Sociopaths are people with serious personality disorders who exploit and manipulate others
The original definition of the word sociopathy was, “anything deviated or pathological in social relations.” The American Psychiatric Association once recognized a condition called sociopathic personality disturbance, but this was later changed to antisocial personality disorder. Today, when mental health professionals use the word sociopath, they generally mean someone who has antisocial personality disorder. Sociopath itself is no longer a clinical diagnosis; it is a term without an official meaning.
Lovefraud.com uses sociopath according to its original definition — as an umbrella term for all personality disorders in which the affected people exploit and manipulate others. On Lovefraud.com, sociopathy encompasses the current clinical diagnoses of antisocial, narcissistic, borderline and histrionic personality disorders, and psychopathy.
- Lovefraud’s definition of the term sociopath
- The original definition of sociopath
- How the definition of sociopath evolved in mental health
- Confusion among the public about the sociopath definition
- Why the definition of sociopath is important
- Sociopathy is a psychological disorder
- Lovefraud uses sociopath as an umbrella term
- Sociopath is a good word for education and communication
What’s the definition of sociopath? Is it a serial killer? Or a criminal? Or a crazy person? If you’re confused, don’t feel bad. Why? Because there is no standard sociopath definition. The word is no longer an official clinical diagnosis. In fact, despite what you may have read elsewhere, the mental health field does not have agreed-upon criteria for using the term.
Here’s Lovefraud’s definition of sociopath:
A sociopath is a person with a serious personality disorder in which he or she manipulates and exploits others.
Sociopaths are not delusional; they are social predators who know exactly what they are doing. Depending on the individual, they may engage in a wide range of sociopathic abuse — everything from emotional abuse and psychological abuse to criminal activity and murder.
Lovefraud uses sociopath as an umbrella term covering the following psychological conditions, which are official clinical diagnoses:
- antisocial personality disorder
- narcissistic personality disorder
- borderline personality disorder
- histrionic personality disorder
This isn’t quite how many of today’s psychiatrists, psychologists or counselors use the word, but it is close to the original definition of sociopath.
George E. Partridge, a psychologist, coined the word sociopath in 1930 when he published a paper in the American Journal of Psychiatry called Current Conceptions of Psychopathic Personality. Partridge analyzed the literature existing at the time on “psychopathic personalities,” and found that there were too many definitions and descriptions for the term to be useful. He suggested using the word sociopathy to describe “anything deviated or pathological in social relations.”
These persons display, first of all, persistent and chronic sociopathic behavior. This chronic behavior, to be regarded as essentially sociopathic, is to be understandably related in some way to their motivations with respect to their major interests and urges. They display long-continued mal-adjustments, and their behavior is not readily corrected and brought into the normal social pattern by any ordinary methods of education or punitive technique; nor does it right itself by any of the usual processes of resolution based upon self-understanding and self-discipline. These persons are preeminently sociopathic; they are very numerous; there are recognizable patterns of behavior which they adopt.
In other words, Partridge originally intended sociopathy to define a pathological condition in which people are maladjusted in their relations with others and society, and motivated towards antisocial behavior.
We need this word today. We need language to describe the millions of people living among us who routinely exploit, manipulate and abuse the rest of us — what Lovefraud refers to as “everyday sociopaths.” We need to be able to talk about these social predators, so we can protect ourselves from sociopathic abuse and hold them accountable for their actions.
Today, the American mental health profession has multiple diagnoses for people who have serious personality disorders in which they exploit and manipulate others. The professionals, therefore, do not have a clear message for the rest of us on how to avoid and escape the social predators who can ruin our lives.
Psychiatrists and therapists, the professionals who treat patients, rely on the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Because of the influence of George Partridge, the first DSM, published in 1952, included a diagnosis of sociopathic personality disturbance. In 1968, this was replaced with the term antisocial personality disorder, which has been used ever since.
So today, sociopathy has no official meaning. If a clinician uses the word sociopath, it is usually a shorthand reference to antisocial personality disorder.
Research psychologists in universities, however, refer to people who exploit and manipulate others as psychopaths. This is largely due to the work of Dr. Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist who in the 1990s developed the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R), an assessment that measures an individual’s level of disturbance. Hundreds of scientific papers have been published on psychopathic traits, behavior and physiology, and the vast majority of them evaluate the subjects’ psychopathy based on their PCL-R scores.
Psychopathy is similar to, but not precisely the same as, antisocial personality disorder. In fact, psychopathy is not listed as an accepted diagnosis in the DSM-5 at all — discussion of it is relegated to the book’s “emerging measures and models” section.
People like you who are searching for answers on the Internet to explain the abuse you’ve endured in your romantic relationships, families or workplaces, have started referring to the perpetrators as narcissists. This may be true, because many abusers certainly could be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. In plenty of cases, however, the more accurate diagnosis is antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy. But that sounds like you’re involved with a vicious murderer. Referring to the abuser as a narcissist is simply less frightening.
