advice about story with psychopath character

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OK, I'm writing a story where the main character is a psychopath who ends up unintentionally giving himself the psychic ability to feel other people's emotions, and this ends up compensating for his lack of affective empathy.

Anyway, he's an intellectually gifted teenager with behavior problems, and his parents get him into a gifted enrichment program to motivate him to improve his behavior. He ends up being a lab assistant to a researcher who has designed a serum for giving rats the ability to read minds. Hoping that it'll make him better at manipulating people, the protagonist steals the serum and uses it on himself, but soon find that feeling other people's emotions comes along with hearing their thoughts.

After feeling the emotions of a classmate that he date raped a few months ago, he decides he wants to get rid of his new power, so he goes to the researcher and confesses that he used the serum on himself, and begs the researcher to undo its effects. The researcher agrees to try to design a counter-serum, but it'll take a few months. In the meantime, she's doing research on him, and ends up discovering that he's a psychopath. At that point, she decides that society would be better off if she didn't reverse the serum's effects on him.

But I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out how she'll find that out. So far she's noticed that he doesn't seem to feel fear, but she's thinking more along the lines of amygdala damage at some point in his childhood. Partly she's not thinking of psychopathy because she likes him and feels sympathetic towards him, so I'm thinking maybe if she gets jarred into realizing he's not as nice as she thinks, she'll figure it out. So I was thinking maybe she finds out about the rape.

But I'm not sure how she finds out. He'll certainly not tell her. He has told her that one of his classmates is scared of him, and told her this classmate's name, but he lied through his teeth about why she's scared of him. I was wondering if maybe she could go to his school and track down this girl and ask her why she's scared of the protagonist (because she thinks he might not understand why she's scared of him). She hasn't told anyone about the rape but she might break down and tell this researcher. But I'm not sure how appropriate it would be for the researcher to check up on this.

Any ideas?

The character you describe is not a psychopath. Your character seems to care a little too much about himself. He is probably more of a narcissist and a megalomaniac. I hate to be nit picky, but I'm a bit of a stubborn ass when it comes to accuracy.

Um, what about him makes you think he's not a psychopath? Psychopathy is my current obsession, and I've done a lot of research about it. I've been very careful to ensure that his behavior is consistent with psychopathy. He does have some narcissistic tendencies because the two conditions overlap quite a bit, but his main issue is lack of empathy rather than inflated self-esteem.

I also tend to write using the theme of insanity or psychoticness, i would say maybe have the character torture the lab rats, or maybe fantasize killing the rapist, i once read a story where a psychopath murdered a young girl, and he took pieces of cloth, soaked her blood in it, and would chew on the bloody cloth motnsh later when he was angry, and ive also written a couple stories using the theme. susually i give my characters a dark childhood, perhaps being abused, or maybe the reason why he hates the rapist so much is because as a child he was molested by someone. and he was someone who does feel for other people, but he has kept so much anger inside of him from his childhood that eventually he snaps. because he realizes how everyone else had such a greta life but have such evil minds, while he had a horrid life , and his once innocent mind was turned evil.

My character isn't this way because he was abused or anything. Research suggests that psychopathy is largely genetic and many psychopaths were raised by decent parents who don't understand why their discipline techniques aren't working on this kid. (Now, serial killers on the other hand often were abused, but they have a lot more wrong with them than just psychopathy. Psychopathy itself doesn't make a person kill, just removes one of the barriers to killing.)



I'm not sure what you mean by that. The protagonist is the rapist. Do you mean his victim trying to get revenge on him? I'm confused.



Well, he does seem to enjoy when the researcher asks him to administer electric shocks to the rats as part of the research, but he doesn't want to jeopardize his participation in the enrichment program (because he has a low tolerance for boredom combined with being intellectually gifted, so he really needs something intellectually stimulating in his life). He also doesn't have particularly strong violent urges, he just doesn't stop himself from violence out of a sense of morality. He does blow up seagulls by feeding them Draino, basically as an experiment to see if that would actually work. And the rape he committed was because he was sexually aroused and didn't want to stop when she said 'no', plus she offended him by rejecting him. (As I mentioned, he has a touch of narcissism.)