Are there autistic serial killers or only psychopathic ones?

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The taste varied depending on the season, but it has a chicken like taste with a lake/fish/reptilian (ate a few snakes and lizards in my time as well) quality to it.
I understand the ritualistic part much better these days, as I have experience in other corresponding behavioural aspects (stage acting, dancing and various other forms of performing). It is a basic connection to the primordial hunter behaviour and is often lacking in today's society (especially the ASD part) in order to develop a proper relationship with respect to one's environment and responsibilities stemming from being it's custodian.
Historically a ritual would follow a successful hunt in order to re-enact it and perpetuate the knowledge of it in a celebratory manner.
After all art imitates life, even if in death.
Sadly I only hunt in shopping malls these days. Still, people perceive me as a fearsome hunter/warrior (I don't mind it, keeps people at bay and gives me some breathing space).
People also tend to disrespect their elders for all the wrong reasons these days (personally I don't give two flying f**ks about authority, but I understand the value of mentorship and leading by example).
Knowledge became akin to porn to the general population. Gives you pleasure, but no much else.

This is complete nonsense. People very easily, especially Aspergers people, as I have learned from this forum, like to put the label 'Psychopath' on a person who starts shooting people. The mistake you and a lot of people make is the reason why behind it. I have studied the subject 'psychopath' for quite some time and one important similarity between psychopathy and aspergers is: no empathy, but the way in which the lack of empathy is present is different. An Aspergers doesn't have a lot of cognitive empathy, they mostly live in their own world but they can feel love. A psychopath has cognitive empathy, but feeling love and such things are difficult for a psychopath, which can make their behaviour inappropriate. The only similarity which is kind of the same is that some autistic people don't take responsability, just like psychopaths. I notice that when I feel bad I tend to take less responsability of my actions, because I mess up everything anyway, so it doesn't matter. All the other things are just a lot of big differences, in general.

You say that people like Lanza and William Freund were psychopaths. I don't know what your life is like. You might have a good life, unless your autism you actually have a few friends maybe. But what if you don't have friends at all? If you are friendless? Do you know what that can do to a person? No sure, shooting up people isn't DIRECTLY related to autism, but INDIRECTLY it sure is! Autistic people have a hard time making friends in general, so if they don't accomplish this due to their disorder, it can lead to violent behaviour because of frustration or suicidal tendencies.

People can either aim frustration and violence at themselves and commit suicide, or they can actually decide to aim it at the people who are responsable. Your claim that autistic people don't do that seems like a lie to me, in order to feel comfortable and say to yourself: we never do that. That's the same as if a person of a different group would say that, the thing is that you can never judge whole groups. If you claim that there are 0% autistic people who do this or could do this you are naive. There are autistic people who can do this. In my country there are autistic people in detention in a hospital. If you say that autistic people who do bad things aren't real autistic people you use the same sophism as religious people, there are christian people who say: those 'evil' christians aren't real christians. There was also a muslim who told me: those scary people who are terrorists aren't realy muslims. The problem is how you define a religion and a theist. This problem is more clear with autism, because there are certain criteria and a diagnosis makes somebody autistic. William Freund had an official diagnosis that he had Aspergers Syndrome, your claim that he was a psychopath is either a false assumption or a lie.

The only serial killer that I can think of off the top of my head who was on the spectrum was Robert Napper (The Green Chain Rapist/Plumstead Ripper), who was diagnosed with Asperger's. I'm not sure if he is technically considered a psychopath, but he did receive his sentence to be served indefinitely in a mental institution as opposed to prison, and I'm pretty sure he was found guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility.
Dahmer was considered to be on the spectrum, though I'm not entirely convinced that he was.

I hate to be the one to tell you, but the very definition of psychopath is:

"A person with an antisocial personality disorder, manifested in aggressive, perverted, criminal, or amoral behavior without empathy or remorse."

