who's trying to help you. Um, and, and when you think that both of those two men would've met the criteria for being a psychopath, and I... there's lots of argument about where the threshold is, uh, using the psychopathy checklist, which we can maybe go into later, but these guys were both way up there, like way over the, the American threshold of 30, which is higher than the British one. A- and, and to say that those guys are both defined by being psychopaths is, I think, totally unhelpful on a number of levels. Uh, and this, this debate actually goes back a long way to the 1940s and '50s when Herve Cleckley first published his book on The Mask of Sanity, how to identify a psychopath, and he, uh, quickly... There was a, a debate in American psychiatry about the fact that actually there were two kinds of psychopath. There were people that we would, or would call a psychopath or understand a psychopath to be, who always have this sort of, um, it feels like a characterological element, and when I say that, I mean that they were sort of born that way. And when you read books like We Need to Talk About Kevin, uh, by Lionel Shriver or you see people who are just bad to the bone on TV like, um, uh, Patrick Bateman or, uh, Hannibal Lecter, those are what was traditionally thought of as being a psychopath, and there was another term, sociopath, which referred to people who presented in much the same way as a psychopath, so they had that same lack of empathy, they tended to lie, uh, but they were a bit more violent, they were a bit more, sort of, uncontrolled, they were a bit more, sort of, impulsive, and they were termed sociopaths. Now we don't really use those words anymore, but the idea of a, sort of, primary psychopath, uh, and a secondary psychopath, the primary psychopath being much more narcissistic and much more, sort of, uh, outward-directed and the second- s- secondary psychopath being a little bit more inward-directed. And maybe being a psychopath simply for them is a way of defending against horrible emotions and feelings and guilt and shame for the things they may or may not have done as kids. So that, that distinction's always been there and I think if you get really into it, you can see how some narcissistic psychopaths and primary psychopaths might be, um, more or less charming and they might be people who are simply, you know, very, very good to talk to and, and great con men, whereas others, a- and I think this is especially true of robbers, just tend to have this really macho image where they think they're on top of the world and they don't need to be charming because if people don't like them, they'll just bully them into- in- into being friends, you know? So there are m- many more gradations we can start to make.

   14. CWChris Williamson10:53

       Is the psychopath-sociopath distinction, is that even a thing? Go- uh, that- is that just bro science or is, is that used as a, as terminology?

   15. MFMark Freestone11:03

       It's- sociopath was used, um, but then when the Americans published their DSM-IV, the way that they diagnose mental disorder, they included, in 1983, they included something called antisocial personality disorder, and this is pretty much, um, uh, it's, it's just a term for the, sort of the behavioral aspects of psychopathy. So none of the, sort of, conning, manipulative, charming stuff, but more the, sort of, uh, antisocial lifestyle, parasitism, telling lies, lacking remorse, breaking the law, things like that, and that came to be known as sociopathy over time. But, uh, and I think because of that confusion between, you know, uh, uh, uh, a proper psychopath, who's probably made more by their environment than by their genes, being a sociopath, to somebody simply with antisocial personality disorder, and to get antisocial personality disorder is, is a, a much more inclusive term. I think something like 80% of people in prison in the UK and something like 70% of those in the USA will have this diagnosis because one of the traits is breaking the law, so if you break the law a lot, check. (laughs) But then you get round to this, "Well, why did they break the law?" Because they've got antisocial personality disorder. "Why have they got antisocial personality disorder?" Because they broke the law. It doesn't really go anywhere, so it's not a terribly helpful diagnosis, but if you think of it as a sort of a Venn diagram, the vast majority of psychopaths will also have antisocial personality disorder, um, and- and- and m- m- most people who have antisocial personality disorder won't be psychopaths. And there's only that sort of interesting distinction of pe- m- m- people with a diagnosis of psychopathy who won't have ASPD, and they're more what we like to think of as successful psychopaths, people who haven't been caught (laughs) or people who just don't break the law, but they're still psychopaths, right?

4. 12:39 – 19:24

   Genetics Vs Environment

   1. CWChris Williamson12:39

      How much is heritability and genetics, uh, how much does that play a role when it comes to someone becoming a psychopath, and how much of it is the environment?

   2. MFMark Freestone12:48

      So that's a tricky one because we have pretty good evidence that there are, I suppose, heritable characteristics in psychopaths, and in particular, those are what we call the callous, unemotional traits. So the fact that psychopaths don't really seem to feel any remorse for what they do, they struggle to have empathy with other people, um, and they can be very callous. They can do things and then not really feel sorry for them. I think because, you know, their wiring's different. They don't have the connection between, uh, the- the- f- f- forefront of the- m- the prefrontal cortex of the brain and the amygdala that the rest of us do to identify things like, you know, um, disgust, fear, anger, disappointment, (laughs) that we sort of live our lives by. Psychopaths don't really interpret those signals in the same way, so they don't feel shame, they don't feel guilt. And- and children as young as seven or, or nine years old can experience or- or- or show those traits as well. But of course, a large proportion of them won't then go on to be psychopaths. I think only about 40% will ever progress to a point where they have something like a, you know, enough, enough traits to be diagnosable as a psychopath. So it's not the whole picture to say it's just, it's just genes. And then there's, you know, these wonderful cases like James Fallon in impressive neuroscience in, um, Stanford University, uh, successful career, and very interested in psychopathy himself. I wonder why? And he was doing a study where he exposes people to, um, uh, u- unpleasant stimuli, like looking at a- a- a- an unpleasant image of maybe wound detail or maybe a pleasant image of a butterfly or something like that. And then he measures their- their brain response using, um, I think it's contrast tomography. So you look at which areas of the brain are being activated, like a CT scan, um, and then you- you look at particular areas of the brain corresponding to how people are- with the stimulus that people are receiving. So if you look- give a psychopath a- an image of, um, I don't know, a war zone, and you gave the same image to someone who isn't a psychopath, the psychopath will show much lower levels of neurological activity in response to that stimulus because they don't recognize it as something that's necessarily bad. So Jim's conducting this experiment, and he has, uh, a lot of, uh, clinical psychopaths for his experimental arm, and he's looking for some people for his control arm, and he's struggling because he's used up all his grad students, and he hasn't properly advertised. He's like, "Well, I'll just scan myself, and then, you know, that'll be fine." And then he's looking through the results of the trial, and he finds in his control arm this- a brain scan from someone who really looks very, very psychopathic (laughs) . There's virtually no brain activation. He's written a book about this, uh, which is really interesting and the- the scan's in the book, and it's terrifying. This person's completely psychopathic. He's like, "Oh my God, have I got this wrong? Is this person definitely in the control group?" And he looks at the scan, goes to his master key where we see all the people who have taken part, and he realizes that this is his own brain scan. He is functionally a psychopath, uh, studying (laughs) psychopaths at Stanford University, and he's got a wife and kids. He's got a very successful career. Um, and he thinks about it, and- and he thinks, "Well, actually when I really think about it, I really f- I struggle with a lot of the roles that I play in life because I don't see why I have to do it. I don't see why I have to be a good dad. When people come to stay at my house, I just think, 'Why am- why am I letting you eat my food? It's my food. Get outta here. I didn't invite you. Who are you anyway?'" (laughs) A- and- and these kids are, uh, there- there's also a little video associated to promote the book and this kid's like, "Yeah, Dad can be difficult. (laughs) He doesn't really do emotion," things like... All these little tiny clues that add up to a picture of somebody who, you know, clearly has some sort of background, uh, maybe, you know, a- a relative or something that would've caused his psychopathy to come out, but doesn't have any of the behavioral features, you know, good career, good family life, bit cranky at the weekends maybe, but that could describe me as well, and I'm far too neurotic to be a psychopath.

