11 Signs a Child May Become a Psychopath | Psychopathic Risk Factors

welcome to my scientifically informed insider look at mental health topics if you find this video to be interesting or helpful please like it and subscribe to my channel oh this is dr. grande today's question is what are the signs that a child could become a psychopath I've actually been asked this question a number of times a number of ways another version here is one of the signs that a child has already become a psychopath and I said the word psychopath I've also received this question with the term antisocial personality disorder now I receive this question almost a year ago now so it's it's been a while and I had to do a bit of research on this and also I want to talk to a number of clinicians before I attempted to answer this question there's really a lot to this because you're dealing with a construct like psychopathy which has a lot of serious consequences attached to it and then of course referring this or relating this to children and a lot of times in mental health we don't like to label children as psychopathic and I'll talk more about that in a moment so first let me explore the difference between psychopathy and antisocial person I've sorta SAN area of confusion and that really does lend an important component here to this discussion like understand that difference is important here so psychopathy is a construct it's not a mental disorder and it has two factors to it so really there's two types of psychopathy primary and secondary sometimes they're also called factor 1 and factor 2 and sometimes to make it even more confusing psychopathy factor 1 psychopathy is referred to as just the word psychopathy and factor 2 psychopathy is referred to as sociopathy so we have a lot of terms to really talk about the same two types of psychopathy factor 1 psychopathy has traits like being callous unemotional manipulative deceitful and factor 2 has characteristics that we more typically associate with antisocial behavior like impulsivity irresponsibility and committing crimes so factor to psychopathy secondary psychopathy has a stronger association with the mental disorder antisocial personality so that is an actual mental disorder in the DSM and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual so somebody can be diagnosed with antisocial personality sorter and again it aligns with factor to psychopathy and has some overlap with factor one psychopathy so when you look at the research and you look at how children could have psychopathic tendencies a lot of times they're talking about antisocial personality and not psychopathy so to make things even a bit more confusing antisocial personality or can't be diagnosed until age 18 so before 18 another disorder named conduct disorder is oftentimes used so again we have when working with children and the construct of psychopathy we have a lot of confusing elements here and when you look at the research it's not always clear to what they are referring psychopathy factor 1 or factor 2 antisocial personality disorder or conduct disorder so to answer this question about the signs that a child will become a psychopath I titled this video 11 signs that a child is at risk for psychopathy because that's what I'm really talking about here since we're not going to label children as Psychopaths we really talking about the risk for future psychopathy and psychopathy is an important topic this is a topic that really deserves more attention there aren't many psychopaths in the general population depending on the research you look at maybe 1% but we know that psychopaths are responsible for a large percentage of violent crimes and the exact percent really isn't known because again psychopathy is confused with antisocial personality disorder so we just know it's a fairly large percent some estimates say as many as half of violent crimes can be connected to psychopathic traits so I mentioned before that we don't label children as psychopaths and kind of talked about conduct disorder a little bit it's important to understand here that in mental health again psychopathy has a stigma attached to it so a lot of times you'll see this term cows on emotional traits so you see a child has low level of guilt reduced empathy callousness and uncaring behavior sometimes this is referred to as pre psychopathic but I don't really like that term because again it kind of suggests that somebody is definitely going to be psychopathic or is likely going to be psychopathic so instead of psychopathy we use the disorder conduct disorder and specifically with the callous unemotional trait component there's what's called a specifier attached to that disorder so it's an element that explains more about the presentation of the disorder and the specifier for callous unemotional traits this called limited pro-social emotions so really when you see limited pro-social emotions that's the same thing as callous unemotional traits and we know that if somebody has limited pro-social emotions they're at a greater risk to develop psychopathy we also know that eighty percent of children that have this diagnosis will not develop into Psychopaths of course that means about 20 percent will so that's why again we have to take this kind of seriously when we see conduct disorder with limited pro-social emotions so with all this in mind my talk about a sign that somebody could develop psychopathy that a child could help psychopathy it's important remember that the sign is really in essence a risk factor so we see multiple risk factors and one child and we get worried that they may develop psychopathy someday but somebody can have a lot of risk factors and never develop psychopathy so the signs don't necessarily mean somebody definitely will develop psychopathy they're just things that we see in the literature and different elements I've seen in clinical experience in talking to other clinicians that are poor prognostic indicators but they don't deston somebody to having psychopathy or they don't mean certainly they will develop it now again I've used many references here for this video and I'll put the articles that I've used I'll put the references for those articles in the description for this video so let's get started with the eleven signs the child is at risk for psychopathy now if you want to stop here in terms of this video if you want to say well I don't want to into the different