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A review by lee_hillshire
Sociopath: a Memoir by Patric Gagne
In high school I took a criminology class and went through a pretty intense abnormal psychology phase centered around the "antisocial personality disorder" umbrella. I was that kid who would immediately correct someone if they miscorrectly said "psychopath" when "sociopath" was more accurate, and I read so many articles about both. And then I got disillusioned with it and lost interest just as quickly. No one ever talks about how to actually help people with said conditions, any single resource you could hope for on depression, PTSD, anxiety, the "romantic" mental illnesses, every one of those had gallons of ink spilled on how to identify, treat, self help, diagnose, address, support, etc. But not ASPDs. And it pissed me off, so I (ironically) went apathetic about learning more on the subject.
So when I saw this book was coming out, I snatched up the first copy I possibly could from the library. There was always the chance that it could have been not what I'd hoped, but I was more than willing to read it no matter what. And you know what? This book would have kept high school me invested. It's personal, it includes enough therapeutic insights to begin to be practical, and it's (hopefully!) the first step in a much larger movement to actually begin to deal reasonably with the issue, and not just stereotype everyone with it as villains and killers (and people in HR).
In a lot of ways, it reminds me of a lot of the work I've read recently on autism. And weirdly enough, I see some similarities between the two that make me really curious. But even without that relation, it's very similar in the nature of "I'm different, but I'm not Wrong, and I'm still very much human." There are a lot of functional differences, and especially ones I noticed in Gagne's description of what kinds of therapy helped her the most. But maybe seeing things that way will help more people realize that reacting with fear to people who are neurodiverse in uncomfortable ways, only makes things a million times worse.
So when I saw this book was coming out, I snatched up the first copy I possibly could from the library. There was always the chance that it could have been not what I'd hoped, but I was more than willing to read it no matter what. And you know what? This book would have kept high school me invested. It's personal, it includes enough therapeutic insights to begin to be practical, and it's (hopefully!) the first step in a much larger movement to actually begin to deal reasonably with the issue, and not just stereotype everyone with it as villains and killers (and people in HR).
In a lot of ways, it reminds me of a lot of the work I've read recently on autism. And weirdly enough, I see some similarities between the two that make me really curious. But even without that relation, it's very similar in the nature of "I'm different, but I'm not Wrong, and I'm still very much human." There are a lot of functional differences, and especially ones I noticed in Gagne's description of what kinds of therapy helped her the most. But maybe seeing things that way will help more people realize that reacting with fear to people who are neurodiverse in uncomfortable ways, only makes things a million times worse.