   3. CWChris Williamson16:28

      Would he have met the criteria, whatever it is, 26 or above or 30 or above on the- the scale, would he have met that?

   4. MFMark Freestone16:35

      No, he wouldn't. He wouldn't because I think the- the- the psychopath test, Bob Hare's Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, uh, has pretty much an, um, a- an eq- I'd like to say an equal split, but actually the behavioral stuff, so breaking the law, being impulsive, being irresponsible, taking drugs, uh, being what we call criminally versatile, so having a lot of offenses from different categories, all that's in the- the secondary psychopathy factor, Factor Two as we call it. And Jim Fallon had none of that, so he never even got halfway up the scale, which wouldn't have- hadn't been enough for it to diagnose him as a- a clinical psychopath, if you like.

   5. CWChris Williamson17:07

      Well, that's interesting because what that shows is that you can have someone who, um, has the predisposition or perhaps the ingredients, uh, to become a psychopath, but for whichever reason, they haven't, um, behaviorally deployed that into the world in a psychopathic way. Is that the right way to look at it?

   6. MFMark Freestone17:25

      Absolutely. And- and I- I think I can- I can- I can even support your hypothesis a bit further by saying that all of the psychopaths I've met in, you know, in clinical practice have lives that are really just messed up. And I can mean a lot of different things like that, like some of them are from the middle class, but their relationships with their parents, their mothers and fathers are messed up in- in really sort of sometimes quite twisted ways. And you know, for an example of this is something we call enmeshment, where, uh, somebody never quite breaks away from one of their parents, so typically... Or let's talk about, um, Tony, who's one of the cases in my book. He had an enmeshed relationship with his mother where he was never really able to break away from her emotionally, so even though he was in his late 40s when I was working with him and his mother would come to visit-... often they would part with quite a lingering kiss on the lips. And, and I used to get all of these, um, you know, just very upset nurses who'd been supervising the visit saying, "Oh, they did that thing again."

   7. CWChris Williamson18:22

      (laughs)

   8. MFMark Freestone18:22

      "You know, what are we gonna do? We have to redress this." And, and sort of, you know, visits in hospitals are quite sacred, so we, we can't mess with it, but it really did freak people out. And, and the way that, uh, you know, he seemed to sort of function or do the things he did just to sort of please his mother all the time w- was really interesting in the way that it sort of overrid his, his own personality. It sort of, it meant that he, his own personality ca- you know, "Who, who are you, Tony?" And he would really struggle to answer that question as well. He was a very good con man, he was very psychopathic, but none of those things really make a person who they are. And I think f- one of the reasons that he was such a good con man is 'cause he could play any role, 'cause he wasn't really playing a role. That was him. He lacked a sort of, you know, "I'm Mark, I'm an academic, I'm neurotic, I do very strange things in my spare time, like read about psych- read and write about psychopaths. That's who I am." But for Tony, there wasn't that sort of core. He didn't have anything that wasn't the slick con man.

   9. CWChris Williamson19:20

      Yeah, there's no-

   10. MFMark Freestone19:20

       And that's really strange.

   11. CWChris Williamson19:21

       ... no concrete sense of self is there? It's very, very malleable.

5. 19:24 – 27:00

   Impact of Negative Childhood

   1. CWChris Williamson19:24

      If you were to-

   2. MFMark Freestone19:27

      No, no.

   3. CWChris Williamson19:27

      ... if you were to design the childhood to activate the, uh, psychopathic genetic tendency, what would you, what would you have happen to a child?

   4. MFMark Freestone19:38

      (laughs) That's an interesting way around of asking it, Chris. But I'd say you've got, you've got a lot of options, unfortunately. You've got, um... So w- let's start thinking about someone like Tony. Where does enmeshment come from? And I think enmeshment comes from... Well, in Tony's case, there's two things. First of all, a father who's very, um, very, uh, sort of very potent, very present. So the father was a con man as well, a very successful one. Considerably more successful than Tony, 'cause I can't find any record of who he was with him ever being caught, but there we go. Um, uh, and, and then, uh, the father, in Tony's case, disappeared. So once, if a father leaves a kid, particularly in sort of, you know, their pre-teen, teen years, uh, they can become very, very, um, I guess, uh, i- imbedded in the kids' memories as like a perfect dad. You know, they, they didn't stay around long enough to fuck it up, basically. So, in that case, the relationship turns very much towards the mother, because that's the only parent you've got left. And in this specific case, I think the mother also, um, tended to be very, very overbearing. She didn't want to separate from her son. She wanted him to be around all the time. She wanted to have almost like an adult intimate relationship with them. You know, with... Not necessarily sexual, but having that sort of, you know, that, that same level of intimacy. Like, "We cannot part. We cannot be different from each other." And if you look back at some of the early psychoanalytic writing from sort of the '40s, '50s, and '60s, this is all very much identified. Very strong patriarchal figure, um, and potentially l- overbearing, over-enmeshed mother as well. There are... Lots of people s- talk about Ted Bundy as being the sort of nice middle class-

   5. CWChris Williamson21:12

      I was literally about to say the same thing.

