Free Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas Page A

stranger.
    Whenever suspected sociopaths write to me and ask whether they should get tested, I almost always tell them no. It’s just too risky. Because there is no real treatment, the only upside to a formal diagnosis is peace of mind, that you know who you are. The downside is having a major blemish on your record that could affect every aspect of your life, should it fall into the wrong hands. Even Dr. Edens showed an overabundance of caution in sanitizing the e-mailed version of the report, lest the “Internet gremlins” intercept it.
    At the end of our several hourlong sessions Dr. Edens asked me, “What would you think if I told you that you are not a sociopath?” It was a question I had asked myself many times before. What if I just stopped the blog? What if I stopped trying to find answers in new psychological research? “I don’t know, I guess I would be annoyed that I spent all day traveling and talking to you for nothing?” I replied. He laughed. When it was time to leave he told me how much I owed him for his time. I had forgotten my checkbook. We both joked at how that was a likely story from a sociopath.
    I left his office having no clue what he would put in thereport. But I knew we shared a perception that sociopathy was understudied, overvillainized, and an important issue to get right. When I got the report back a couple weeks later it confirmed what I had suspected for a while—both in terms of my own diagnosis and also understanding better the inconclusiveness and subjectivity of the modern psychiatric diagnostic process.
    A final question regarding detection is, why do we need to detect sociopaths? When I was growing up, my grandfather raised chickens and other animals on his ranch. Each chicken laid approximately one egg a day, so if he had seven chickens at the time, we would expect to see seven eggs. My grandfather was always very careful to feed the chickens and collect the eggs every day and taught me to be equally diligent when I stayed with him. If not, he said, the chickens might turn to eating their own eggs, and once a chicken has a taste for egg, it will continue eating eggs and have to be killed. I don’t know if it is really true that there is no cure for a cannibalistic chicken, but that is what he told me to scare me into feeding the chickens and collecting their eggs regularly. One time while I was gone, he got sick and couldn’t visit the chicken coop every day to feed them and collect their eggs. When he finally did get out there, he saw broken eggshells everywhere, the evidence of egg eating. Ever after, there were always one or two eggs missing from or pecked over in the daily collections. At least one chicken had gotten a taste for egg and wasn’t willing to give it up, even with the renewed ample food source.
    “How are we going to find out which one of them it is?” I asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “We need to kill the chicken that is eating the other eggs.”
    He just laughed.
    “No, seriously, Grandpa. One of these chickens is eating our food, taking up room in our coop, and ruining our eggs. We have to find out which one it is and kill it, right?”
    “I don’t have time to sit watching chickens. Plus that chicken actually helps. It helps to remind me to stay vigilant about caring for the other chickens and collecting the eggs. It also reminds me that nature is cutthroat, and that human nature is just that.”
    I wasn’t satisfied with my grandfather’s reasoning. The next day I woke up early and kept watch over the chicken coop. I saw the chickens go into the nesting area and lay their eggs, one by one. I also saw one of the chickens begin toying with an egg with its claws and pecking at it with its beak. I thought about killing the chicken. I had learned how to slaughter a chicken by hanging it up by its feet, securing its head in my weak hand, and with my strong hand locating the jugular vein with a knife and slitting it open, spilling the blood on the