Reddit reviews The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain

This book is fascinating and it's written by an established neuroscientist. (Actually I recommend this to anyone reading. It's very interesting.)

 

The answer as I know it, from my own families' illnesses, from knowing neurosurgeons personally and from reading, is that the jury is out for the most part. Nothing decisively definitive has been proven. There is an idea (as written about in that book) that certain illnesses take a 1-2 punch of nature (brain wired differently) and nurture (fucked up childhood).

 

That said? Visit a doctor. A bunch of strangers online may have ideas and experiences but it will take a compassionate and thorough medical professional to guide you further.

He wrote a whole book about it.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00C5R729S/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

Your dad sounds like the author of this book on psychopathy. He talks about how he loves his wife and his kids, but only because they manage to still interest and entertain him.

It sucks to have a parent who doesn't love you unconditionally. On the bright side, you must be very interesting and talented in your own right to hold his attention.

>Their definition is the exact opposite of low emotional variance.

I love how smug you probably felt while writing that. Take the time to actually read up on psychopathy. The dictionary definition is not accurate.

Here's your source:

http://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Inside-Neuroscientists-Personal-Journey-ebook/dp/B00C5R729S/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1418388115&sr=8-3&keywords=psychopath&pebp=1418388125403

http://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Whisperer-Science-Without-Conscience-ebook/dp/B00G8ELS94/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1418388115&sr=8-6&keywords=psychopath

http://www.amazon.com/Wisdom-Psychopaths-Kevin-Dutton-ebook/dp/B007NKN9U8/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1418388115&sr=8-8&keywords=psychopath

A defining characteristic of psychopathy is experiencing diminished, or no, emotional variance under stress. Your source on that would be Robert Hare, who conducted an incredible amount of testing on the subject and essentially invented the concept of psychopathy.

Psychopaths are, like all mental illness, best represented by a spectrum. There are those "with the dials all turned up" that are emotionally unstable and act out violently regularly, but there are a great many who operate with low emotional variance and are far more in control of themselves in a given situation than an ordinary person. Their testing involved subjecting test subjects to scenes/pictures of violence and were able to identify the lowest emotional reaction as psychopaths.