   6. MFMark Freestone21:14

      Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

   7. CWChris Williamson21:14

      'Cause his mother was still, at the trial, th- had this sort of angel boy, my, my beautiful perfect child vision of him.

   8. MFMark Freestone21:23

      Right. And, and that... (laughs) And the k- so there's that, and there's also the fact that, you know, I think his father was not particularly somebody to marry, but his grandfather was a hugely sort of paternalistic, overbearing, dominating figure in his life. And, uh, he... There were all these sort of signs that would encourage somebody to, to be psychopathic. I don't know about... And this is the interesting thing, is being s- a psychopath doesn't necessarily make you a criminal like Jim Fallon, right? You... What pushed Bundy, Bundy to commit his crimes specifically is a different question. But certainly, being a psychopath and not having that s- same level of moral restraint could make it easier for you to commit crimes like that. The other... If, if we think a little bit about what we're talking about, sociopathy as well and secondary psychopaths, I think they can be much more formed by an environment that's just very abusive and harsh. And I remember, uh, somebody I worked with in the UK actually, who was very much a s- you know, a sociopath, a secondary psychopath. So somebody who wasn't charming, wasn't particularly c- cu- cunning, wasn't very glib, but was very antisocial, uh, very remorseless, um, uh, and very callous. You know, did bad things to people and didn't feel bad about it. Uh, uh, he, he recounted this, this episode that still stays with me. He's not in the book, but he's just a very interesting character. And, and he was 12 years old, and he was, um, uh... His dad was very, again, very dominant, but he... And, and his dad wanted him to be tough, you know? So he gets into a fight with some older boys and this guy was, you know, even in his 40s, very cheeky and sort of liked to push boundaries, so he probably said something a little bit out of his station. So much, a group of much b- older boys chase him alone down the street, and he knows he's gonna get everything beaten out of him if he stays around, so he runs home, bangs on the door. Open- his dad opens the door and says, "What is it, uh, Jim?" And Jim says, "Oh, these, these guys are chasing me. They're gonna beat me up, Dad. You've gotta help me." And he says, "No, sort it out yourself. It'll make you strong," and closes the door in his face. Other guys arrive and beat him up right side, right outside his family's front door, and he never forgets that. But he doesn't remember it as I would, which is, "My God, wasn't your dad an awful bastard?" But rather as his dad making him tough and this being a good thing that, you know, his dad made him realize that at the end nobody's got your back. And I was just like, that's an awful lesson to learn from that story. But nevertheless, if you are brought up like that, then you're gonna l- develop something like a psychopathic defense, because feeling emotion and trying to think about events like that in terms of what they mean for you as a person is gonna be really hard, so better just not to think about them emotionally at all. Better to distance yourself and act like a psychopath.

   9. CWChris Williamson23:53

      Have you got any idea why psychopathy's adaptive? Why it would have evolved at all?

   10. MFMark Freestone24:00

       So, uh, (laughs) we, we often think about this about personality disorders of all kinds, because they, they're chronic, they don't go away. Um, I think the way that we think about personalities or in terms of antisocial, narcissistic, borderline, histrionic isn't terribly helpful, because it suggests that there's sort of a typical psychopath or a typical narcissist or a typical, um, schizoid person, and that is very rarely the case. These people are often very, very different. But they do have these sort of core features, and I, I think the thinking is if, if, if particularly you, uh, were... If we think back to, um-... uh, let's say Vikings. Yeah, a society with very, very limited resources. It has to sort of parasitize from other societies in order to gain the resources it needs to proliferate, right? To, to se- start new colonies, to expand. So, uh, you know, we both lived in, uh, Newcastle for a while, and Lindisfarne, the monastery there was very rich and very (laughs) prone to raiding by Viking invaders.

   11. CWChris Williamson24:59

       They got fucked up. They got fucked up.

   12. MFMark Freestone24:59

       Absolutely. And they, they were sacked and they were murdered, and their life stuff was taken. They kept coming back, bless 'em. And I think, you know, there's some sort of period when the, the s- 16th century where the Vikings came four or five times a year. Uh, uh, in order to do that, to be able to... I mean, you know, anybody can do something terrible, but to be able to do something terrible and then do it again... And I think this is where we start to think about post-traumatic stress disorder. It's literally the case that some offenders in prison have done such terrible things that they've traumatized themselves. So when they sort of say, "I don't really remember the offense," uh, in, in some cases they might be telling the truth, because they, they may not be actually able to access those memories. But that isn't how a psychopath works, because a psychopath won't experience that shame and trauma in response to doing bad things, because they, they don't see these as bad things. They see, "I'm gonna go and protect my family. In order to protect my family, I have to provide them with food and I have to provide them with clothes. I have to provide them with wealth so that we can have more kids. If I have to kill some people to do that, it's not a problem, because that's what I want to do." And this is what we call instrumental reasoning. So, all that the focus is, is on the end. Yeah. The means are totally irrelevant. Yeah. "I need to get there. If people die or get messed up on the way, hmm, oh well, that's unfortunate, because you say it's unfortunate, but I don't really buy into that." So having a group of people in your society... Not all of them, I should stress (laughs) , but a group of people in your society who can repeatedly go out and do violent, stressful, traumatic things in service of the wider family is extremely adaptive. And you can actually think of how there are certain models like this for things like borderline personality disorder. People who lack a fixed identity, who require a level of support and steer that just isn't available in our societies anymore today. You can see how genetically that would actually be quite adaptive. But in modern societies where you can't be a violent asshole, and you can't be entirely dependent on other people for everything that you want, because it's an individualistic society, they're no longer adaptive and they cause problems for people, and they also cause problems for the people around them as well.

   13. CWChris Williamson26:55

       Dude, you're blowing my mind. That's so interesting.