" a person afflicted with a personality disorder characterized by a tendency to commit antisocial and sometimes violent acts and a failure to feel guilt for such acts. Also called sociopath"

See for yourself

You're being borderline ignorant as far as this whole topic goes as well as some aspects of AS, and as for the so-called 'inability to feel empathy', I have AS and I empathize just fine, as do others on this site who also have it. If you want to continue making your arguments then you have to start giving concrete evidence to back up your claims, like I just did by simply defining a word which at it's very definition has the meaning of doing bad things.
Your corralation between "not having friends" and "becoming psychopathic for that reason" is total crap, it isn't backed up by any real evidence other than what you think humans are like when secluded from society. It's pure speculation based on your thoughts about how others' brains work and that is not science, that's speculative theory and is no different than saying "being white contributes to being a criminal because there have been white criminals" (which is obviously completely bogus).

I have no problem discussing this matter with you, and I can see why you might think what you do (afterall, a lack of empathy could lead to violent tendencies and that is backed up by science and fact), but if you're going to bash on certain people/groups' reputation then it is advisable that you bring real evidence to the table instead of simply spouting a bunch of heresay that has no real basis whatsoever. There has never been any corralation between Autism/AS and psychopathic behavior, socially created or otherwise.

You are actually wrong, there actually is scientific evidence that social isolation can lead to wrong behaviour.

This is a part from an article of Scientific American:



Mind & Brain
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December 17, 2012
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Cover Image: August 2007 Scientific American Magazine See Inside
Deadly Dreams: What Motivates School Shootings?

After a recent spate of school shootings, researchers are analyzing the malignant fantasies of young assassins for warning signs that could help prevent future tragedies

By Frank J. Robertz









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inShare



Of course, dreams and daydreams sometimes have a dark and violent cast to them. Almost everyone has imagined vengeful scenarios, even murderous ones, after particularly frustrating experiences, according to research by psychologist David Buss of the University of Texas at Austin. Such fantasies can defuse tension and thus might be considered a type of psychological hygiene. As Austrian psychoanalyst Theodor Reik put it: “A thought murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”

But what is cleansing to a healthy mind may overwhelm a less balanced psyche. Signs of psychic trouble include being excessively introverted and lacking strong social attachments. Cho’s peers described him as “quiet” and as someone who would not respond when others greeted him. Violent offenders are also often pessimistic about their future and have low self-esteem; many have been harassed, bullied or rejected by classmates; suspended from school; or pressured by teachers. Cho was reportedly teased and picked on in middle school for being shy and for his unusual way of speaking.

Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ams&page=2

I will cite another part from another scientific source about social isolation and the consequences:

Lonely people who are middle-aged and older tend to also have problems with alcoholism, depression, weak immune system responses to illness, impaired sleep and suicide.

Source: http://www.livescience.com/697-loneline ... shows.html

As depression can lead to hostile behaviour loneliness actually can lead to bad behaviour, a real life example is a family member of me who is depressed and is hostile, so this isn't just crap.

By the way, in Finland they introduced a method to reduce bullying after a school shooting. Guess what? The school shootings declined too with the amount of people being bullied, they could decrease the bullying with approximately 40%. As bullying leads to stress, which you can find in a lot of sources, it is very well possible that stress could lead to school shooting, I admit though that this is just a hypothesis.


You just shout: There is no scientific research to back up your claims, without looking for it yourself.

I read an interview of Simon Baron-Cohen, and I thought that he actually gave a perfect description of the difference between Aspergers and Psychopaths. According to the defintions which you give, one of my family members who I know well and who shows all the signs of autism, is severely autistic and has a diagnosis of autism, would be also a psychopath, but according to a lot of people on this forum who seem to be narrow-minded to me, it's impossible to have both psychopathy and autism.

Here is the interview of Simon Baron-Cahon, I can very good identify myself with his description of autistic people. I can't really empath in a cognitive way, when I talk to people I can't imagine how they perceive the world, but I actually feel love and want to help other people. With psychopaths, it's rather the opposite, and numerous of sources will show these same results, I also listened to experts who talked about this subject and they confirmed this.

