What do you understand by the term "psychopathic personality"?

Trump

An inability to empathize, which leads to not caring about anyone.

I’ve encountered more than enough people who I’d call sociopaths, and for a while I read up to try to understand them better, and how to deal with them. I never had to use the term “psychopathic personality” before, and would go look it up before using that one. Sounds more severe and dangerous than most sociopaths.

One example of a case where someone’s behavior verged on the psychopathic, was calling the police to report their 16+ daughter was out driving without his permission. Still it wasn’t fully psychopathic – he was just willing to escalate to potentially do massive damage to his family, in order to get his way. (Calling police to ask them to arrest people, can and has gotten people killed.)

But I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t qualify for the actual “psychopathic personality” disorder – I expect that’s about people with almost no empathy, who routinely cause mayhem for others. (So yeah, Trump and Putin and Saddam Hussein and Charles Manson and so on.)

Sadly I understand more than one needs to know. Example: my Ex wife.
The first chapter of Psychopath Free is titled Spotting Toxic People providing 30 Red Flags. You can download it for free.

I have known a couple. One in high school was truly terrifying. It is a spectrum where some are much worse than others.

I liked the brief overview.of your link @Forever_Free. Especially not to trust the people who day “I’m the kind of guy who…..”

Psychopaths exist across cultures and ethnic groups. It has been estimated that approx. 1% of males and 0.3–0.7% of females could be classified as psychopaths. An individual may show elevated levels of multiple traits associated with psychopathy without qualifying as a psychopath, according to a measure such as the Hare checklist.

Psychopathy is a spectrum disorder and can be diagnosed using the 20-item Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which features traits… each scored on a three-point scale based on whether the item does not apply (0), applies to a certain extent (1), or fully applies (2) to the individual. The bar for clinical psychopathy is a score of 30 or higher; serial killer Ted Bundy scored 39.

Wow! 39!! There’s a 20 item checklist of characteristics in the link below. True psychopathy is rare. Psychopathy and sociopathy aren’t the same thing and the DSM diagnosis is actually Antisocial Personality Disorder. A person can have high levels of some of the traits without being a psychopath.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/psychopathy Interesting!

@smudges I have read stats that show the estimations to be more near 10% of people have psychopathic tendencies. That is 1 in 10 people around us daily that have some psychopathic natures.

^^ Right, but that’s tendancies. Those percentages I quoted were for actual psychopaths and are much lower.

I looked at the list and actually would have scored positive on at least 5 of the characteristics when I was 15, and 6 of them currently. But it’s a spectrum, and I wouldn’t score high enough on those characteristics to reach a score of 30 or higher. But you’re right, many people, and some of us and our friends would score at least a few on the scale.

^^ Yes, most are undiagnosed.