   14. MFMark Freestone26:58

       (laughs) .

   15. CWChris Williamson26:58

       That's so interesting.

6. 27:00 – 37:50

   Society’s Evolving View of Psychopaths

   1. CWChris Williamson27:00

      W- w- So, if you were to think of, uh, a typical tribe, your Dunbar hundred-person tribe or whatever, as, like, a football team. You need a goalkeeper, and your goalkeeper has a very specific role to play.

   2. MFMark Freestone27:14

      Mm-hmm.

   3. CWChris Williamson27:14

      Now, it wouldn't... The team wouldn't work if everybody tried to be a goalkeeper. Now, the same thing is happening here. So I had, um... I had a really good discussion about narcissists a couple of years ago, and in that, i- it was basically suggested that the, um, social ecology constrains narcissism. That if you have too many narcissists, it becomes so chaotic within your tribe that it, it can't continue to, to work. So, not only do you have social norms which restrict sort of narcissistic tendencies, but narcissists are probably killed at a higher rate than non-narcissist people. And I'm gonna guess that psychopaths, it's like a high-risk, high-reward strategy of, of existing. So, you, you're more likely to die, but you're also more likely to become the, uh, billionaire or, or the, the chieftain of the tribe or something like that, which is a lot of the time why people point the finger at presidents and say that they're, they're a psychopath. So... But that's so interesting to think that individually, as a person, psychopathy, whether it's adaptive or not, is kind of up for debate. But for the tribe overall, having a few psychopaths, or maybe one or two psychopaths per group, is actually like having a very specialized weapon or a tool that you can deploy into certain, certain circumstances. And then if you scale up to the size of, you know, the Vikings... I don't know how big that was, but I'm gonna guess perhaps in the thousands, you may be able to condense down a, a boat, a long boat of 30 psychopaths-

   4. MFMark Freestone28:39

      (laughs) .

   5. CWChris Williamson28:39

      ... with a couple of non-psychopaths, and you can send them over to Lindisfarne to sack them and, and come back. That's so good.

   6. MFMark Freestone28:46

      Yeah. And I, I think just to, to add to that, it's a... The other thing about psychopaths is they have terrible risk-reward reasoning, particularly socially. So if you, you know, if you play a, a game of poker with a psychopath, they'll continue to, to bet outrageously, um, based on very, very bad cards. And I think that that's really interesting that psychopaths are such good con men in some cases, you know. They can actually carry that off. They can play brag very effectively. Um, but if you have somebody who can't make those risk rule calculators, they think, "If I go off to Lindisfarne, they may have got wives and stationed, you know, Celtic soldiers all the way around the edges, and we're gonna go there and we're gonna get fucked up." They won't think of it in that kind of way. All they'll be focused on is the potential reward. The risk is irrelevant to psychopaths. And we've shown this again and again in research literature that they just don't, you know, they don't factor that in. And also, if you... You know, again, I was talking about trauma. If psychopaths come back from these raids and they're not traumatized, they can just go and do it again and again until they're all killed off. And I think with the, the example you were using of, of narcissists, again, it, there is sort of, like, you know, a sense of maybe a critical mass or maybe a point to which, um, those kind of traits are valued by a society, but only up to a point. You, you know, you, you can only be an... as mu- so much of a narcissist before it becomes intolerable for society. And I think that changes over time. I think the amount of, of narcissism that we'll accept shifts quite a lot. Um, I'm not necessarily in the... So I think about narcissism as a clinical condition. And when I read stuff from the United States about there being an epidemic of narcissism, I've recently written (laughs) an article that got quite a lot of attention that says n- that's not how... it's not helpful. I think you've got to really be-

   7. CWChris Williamson30:22

      Someone that likes to take selfies and post them on Instagram, we're not, we're not talking about that?

   8. MFMark Freestone30:26

      Yeah.... no, we're- the g- we're, because (laughs) we need to draw a line between... I think we all have, we all need a bit of what's called narcissistic supply. We all need a little bit of, uh, telling that we're good people-

   9. CWChris Williamson30:37

      Self-pride?

   10. MFMark Freestone30:37

       ... and we've done right things, yeah, that we're important, right? And if we don't have that, then our self-esteem drops and we feel terrible. Um, and, and narcissists, uh, particularly grandiose narcissists, don't have that need at all, because they're so absolutely convinced that they're, they're right, that it's, uh, (laughs) you know, it's, uh, sort of a non-issue. So like with psychopathy and na- and narcissism together, and there's a lot of correlation between the two, I should say, so rather the sort of more grandiose narcissists can also have psychopathy and, and vice versa. Um, I think there is a, a limit, and I think that if we think about Steven Pinker's work on the reduction of violence in societies over time, these aren't societies that value the, the traits and the qualities that psychopaths have, but I'm sure that there were such societies at many stages in our past.

   11. CWChris Williamson31:19

       Who was that guy that tried to get someone to buy the Eiffel Tower?

   12. MFMark Freestone31:23

       (laughs) I do know who you... He was a French con man some time ago. I do know who you mean, but, but that, that, so someone like Tony, um, that, that's, that's an old con. Uh, you know, selling off, uh, s- s- the o- old, um, uh, wonders of the world or, or structures that have, you know, qui- had quite a few years on them and plausibly could be ready to be decommissioned and replaced with something better, that's one of the oldest cons in the book is you try and attract investors into this great opportunity, and you're basically selling, you know, selling the Eiffel Tower to someone who's gullible enough to believe that it could be up for sale. And that's all about the, that's all about the graft, right? That's all about how you present yourself as a plausible salesman. So someone like Tony in the book, you know, he's, he's got the best suits. He's got his own bank. He's got a chauffeur. He's got a Mercedes, stretch Mercedes-Benz. All things that he's obtained through very dodgy means, but nevertheless, you know, you (laughs) , when you start signing checks from your own bank, people start to pay attention. And if you've seen enough, and I think with Tony's case, he'd seen enough from his dad about how you get people to buy a con, it's very diff- it, it, because the... This is what, um, I don't wanna get too technical, but we call this malignant pseudo-identification. So you see what somebody wants in a situation, you learn from watching other people in the same situation fall for the con, and you think, "Why do they fall for the con?" And you're not thinking emotionally. You're thinking, "They fall for the con because they want this. So if I can promise that plausibly, then I can pretty much take them for everything they've got, because once I have them a- believing they're gonna get, you know, a 10,000% return on their scrap or the Eiffel Tower, (laughs) then, then, you know, they, they're finished."