science that's certainly okay I'm going to avoid being graphic of course want to try to avoid being graphic as I do in all my videos but some of these signs are a little disturbing so if you stop now you still learned a lot about antisocial personality and psychopathy and conduct disorder so it's a win you can stop now and you've learned something and that's good the details aren't for everybody certainly so now moving into the signs so the first three are referred to as the Macdonald triad and I've seen all three of these and they do seem to have a connection to psychopathy but again they're don't guarantee the first one is bedwetting and I'm going to group a few different elements together here so bedwetting I also have seen children who urinate on furniture and urinate on other children and I think these are really kind of two separate issues bedwetting I think is usually a sign of trauma or at least it's often a sign of trauma and that may be how it connects to psychopathy in the future but urinating on furniture or in places they shouldn't urinate or certainly urinating on other people and other children that's more of a sign of domination the literature isn't really clear on this some theorists think it's domination others just think it's aggression but either way it's a poor prognostic indicator so moving to number two this would be arson and this is really not only arson but a fascination with fire and destruction I've seen this take many forms but usually with children that are really young you'll see getting into matches or looking at flames or candles and being fascinated with that and then it'll develop into having desire to set small fires and then sometimes it leads to again arson so usually doesn't start with no interest and move right to arson that would be a fairly unusual presentation usually it's a fascination that develops over time and the flames the looking at flames looking at videos of flames or fires really captures the attention of the child that's one of the things I've noticed it's not something they can really be distracted from usually too easily there's a genuine interest in flames and destruction and the power of fire so the third sign is hurting small animals sometimes we see this referred to as torturing or killing small animals and this one's particularly disturbing of all these signs this one really stands out is a particularly poor prognostic indicator so again with this one just like we see with a lot of these signs it doesn't necessarily start out by hurting small animals so if somebody just doesn't go from nothing to getting a household pet and torturing them usually we see this starts with an interest in hurting animals and one way this is expressed is on stuffed animals so I've talked to a number of counselors in my career who treat children with conduct disorder and kind of specialize in the area of weil behavioral problems like the cow's unemotional traits and many of them keep stuffed animals in the office and they might have like a teddy bear or some other stuffed animal and they want to see what the children will do in therapy with the animal and sometimes it's really disturbing we know it's a stuffed animal not a real animal I've had clinicians tell me stories of how children ripped off all the limbs of a teddy bear or stuffed animal put the stuffed animal in the door and slam the door on the stuffed animals head flush the stuffed animal down the toilet or attempted to and even tried to set a stuffed animal on fire so fortunately I've never heard of an instance where they were successful at siting the fire but that's fairly disturbing if somebody's going to do that to a stuffed animal again that's a bad sign they may try to do it to an actual animal now this hurting small animal sign is one of those signs that a lot of times we see when a child comes in for counseling because this is an indication that pushes parents kind of over the edge so if the family cat or dog was hurt by a child in the household that is a moment when parents would oftentimes seek counseling for a child so unfortunately this becomes kind of the entry point right so the child hurts a small animal and then they come into therapy so we don't necessarily see the child before that in a lot of cases now this isn't something that all children with cow unemotional traits do again it's just a sign it's just an Associated feature that we see with callous unemotional traits now the fourth sign or risk factor here is cheating friends enemies and individuals who are neutral to the child so what do I mean by this now with children we usually don't see fraud or manipulation at the level we would see with an adult but sometimes we'll see stealing money or stealing toys so if you think about this you think of normal child behavior think well maybe some children would steal toys from other children this isn't particularly shocking or unusual but it strikes me with this particular sign is really the cheating or stealing from friends enemies and from people that would be neutral like that's the distinction usually children will at some point steal toys that's not again super unusual but not from friends not from people who already share their toys with them so that's the line that's being crossed here if a child views another child as an enemy and they take something from them that's one thing it's not pro-social but that's one thing but to take toys or other material goods from a friend that's what really seems unusual to me and that's really what has a stronger connection to psychopathy not recognizing when somebody's an ally an enemy or neutral having no recognition for that boundary and then just crossing that boundary now the fifth sign really usually applies to children they're a little younger maybe even as young as 3 or 4 years old but it can of course apply to children a little older as well and this is ignoring another child who is crying this is a bad prognostic indicator one of the theories here is that children who have psychopathic tendencies or traits or callous unemotional traits can't recognize the stress in faces so if they see the another child is crying they're not going to react to that that's not something they recognize as being problematic and the reason that this sign tends to matter I think is because we believe that this inability to recognize distress and faces leads to aggression so one of the things about someone who