In short, naming the category of people who exploit and manipulate others is a mess. And as the experts argue, the you and everyone else are in the dark.
Lovefraud has conducted research with people like you who have tangled with social predators. One Lovefraud survey included questions about the name of the disorder. More than 1,200 people responded. Here are the questions and the results:
“Before your involvement with this disordered individual, what did you understand the term ‘sociopath’ to mean?”
- Criminal — 19%
- Serial killer — 19%
- Someone who was delusional — 6%
- Person without empathy or a conscience — 20%
- I didn’t know what it meant — 35%
“Before your involvement with this disordered individual, what did you understand the term ‘psychopath’ to mean?”
- Criminal — 15%
- Serial killer — 51%
- Someone who was delusional —13%
- Person without empathy or a conscience — 9%
- I didn’t know what it meant — 12%
These responses illustrate the your confusion. Half of the readers thought “psychopath” meant serial killer, and the largest number of responses for “sociopath” was “I didn’t know what it meant.”
Why is this discussion important? Why should anyone care about what to call people who manipulate and exploit others?
Two reasons: First of all, these social predators are probably responsible for most of the manmade misery in the world, ranging from the fraud perpetrated by Ponzi schemers, to the abusers who terrorize their romantic partners, to the bullies causing turmoil in the workplace.
Secondly, once you become entangled with a sociopath, there is usually no support from legal, financial or other institutions. Why? Because most sociopaths use social interactions to find and exploit their targets. This means there is some kind of relationship between you and the social predator, which muddies the water when you seek redress.
The only effective way to deal with the trauma caused by sociopathic abuse is prevention. Prevention requires education. And for education to work, we need agreement on what to call these social predators.
It is not sufficient to say that these predatory individuals are “abusers” or “toxic.” We are talking about a psychological disorder, a mental condition, not merely a lifestyle choice. Of all the personality disorders, only psychopathy and the DSM “Cluster B” disorders — antisocial, narcissistic, borderline and histrionic personality disorders — are defined by the affected individual’s victimization of others. Most of the perpetrators do not experience distress because of their actions. It is the people around them who experience distress.
Mental health professionals, searching for possible causes and treatment, engage in nuanced debates with each other about sociopath definitions and diagnostic criteria. For example, are antisocial personality, narcissism and psychopathy distinct disorders, or are they different points on the same continuum of abusive behavior? In practice, the behaviors and traits exhibited by individuals diagnosed with psychopathy, sociopathy, narcissism and even borderline personality disorders overlap, so it’s hard to tell where one ends and another begins.
From the perspective of those of us who have tangled with one of these individuals, the clinical diagnosis doesn’t matter. Our lives were turned upside down, we lost money, our homes, our children. We suffered PTSD or other maladies. The point is that we were involved with a disordered person, and we suffered sociopathic abuse.
Lovefraud uses sociopathy as a generic, layman’s term, similar to “heart disease.” It is not used as a clinical diagnosis. It is a general description of personality disorders in which the people who have the disorders purposely exploit others.
Let’s compare it to “heart disease.” There are various types of heart disease, like a heart attack, or, clinically speaking, a myocardial infarction. There’s also cardiovascular disease, coronary artery disease, and so on. The American Heart Association tells us to keep our heart healthy by not smoking, avoiding fatty foods, and getting regular exercise. They don’t tell us to avoid heart attacks by doing this, or avoid strokes by doing that. They provide information to protect the whole system.
Let’s do the same thing to protect us in our social relations. Under the umbrella of sociopathy, the professionals can still use all of the existing clinical diagnoses, or develop new ones as more is learned about the disorders. Perhaps a psychopath is defined as someone who scores 30 or more points on the PCL-R; antisocial personality disorder describes someone who consistently disregards and violates the rights of others; a narcissist is someone with a grandiose sense of self-importance. The idea here is to agree on a general, categorical term that describes social predators so that people can be educated. In reality, it doesn’t matter if a perpetrator is clinically diagnosed as psychopathic, antisocial or narcissistic. The idea is to avoid all of them.
The word sociopath is a good choice for the purpose of education and communication. It has the advantage of already being in the lexicon, without the serial killer baggage of psychopath. People are generally aware that the word is a psychological term related to bad behavior towards others. But, as our survey pointed out, most people don’t really know the definition of sociopath, so it’s a golden opportunity for education.
Yes, Lovefraud is asking mental health professionals to change the commonly used vocabulary in the field. But the meaning of sociopathy already morphed from a term describing all of the socially sick, to shorthand for antisocial personality disorder. Perhaps it’s time to go back to the original definition of sociopath.
Settling on a clear name for this range of disorders is a public health issue. People have learned how to protect themselves from heart disease. Sociopaths cause physical, emotional and psychological injury, illness, trauma and sometimes death. We need to learn how to protect ourselves from them.
When it comes to helping people avoid social predators, it’s not a diagnostic issue, but an education and communications issue.