   13. CWChris Williamson33:00

       Mm-hmm.

   14. MFMark Freestone33:00

       Because th- the psychopath will keep doing that, that scam over and over again. I, I worked with a, a guy who posed as a police officer, and he would, uh, go into people's, uh, flats and offer to move their jewelry and money to a safe place in the flat, um, and say it was a, you know, obviously a secret police procedure, and he'd tell them where he was gonna leave it. He'd take it, put it all in a, a police marked bag, and then walk out of the house, and then tell them to check after he's gone out it was all there. But, of course, when they checked, it wasn't there, and he wasn't a police officer, so there was no way they'd track it down. And that, you know, isn't a particularly complex scam. But what is amazing is the fact that he had something like 600 instances of the same scam on his rap sheet, like 600. It's just unbelievable numbers of, of, of sort of cons that have gone down in this guy, and how good he must have been to be able to identify people who would fall for this and carry it out again and again and again. So it really is quite a sort of remorseless, um, r- rate of success once they get the graft right, you know?

   15. CWChris Williamson33:58

       What's interesting to me is that psychopathy, perhaps for a long time throughout human history, let's say maybe the last 10,000, 20,000 years, has been pretty useful, and then for the last 100, 200, 300 years, it's now no longer adaptive. It's now a big problem. And, um, it's ki- s- strange that we may have, like, culturally competed psychopaths out of their place in society.

   16. MFMark Freestone34:31

       W- well, I wouldn't go too, too far with that, Gr- (laughs) . I mean, I think there's still a lot of places where psychopaths can flourish to a degree. I think the difficulty is that we have to think a little bit more carefully in the way we define psychopathy and particularly about whether things like aggression, violence, and antisocial behavior are necessarily part of that. And if you think about, I don't know, I'm sure we can all imagine some recent political figures who've been diagnosed as psychopaths. Are they aggressive? Are they antisocial? I mean, they're very self-serving, I'm sure, but those, those descriptors don't really define them. So we need to think more crisply, I think, about what it is that makes a psychopath, and we need to do that without thinking about behavior, because the factors that drive behavior are very, very complicated. I've... There's a, a colleague of mine, Kerry Daynes, forensic psychologist, has also written books about her work, and she says, "I know a guy who is a murderer. They've killed, I think, about 15 people in their lifes, lifes, uh, lifetime. They've, uh, uh, killed women and children included in that total, but they've never been to prison, and they're not a psychopath." And this person is, of course, a, uh, an SAS commando, special forces commander, who does this as part of their job. Now, that behavior, it's possible this person is a psychopath, sure, but, you know, my colleague didn't think so, and she's quite experienced. So it's possible this person is a, a psychopath. But tha- that's sort of irrelevant here, because the reason that they're doing these things is not because they are instrumentally driven. It's because that's their job, and it's their function in life to do that. So we can't really infer psychopathy from behavior, and we need to start moving away from that way of defining psychopathy and think much more in terms of the sort of psychological/emotional traits that people have. And if we were able to do that, well, I guess a corollary is that we'd have a lot more (laughs) , we'd identify a lot more psychopaths in probably politics, used car sales, possibly c- chief executives, stock traders, but-

   17. CWChris Williamson36:22

       Is it true, does, does, does that, um, that sort of folklore thing about one percent of the s- the population are psychopaths, is that tr- is there any legs to that?

   18. MFMark Freestone36:32

       Yeah, I, it's less than that. But, um, we did, uh, in the 2000 Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey, which is a representative survey of, um, people in the UK, uh, which they, isn't currently an equivalent of in the USA, but there are some other surveys you can use to, to estimate it. Um, we actually included the, the PCL-SV, the screening version of the psychopathy checklist, which you don't need to do a long interview for. Uh, and we looked at the proportion of people w- who were diagnosable psychopaths in the UK household population is about one or 0.4 to 0.6%. So about one in 172 hundred people w- would have been diagnosable as a psychopath, um, which is actually higher -

   19. CWChris Williamson37:11

       Still quite a lot. (laughs) That's still quite a lot.

   20. MFMark Freestone37:11

       ... than I would have thought. Yeah, yeah. And if you think, you know, they tend to get banged up with quite a high propensity. And there's, that we did also find that group, the group of successful psychopaths who didn't have long criminal careers, but, um, what was interesting about it was that they did use a lot of designer drugs. They tended to have quite high-risk, high-reward jobs. They also had declared bankruptcy a lot more often. Um, and very interestingly, their annual average household income was significantly higher than people in the, uh, the general population. So they were successful, like more successful than not just getting by, (laughs) but actually flourishing, give or take the old bankruptcy here and there.

   21. CWChris Williamson37:46

       High risk, high reward, man. High risk or high reward.

   22. MFMark Freestone37:48

       Exactly. Exactly.

   23. CWChris Williamson37:48

       Uh, why is it, why is

7. 37:50 – 52:05

   Sexuality in Psychopaths

   1. CWChris Williamson37:50

      it that there's so few female psychopaths?

   2. MFMark Freestone37:54

      Well, I think that, that, that's sort of, part of this is recursive. Like, if we are judging psychopathy on the basis of behavior, um, male, men are more antisocial or they have more, there are more antisocial men, there are more men who go to prison, there are more men who meet the criteria for juvenile delinquency, for criminal versatility, for poor behavioral controls, and therefore there's sort of a bias factor in using something like the psychopathy checklist because we use a lot of behavior that's just more typically associated with men. Um, there are female psychopaths. In, in my book I talk about Angela Simpson who presents, you know, very much as a really seriously high scoring male psychopath, very remorseless.

   3. CWChris Williamson38:32

      What, what does that mean?