has a fearful expression or who's crying in a sense it can be a sign of submission it can be a sign that somebody's not a threat to you but if somebody can't see that sign if a child can't recognize that another child is trying to move away from a fight or submit then the child with the cows and emotional traits is more likely to attack so this really results in a problem where they don't recognize who's trying to dominate them and who's trying to submit to them they look at everybody as potentially threatening so again I'm kind of starting here with ignoring a child who's crying and moving to potential attacks but that's really what we worry about what this particular sign has indicated the sixth sign is being dominant with an authority figure so let me give some examples of this one of the most distressing or alarming symptoms or signs connected with this risk factor is attacking a teacher if we look at the research literature we see that when a child commits crimes like an adolescent commits crimes and they look back at the history that child most of the time they see some sort of incident that involves somebody being dominant with an authority figure and a lot of times that comes in the form of attacking a school teacher so this really kind of breaks from the conventional thinking that a child would be kind of afraid to attack a teacher or would submit instead we see a child trying to dominate I've also seen this with children who attack police officers again that's a poor prognostic indicator I would say it's a bad sign if a child hacks anyone regardless of whether that individual is an authority figure or not but on top of this what really worries me is when there's a weapon used so it's one thing to impulsively attack or try to dominate somebody that's problematic but to use a weapon kind of shows planning and an intent to really do a lot of damage and potentially lethal damage so that's even more worrisome when you add the weapon on to the attack also if the attack is unprovoked that just adds more alarm to that particular sign so number seven the seventh sign that a child could eventually be a psychopath would be committing a crime alone a lot of times we see the children to commit crimes it's relatively common but it's peer pressure that's involved so they get together with other children and the worry about consequences decreases they take more chances and then commit some sort of crime or there's an excitement element tied to it they want to do something together that's exciting but when we see children to commit crimes alone that's a particularly worrisome indicator now kind of tied to this around criminality I also see that when children get together sometimes they fantasize about crime like they'll see these different movies about a jewel heist for example or a bank robbery and they'll start to plan out the crime like can they break into the museum or the bank whatever at night and steal this high-value object but if an individual has the limited pro-social emotions the cows on emotional traits they're more likely to introduce the idea of harming somebody into those crime fantasies so if children are talking about a bank robbery kind of hypothetically again not seriously planning a bank robbery but just talking about how they would get away with it and a child introduces the idea of just knocking the guard out or something like that that's really jumping to another level of harm and it's a poor prognostic indicator so the eighth sign here is a desire to see disturbing images or scenes and this really connects to the lack of empathy so if there is an article about a car accident like in a newspaper or online and a child accesses that they may be disappointed because they couldn't see the bodies they couldn't see the dead bodies in the car accident or the injured bodies so again most people may look at the picture they may want to see how bad the Clarkson was but this is really a desire to see that people were hurt and you could look at this for another angle too sometimes with children have callous unemotional traits they really mentioned this idea that they want to see somebody die they want to actually see a human being pass away this is something I've heard dozens of times and it's no less distressing the 20th or 30th time you hear it as it was the first time you hear it and what's interesting about this is the child doesn't always want to be the cause of the death but they just want to see the death now sometimes they do want to cause the death and this only magnifies to worry even more this is really probably one of the most disturbing elements that we see with the cows emotional traits when a child says to you as a counselor that they want to cause someone's death because they want to see it take place so it's disturbing no matter what the reason would be but for whatever reason for me anyway that just strikes me as particularly disturbing this one is frightening and a very poor prognostic indicator so moving to number nine this one is about how sometimes children can be fearless with consequences so one thing we see with callous unemotional traits is that children aren't afraid of timeouts are not afraid of punishment they're not even afraid of physical pain so it's related to fearless dominance which is a characteristic of psychopathy we also see that after the punishment they resume the bad behavior almost immediately so it's really like the punishment that consequences just don't matter at all now what's interesting about this sign though is a lot of times when this is present a child will still be motivated by reward so they're not afraid of punishment but they're still motivated by reward so it's that's a kind of interesting dynamic when trying to lay out behavioral plans that will help a child move away from cows on emotional traits the tenth sign is when a child bullies other children and what's particularly notable here with this one is when there's a desire for the child to create fear in another child so it's not about just taking something from them but when a child really wants another person to fear them and when I find interesting here is again we see a deficit and the ability to recognize fear but that doesn't mean that a child doesn't know that fear exists is a construct so the last sign the eleventh sign that a child could potentially become a psychopath is poor parenting and we see this over and over in the