Interview: http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/30/m ... ce-of-evil

The part where he talks about this:

People often think that autistic people are dangerous, like psychopaths, when they hear this idea that they have “no empathy.”

In a way, that was one of my motivations for writing the book. Low empathy is a characteristic of many different conditions or disorders. Often books are written where they either focus on psychopathy or autism but [not both].

We have to look at them side by side, and when we do that, we see that they are very different and it’s important to bring that out.

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Another interview of Simon Baron-Cohen explaining this view: http://www.science20.com/countering_tac ... lity-79669

It's possible that you don't agree with him, but I, as an autistic person, actually agree with him and I don't understand why this website, WrongPlanet, doesn't agree with him. I will make a topic about it by the way, because I really want to get this clarified.

I think that you are very right that there isn't any scientific evidence to support my claims, here is a scientist who wrote a whole book about his research on this subject, affirming my claims:

http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/uaj ... 30147&&amp

One scientist, writes one book about his thoughts on the subject. Hardly scientific evidence, however thank you for bringing something to the conversation.

About previous post:
I didn't say social isolations couldn't lead to bad behavior, and even that doesn't necessarily cause psychopathic tendencies.
What I actually said was:
"There has never been any corralation between Autism/AS and psychopathic behavior, socially created or otherwise."

I can agree that simple isolation could lead to someone acting anti-social and possibly psychotic, however the question was poised in the conversation "does AS/Autism lead to such behavior" and the answer is simply "no". That's what I was saying.

You need some actual research there to back up that social isolation causes antisocial behavior. Otherwise, it's just anecdotal.

I also agree with this point. I think that should be brought into the fold.

Actually there is plenty of research on the subject, just google it. People with a specific predisposition (impulsive personality, poor executive control) are susceptible. When they are socially isolated and exposed to drugs, alcohol, television or video games these precipitate anti-social behavior.

I don't think any of those necessarily leads to violence either, granted, there are some cases where each one might, however, on the whole most people aren't that susceptible to influence, if they were then even normal social exposure could set said person off (and that's more likely to do it than the above listed things, simply due to the kinds of judgements that people pass on each other every day), and exposure to drugs/acohol, isolation, or even a mixture of all of the above would make little difference in how they would ultimately act.
The few exceptions to this are obviously in the minority and couldn't contribute to diagnosing a mass of people as being prone to violence, simply because there aren't enough people like that to say one way or the other.
Besides that, even if they were, what about the people with the same neurological backgrounds who have no psychopathic tendencies? Those people have never done anything wrong, yet if society would have it, they'd stand to lose their rights and freedoms based on the generalization that they're supposedly "prone to violent behavior".

This adds a lot of criteria to the "social isolation causes antisocial behavior" claim. It changes it so much that you are now arguing something different from what the person I was responding to posted.

Substance abuse, for example, is extremely highly correlated with violent behavior. So much so that I would question any study that linked violent behavior to social isolation and substance abuse.

As far as television or video games, I haven't seen research to support the notion that these cause violent behavior, but I have seen many claims to that effect.

That's not a similarity. That's like saying a deaf person and a blind person are similar because they're both missing senses. (Let me tell you, they don't think so.)

Maybe they don't think so, but I can't come up with a good reason why both missing certain senses isn't a similarity.

Ok, so by your logic, you should know that there are similarities between you and a "Bible pusher", both have opinions that you're trying to convince others into believing by giving what you say is proof of something when others are convinced otherwise.
You may not think so, but I can't come up with a good reason why both trying to convince other people of something widely believed as unproven isn't a similarity.

So does that mean you're like a "bible pusher", or is the whole idea just completely bogus?

Well, into certain subjects I could be kind of like a bible pusher so that's indeed a similarity, the fact that we both want to convince other people to have the same opinion as us, the difference is the motivation and if the opinion is well formed. A Bible pusher doesn't use very good arguments according to science and logic, as where I will try to do that, without always having the knowledge, I will admit.