   4. MFMark Freestone38:34

      So that means that on the psychopathy checklist, she would score in the mid to high thirties. You know, there are very few of the items that she doesn't m- doesn't, doesn't hit. Uh, very glib, very superficially charming, very manipulative 'cause she manipulates a, a disabled man into her apartment on the premise of sex and then tortures and brutally murders him over a long, long period of time. So it's a really gratuitous and pleasant offense. Um, and I think actually that when, uh, Phoebe Waller-Bridge was starting to think about Killing Eve, she wanted to start thinking about psychopaths. She saw these interviews on TV and she's like, "That's amazing." And they are real- that's really, really masculine presenting psychopath traits, in that there's a sort of, uh, it's a literature that sort of how people think about female psychopaths that there isn't really, there isn't really a sort of clinical basis for. Like, we don't have a lot of female psychopaths, so we're kind of guessing here. But people think of female psychopaths as more emotionally aggressive, using people as cat support, something of something like, um, Dangerous Liaisons, uh, wh- where, you know, The Marquess uses people around her to do the dirty work so she can manipulate people, but a- can do it behind the scenes. Um, that's sort of the archetype, but again, if you, if you were doing that (laughs) successfully, you wouldn't necessarily get caught for it.

   5. CWChris Williamson39:45

      (laughs)

   6. MFMark Freestone39:45

      And, and secondly, of the, the 2000, we commissioned like 2000 beds for ma- male psychopaths in the UK, dangerous and severe personality disorder, and then fourty, fourty beds, 4-0 beds for women, of which 15 were only ever filled, and a lot of the rest were just decommissioned. So the profile of women who we would be able to use as say a, a research population as female psychopaths is very, very small, and we don't know enough to sort of say, "Well, the archetypal female psychopath is like this." The evidence that we do have is that psychopathy tends to be invariant, but then you can't have behavioral invariants when one of the behavioral factors is aggression or antisociality, for example-

   7. CWChris Williamson40:23

      Yeah.

   8. MFMark Freestone40:23

      ... because we know those are biased towards men.

   9. CWChris Williamson40:25

      I suppose as well that if you have a- a- aggression and beating someone up or killing somebody is such a obvious f- red flag for you to identify as a psychopath, whereas I, it must be easier to get away with manipulating people, doing the cat support type thing, you know, the femme fatale type, but without perhaps the physical aggression because fewer people are going to report the fact that they were conned by a woman and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, that's, I mean, what you're saying is if you are going to be a psychopath, make sure that you're a woman first because it's going to be easier on average to get away with it. Uh, but w- what's, explain the story of that lady 'cause that was really, that was really surprising what she did to that man.

   10. MFMark Freestone41:08

       Well, uh, this is a, this is a- a, again, a, a very psychopathic trait of, um, a sort of grandiosity, so believing that you are the, the, the, you know, the center of the world and your decisions are the right ones to always make. And she, uh, she works as a sex worker and a waitress, and she had, um, she knew a guy in the community around her who'd been to prison for a while and, um, they, they had a sort of on-off relationship thing, and he was, you know, he probably destroyed his body with drugs and alcohol and other things, and he was, sometimes used a wheelchair to get around. Um, and then one day, it turned out she heard, I think from a third party, that this guy had said, um, that he'd informed on one of his, uh, colleagues, uh, for criminal behavior to the police. And she sort of, from this, you know, idle conversation, forms an idea that she's gonna kill him. So she persuades him to come and meet her and then she's sort of, you know, quite tantalizing and, and, and sort of sexually provocative, uh, and gets him to come back to her flat and leaves his wheelchair at quite some distance in the stairway so it doesn't look like, away from the stairway, so, so it doesn't look like he's come in there. And then, you know, brings him into the, the living room, sits him down in front of the TV, then ties him up while he's not got his wheelchair, can't really get away, um, starts torturing him, driving nails into his skull, and he, he lives for about sort of seven or eight hours through this and, and only dies in the early morning after really the end of the ordeal. And then she gets her current partner to help her (laughs) take the body downstairs, dismember it, burn it, and get rid of the evidence, um, all because she doesn't like, she says she doesn't like snitches. And, and if you, uh, there's a lot of YouTube videos available of her being interviewed by some of the American TV channels and it's quite chilling the way that she presents this. You know, somebody says, "Would you do it again?" "Hell yeah."... without a second's hesitation. You know, really, actually just aggressive. It's just aggressive the way that she presents, and very, very remorseless, callous, um, uh, just, just, you know, pretty typical male psychopathy. Um, and that's quite rare in a f- a female presenting, or sorry, a fem- female presenting with psychopathy. But there are elements to it that fit with the stereotypes. Like she, you know, she doesn't just dispose of the body on her own. She gets her boyfriend to do it, and then gets him to keep shtum with some sort of promise, you know. There's this sort of sense of, you know, she's using sexuality to bring somebody up to be, uh, to be murdered, maybe, uh, some... I, well, I can't think (laughs) of any of the, uh, the- the male psychopaths I've worked with as doing that. Although some of them would, um, attack sex workers, so it's not, uh, completely-

   11. CWChris Williamson43:40

       Who was that one in America?

   12. MFMark Freestone43:41

       ... difficult.

   13. CWChris Williamson43:41

       Was it the Night Stalker? Was he the one that was going around killing the endless numbers of... Oh no, there was the, the Yorkshire Ripper in the UK was someone that was almost exclusively working on, uh, sex workers, right?

   14. MFMark Freestone43:56

       Yes, yes, yes. That, that's right. And there was a, um, uh, I worked with a, uh, a s- uh, I think he'd, he would qualify as a serial killer. I think he had two, three offenses. So would target men in toilets, caution, locations in London, and, you know, bring them back, uh, get, put them in a cubicle with the premise of, of sexual contact and then strangle them from behind. Um, and again, very, very, very psychopathic. Because you've got to have that charm to get people to do what you want to do. And some of the other, you know, some of the robbers I worked with, like I said, they just, they don't have the graft that you couldn't, you wouldn't f- (laughs) you wouldn't trust this man as far as you could throw them, right? So you'd never be able to, to sort of trust them in a situation where you were vulnerable. There has to be a sort of something disarming or, uh, seductive about them.

