Are there autistic people who are psychopath/serial killer?

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Janissy
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10 Dec 2012, 4:31 pm

btbnnyr wrote:
nessa238 wrote:
btbnnyr wrote:
What about the Unabomber?


What about him?


Does he wear sunglasses and a hoodie in Supermax?


Probably not. He wore those items in his suspect sketch but I think they were taken away from him when he went to Supermax. I tried to find out by googling but all I found was that the rules at Supermax are considerably stricter than at any other prison in the U.S. So I am guessing that this strictness applies to dress code too.



Loborojo
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15 Dec 2012, 4:19 pm

srange to associate psychopathy with aspieness...but not so strange to read it for me, as one of my freind who is an acrtess and calims that her father is an Asperger (and I see a lot of it in her) labeled me a psychopath to a friend of mine i travelled with. I found that painful and hurting...why would people see that, just because I get so easily in violent meltdowns?


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Matt62
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15 Dec 2012, 7:23 pm

To my knowledge? No one..
M ost of the people who commit crimes like that are psycopaths, paranoid schizophrenics or suffer from multiple other disorders. Most people on the spectrum tend to direct violence towards themselves, not others.

Sincerely,
Matthew



MaKin
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15 Dec 2012, 7:31 pm

i saw this on imgur and thought this a good place to share.

http://imgur.com/gallery/7C4TV



Adam82
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15 Dec 2012, 11:24 pm

The Newton shooter the other day was apparently Aspie.

Which is terrible. We don't need this kind of awful negative exposure.



Ettina
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16 Dec 2012, 12:17 pm

Quote:
Conduct disorder is what they call children so the child doesn't have to live with the stigma of the label of psychopath. When the kids get locked up for shooting a clerk while robbing 7-11 of $18.47 they graduate to the label of psychopath.


Not accurate. Psychopaths usually do display conduct disorder when young, but most conduct disorder kids aren't psychopaths. They're just troubled delinquents, and the majority outgrow it. Even of the subset who continue with criminal behavior in adulthood, only about a third are actually psychopaths.

Psychopathy is not criminality. Psychopathy is a personality type in which the person does not feel affective empathy or guilt. Many criminals do have affective empathy, such as gangsters who feel genuine loyalty to their gang 'family' and would feel bad if anything bad happened to them. Or people with borderline personality disorder (which is overrepresented in criminals), who can be analogized to 'emotional hemophiliacs' because they react too strongly and can't regulate their emotions - they feel affective empathy too strongly like they feel everything else too strongly. In those borderlines who show criminal behavior, it's impulsive and comes out of strong emotions, things like beating up a partner because they want to end the relationship (BPD is a common diagnosis in spousal abusers).

Anyway, back to the main topic, although there hasn't been much research into comorbidity of psychopathy and autism, what research has been done suggests that autistics are just as likely to be psychopaths as non-autistics are.

Most psychopaths aren't serial killers, however - most are petty criminals, and some higher functioning psychopaths are found in professional fields such as business and politics (a touch of psychopathy is an advantage in those fields). About 90% of serial killers are psychopaths, so there is a strong link, but given that serial killers are extremely rare and psychopaths make up about 1% of the population, that means serial killing is rare in psychopaths too.

My impression is that serial killers typically have a bunch of issues bundled together. Psychopathy reduces the resistance to killing due to lack of negative emotional consequences, but other psychological issues are responsible for them having an urge to kill as opposed to just not caring about it. Things like severe childhood abuse making them want symbolic revenge for the things that were done to them (psychopaths do feel anger). Or a sexual fetish associated with violence and/or death, such as sadism, necrophilia, sexual attraction to blood, etc. In the case of a psychopathic autistic person, an obsessive interest with a violent or death theme might motivate killing - for example, obsessive interest in poison.

In addition, there are some people who don't get the chance to become serial killers, despite having the right psychological makeup for it. In order to be considered a serial killer, you have to kill at least 3 people in separate premeditated incidents without clear motive (for example, a hitman is not a serial killer). To do that, you have to get away with the first two murders for awhile, and getting away with murder requires a certain amount of skill. Most serial killers have a high IQ and good executive functions, because that makes it a lot easier to avoid being caught for awhile. (My Dad heard of a guy who murdered someone and tried to fake a suicide by leaving a note, but the note was in the killer's handwriting and he'd misspelt the victim's name.) Many AS people may not have the skill to get away with murder, because of poorer social skills and executive dysfunction (although social skills aren't as big an issue if the killer is a loner - no one knows them well enough to spot the hints they inadvertently give off).



ProvokesThinking
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21 Dec 2012, 9:50 pm

MaKin wrote:
i saw this on imgur and thought this a good place to share.

http://imgur.com/gallery/7C4TV


I agree with you that this shouldn't be considered as normal among autistic people. In my class I noticed somebody mentioning the Newton shooter and laughed about him being a crazy autistic person. This kind of worries me and I think it's a shame that the shooter has the same condition as me, Aspergers Syndrome, however I can't deny that there are people with this syndrome who commit these kind of crimes, and there can be very understandable reasons to do so, however those reasons will always be wrong and morally not acceptable because they hurt innocent people. What I just wondered about is if there are known cases of people with autism or Apsergers who have commited certain crimes as murder, because I hear often about Einstein being used as an example, but of course the opposite can also be true, because if we look at Napoleon for example, it's very likely that he was autistic and used it for the military.



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21 Dec 2012, 9:57 pm

Loborojo wrote:
srange to associate psychopathy with aspieness...but not so strange to read it for me, as one of my freind who is an acrtess and calims that her father is an Asperger (and I see a lot of it in her) labeled me a psychopath to a friend of mine i travelled with. I found that painful and hurting...why would people see that, just because I get so easily in violent meltdowns?


What's strange about that? People have different brain patterns, if some people are born with a lack of remorse in their brain, which is one of the main features of psychopaths, why wouldn't this be possible in the brain of an autistic person? What I wonder about is if this is researched and since I know a lot of autistic people who are empathic and caring, I wonder if there are autistic people who are the opposite.



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21 Dec 2012, 11:01 pm

Of course. Most of my friends are serial killers. You want their phone numbers?

People don't usually share this type of information if they have it.


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21 Dec 2012, 11:02 pm

Adam82 wrote:
The Newton shooter the other day was apparently Aspie.

Which is terrible. We don't need this kind of awful negative exposure.


That's they key word here.

He was also 'diagnosed' by a Swedish psychiatrist after he died.

We still don't know if he had an official diagnosis.


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