   15. CWChris Williamson44:43

       Yeah, so you need... Th- they need the charm to offset the ick factor that people feel when they're around them. How often is it... How often does sex come into this? I, I was watching, um... Who was the dude that dressed up as the clown in America? That clown killer. You, you know the one I mean. Come on, people are screaming it into their-

   16. MFMark Freestone45:06

       Sorry, I'm t- I'm terrible, I'm t- I'm terrible on serial killers.

   17. CWChris Williamson45:08

       People are screaming it into their airport. I'm gonna, I'm gonna Google it. Um, there was this guy who was regularly killing people. He's one of the most famous serial killers. Clown, clown, serial ki- John Wayne Gacy. John Wayne Gacy.

   18. MFMark Freestone45:21

       Oh, right, yes, yeah, yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson45:22

       Right.

   20. MFMark Freestone45:23

       Like I said, I'm terrible with serial killers.

   21. CWChris Williamson45:25

       Uh, so, um, one of the things that he... it, it seemed like he did was, he seemed to be sexually attracted to some or many or all of the peop- boys that he killed. It was mostly guys that he killed, might have been exclusively guys that he killed. But it seemed like he had a, a, a self-hatred of his own sexuality. It seemed like his shame was one of the, uh, compulsions that caused him to do that. I'm just interested by how much... You know, we've talked about some of these killers going after sex workers, John Wayne Gacy here almost killing in response perhaps to his own, uh, sense of guilt or shame around his sexuality. How often does sex seem to come into it?

   22. MFMark Freestone46:11

       So, it- it, yeah, I, that's an interesting question. I think... I guess I'm he- just hesitant to, to say that psychopaths have a particular pattern of offending behavior, because they, you know, really, the- the- the range of offenses we had in somewhere like Rampton was very, very broad, and it included child sex offenses. But, um, one of the interesting things about Rampton was that, uh, nobody... In a hospital, you don't disclose people's offenses, so nobody knew what anyone else had done. So we had this really interesting dynamic between two old friends who were guys who were in their 50s when I was there. So, you know, 20 years ago, this would be... They'd be quite old now. Um, and one of them was a child sex offender. Um, you know, very sort of overweight, not, not particularly appealing person, but his best mate was someone called Tony or something, and To- (laughs) Tony was in the hospital because he killed and dismembered a child sex offender. And it was really interesting that these two had such a sort of positive dynamic, um, that they, uh, uh, uh, you know, didn't know simply because they didn't know each other's offenses. Um, so it... A real range of men in this same ward with very, very different offenses, and I- I, I think the thing about where there was... It seemed to be that where there was a sexual element, uh, psychopaths are quite sexually promiscuous. They don't kind of have maybe the same scruples or strong feelings about their, what their partners should be or look like that the rest of us do, so they tend to be very promiscuous, but they also tend to target partners in a way that would suggest like a sort of marital type relationship. So they don't just sort of randomly go off and pull people and, you know, have sex with them and then leave them. They tend to try and pull people into a more intimate relationship, but only with the goal of satisfying their needs for comfort, intimacy, and perhaps also, you know, things like money and, um, uh, safety. So you, you know, you live with someone because they're your partner, but not because you're really interested in ever having a long term relationship, simply because they are meeting your instrumental goals, immediate instrumental goals. So this means that sex becomes quite a sort of currency for psychopaths, which is something I would say, but the thing is then, uh, the criminal justice system gets very, very black and white about what exactly takes place in the index offense, you know? And if you rape someone then kill them, it's likely that the crime pros- prosecution service would go for just the murder as the crime rather than murder and rape, because then you've got two cases to build, two charges to consider, two lots of evidence. You just go with the murder. So some of the crimes that people or, or that I would have understood and, as being murder might well have had sexual elements that were not necessarily present in maybe the description of the offense, and it could be kept secret because they were never charged and convicted of, you know, sexually intended murder. An example was, um, when I worked within special hospitals, who murdered, murdered a woman by inserting a, a, a sharpened, um...... a broom into her, uh, into her vagina. And it, it's just, you know, a horrible way to go and, and he was, uh, uh, convicted of murder, which meant that he had protection from all of being perceived as a... I'm so sorry, being perceived as a, uh, sex offender or a nonce or anything like that. And he, he, he was also quite grandiose and quite manipulative, and he used his status as a, a violent criminal, a murderer, to avoid being targeted as a sex offender. And this is all about, I guess, sort of the hierarchy of offenses in prisons and why people present themselves in the way that they do. Um, but it was a little bit chilling that, you know, this was clearly a sexual offense, but he got away without being judged in that way because it had been classified as a violent one by a sort of slightly arbitrary system.

   23. CWChris Williamson49:52

       That's so interesting the fact that... because what the criminal justice system is actually looking for is, is a conviction. And if you've got a conviction of murder, presumably that... you're, you're gonna be in there for so long that adding rape on top of that is, is kind of, kinda pointless, kinda doesn't really make any sense.

   24. MFMark Freestone50:09

       (laughs)

   25. CWChris Williamson50:09

       So, yeah, uh, I- it's also I... every time that I speak to somebody that works in prisons or with criminals and stuff like that, this hierarchy of offense, um, always seems to come up. And I suppose that beyond, like, your net worth, in the, the prison has a little bit of a bearing on you, but not tons because you don't have your money with you, you know, your possessions, or your house, or the clothes that you wear, or the watch that you have; all of that stuff has been stripped away from you. Your job title, your qualifications, your education, your family, you know, all of this stuff really doesn't really matter. So one of the few things you have that can quickly identify where you sit in there is what's on the rap sheet.

   26. MFMark Freestone50:50

       Ab- absolutely. And, and this leads to, you know, these very bizarre hierarchies where often, as I said, sex offenders are at the bottom, yet they are vulnerable prisoners. Often, we, we spend a lot of time and, and sort of thought in the prison service protecting them, and at the top is, you know, the, the, the violent criminals, um, say murderers or people who've committed attempted murder, which can be very misleading, and at the very top of that are the robbers because the thing about robbing someone is it's pretty definitely, you know, uh, uh, indisputably a violent offense, and maybe you did, you know, maybe you did or didn't, um, kill someone. I love that, uh, in, uh, Prison Break, the, the guy gets himself into the prison by being a robber because you just... all you have to do to rob someone is threaten them with a weapon, right? Plausibly. So you walk into a bank with a gun, make some sort of unspecified threat, you're a robber. Um, and that (laughs) that goes a long way from sort of somebody who is maybe a serial robber who targets people very aggressively and loo- is looking for an excuse to harm them to someone who makes a sort of botched attempt 'cause they're a drug addict to hold up a, um, a, a convenience store or something and is busted and charged for a very serious violent offense. Very, very different, but, but robbers... the group of robbers contains, for example, a lot of psychopaths, a lot of

8. 52:05 – 56:28

   Can You Cure Psychopathy?

   1. MFMark Freestone52:05

      psychopaths.

   2. CWChris Williamson52:06

      Has anyone tried to cure psychopathy?

   3. MFMark Freestone52:09

      Yeah, a lot of things have been tried, Chris, but, um, it's a pretty sad, (laughs) sad tale. There's... uh, in the '60s and '70s, they got quite experimental. They tried things like naked encounter therapy. They tried LSD.

   4. CWChris Williamson52:20

      What, what's naked-

   5. MFMark Freestone52:21

      They tried-

   6. CWChris Williamson52:21

      ... encounter therapy?

   7. MFMark Freestone52:22

      (laughs) So you take off... basically, you take off all your clothes, and this was specifically targeted for psychopaths. You take off all your clothes, sit around in a room together, talk about-

   8. CWChris Williamson52:30

      (laughs)

   9. MFMark Freestone52:30

      ... you know, your life, your offending, uh, and it... that's sort of the, the idea, I think, behind it was that if you strip off all the sort of social expectations, you'd find that at heart, it was soc- society that made psy- psychopaths bad, and then they, you know, you put them in a sort of primal situation, they'd be much better to each other. But i- i- i- they weren't, and curiously enough, it actually made them worse or more likely to be convicted of a violent offense after that, so totally f- total failure on every point. Isolation tank therapy, um, and there were a few, there have been a few, like, you know, well-meaning but misguided attempts to use, like, less, uh, less directive forms. So Ashworth Hospital had a, uh, personality disorder ward which had quite a few psychopaths on it, and the staff tried to be given a little bit more freedom, and I think the staff somehow got the wrong end of the stick about what freedom, appropriate freedom was for a psychopath, and there was, uh, one of the patients who was there on a transfer, um, said that there was or accused the... or told the hospital authorities that there was a, a girl being groomed by the, the ward, um, patients to come onto the ward and be used for, um, uh, you know, sex and, and other terrible things. And they alerted the hospital authorities, and, uh, there was an inquiry which found that basically the staff had allowed themselves to be completely manipulated out of the ward altogether. So there's also an, an interesting lesson there about putting a lot of psychopaths together in one pa- place, um, which maybe we had learned by the time of DSPD.

   10. CWChris Williamson53:54

       Who is one of the scariest psychopaths that you've worked with?

   11. MFMark Freestone53:59

       So we... I think, thinking about, um, uh... thinking about Paul, I mean, he was sort of scary in the sense of interpersonally, you know, you wouldn't want to, to be with him for any length of time because he, you know, he might try and manipulate you and he just might try and bully you, and, and that, that sort of constant sense of threat, uh, the idea that there might be other people on the ward f- everyone from patients, to prisoners, to prison officers might be working for him on some capacity, that's a very scary thought as well. You're never quite knowing who's on your side. But I think that th- there are other characters who are slightly more sinister than that, characters that you really don't get to the bottom, and there was a patient I worked with in lower conditions of security but who'd been up in, uh, high security for a long time, and he was someone who just seemed to be wired very, very differently. And, and the way that his wiring worked was that he was deeply unpredictable. So you could talk to him one day and you'd have somebody who was quite pleasant, and engaged, and interesting, and then it wasn't necessarily like hour-to-hour, but certainly day-to-day, he could switch into a very, very aggressive mode where any question was met, "Why the fuck are you asking me that?" And, and you, you're still thinking of the guy from yesterday, so you didn't know where this new guy came from. And his offending history was very complex, and there was a, um-... there was a murder in his history and several other attacks on people, and some of it, uh, may have had a sexual element, but it was, again, very difficult to tease out. And if somebody's not willing to work with you to think about sort of the psychosexual aspects of their offending, you're never going to get to the bottom of those things. And I think, let's, uh, let's call him Trevor, so Trevor A, the pleasant one, often dropped hints that he was ready to talk about this stuff, and then curiously enough, Trevor B would show up the next day and tell him to fuck off-

   12. CWChris Williamson55:42

       (laughs)

   13. MFMark Freestone55:42

       ... and that would sort of be the end of the discussion, at least for the next year until Trevor A appeared again. But I think th- th- th- uh, this was a case that really affected me, and maybe I'm not describing it enough, but it, that, that inconsistency, it used to give me nightmares. Like, I used to have nightmares where either he was killing me or I was killing him, because working as a clinician with someone like that, you get very, very frustrated and confused and difficult to organize your thoughts because you don't know who's gonna be presenting you opposite. So I think that's sort of when somebody's deeply unpredictable. If someone's predictably nasty, that's actually okay, but it's like, you know, the sort of how trauma works. If, if, if (laughs) the, the goalposts change every time you come into work, it can really mess you up quite quickly. And I think that, I would have said, was the, the case that, uh, thinking of sort of generating a sense of fear and anxiety in me, that certainly did it the most. Yeah.

   14. CWChris Williamson56:26

       All right, Mark, let's bring this one

9. 56:28 – 57:07

   Where to Find Mark

   1. CWChris Williamson56:28

      home. If people want to check out the work that you do, where should they go?

   2. MFMark Freestone56:32

      Um, I, I would say, you know, Google me. I've got a university web page, and you, you can also find my book, uh, Making a Psychopath. It's published by Penguin in the UK and, uh, McMillan in the USA. It's a short read. It's, it's not intended to be very heavily academic or anything like that. And some of the characters I've talked about today are in it as well. So I, I hope you enjoy it if you do happen to find it.

   3. CWChris Williamson56:50

      All right, Mark, I appreciate you.

   4. MFMark Freestone56:52

      Lovely to be here, Chris. Thanks so much for having me.

   5. CWChris Williamson56:54

      What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 57:12