research literature cold parenting having negative reactions to a child when they disclose something failing to provide a child positive feedback or being highly critical and I think as well neglect any type of neglect and abuse we know is connected to psychopathy now it's interesting here is if you look at some of the horrible things that sometimes parents do it becomes understandable like psychopathy children developing into Psychopaths eventually becomes understandable now I'm going to go through some of the things I've seen here because they're just they're too much but some of the traumatic events you really just look at the horror behind what children have to endure at the hands of some bad parents criminally bad parents you wonder how they could become anything else but psychopathic it makes sense the child would become cold and distant and try to have feelings be removed from them be detached from feelings and not develop empathy now another part of this of course we see in the literature that psychopathic traits in children do seem to worsen parenting practices so it's not just a one-way street here sometimes parenting can lead to psychopathy and sometimes psychopathy can lead to bad parenting so just as is the case with all these different signs the relationship between the sign and psychopathy is complex so with all this talk about how children can develop psychopathic traits callous unemotional traits and eventually develop psychopathy is there any hope does treatment tend to work well we know that there is some success that has been demonstrated with treatment so treatment is always a good option and the earlier the better we know the recovery may be possible although many clinicians believe that the type of recovery is really simply an adjustment so a child who develops into a psychopath may not be an active psychopath in terms of criminality they may learn to adjust to society's norms they may still have a lot of characteristics like low empathy but they learn that they can get more of what they want by following the law as opposed to breaking the law so this is kind of a grim view of recovery from psychopathy and a groom few of how a child could develop into a psychopath but a lot of clinicians believe this a lot of clinicians believe that the psychopathy really can't be eradicated somebody can just adjust to that type of personality but either way we know that the bottom line is success in terms of society we may not be able to eliminate psychopathy always but we can still help children to develop into productive citizens as they move into adulthood so again it just kind of acknowledges the concerns and the seriousness around psychopathy it would be dismissive I think to say well know if a child has callous unemotional traits there's no risk that they'll develop into psychopathy and even if they do we can work it out with treatment that's just not the case there is a risk and the treatment is not always successful and sometimes when it is it's simply functionally successful in terms of society it doesn't really change the underlying traits now on the topic of treatment success one of the trends I've seen over the last few years and again this is understandable there's a lot of agencies struggle to deal with children who have callous unemotional traits especially if there's any violence involved so what happens is they get kicked out of these agencies anger referred to agencies that in theory can handle these behaviors but we see very few agencies that are willing to take children especially again with the violent aspect included so really the children that would be at the most risk to developing psychopathy I remember visiting agency a few years ago when I was walking through the hallway so I was moving through these interior doors they had so we had a hallway I was going through these offices and one of the offices didn't have a door and it seemed unusual because it had a doorframe and you could see at one time there were places where the hinges went but they appeared to be torn out so I asked one of the counselors who worked there what happened and they were telling me that there was a child they were treating and a child was around eight to ten years old and I broke the door off the hinges so they Ram their whole body into the door including their head so they just stood up I got angry and they ran into the door repeatedly so they're inside the office here with the counselor where this happened until the door broke and just fell into the hallway and then just walked away so you saw that all the hinges again were ripped right out of the doorframe and apparently the doorknob was broken off the door as well so they never bothered to replace it they just used the office for something else I don't know if there's storage or where they did with it but they decided not to replace that door and they decided for similar sessions they were just going to leave the door open and they made some other changes to avoid that becoming a problem with confidentiality and on top of that they changed their policy so that any violence there's any violent act by any child that was it they were going to be discharged before they had tried to work with a child but after that they weren't going to do any more and I can appreciate both sides of this right we need to treat children who have these traits to help prevent them from becoming psychopathic because the damage they can do as an adult in theory at least would be much worse we also have to protect counselors and staff and nobody wants to work in a work environment where they're threatened and they have to fear for their safety so I can appreciate again both sides of this I'm not sure there's really any answer except more funding for agencies that are capable of handling children that are at risk to become psychopathic but of course it's always a simplistic answer when you say well throw more money at the problem but I'm just not sure how else to address this issue counselors aren't gonna work in fear but we do have to address the psychopathy issue because of all the violent crime that's attached to it so it's an interesting problem and I wish I had a better answer in terms of a solution now whenever I talk about topics like psychopathy and antisocial personality order especially one like this we're talking about the signs that could lead to it and children I know that they're going to be a lot of strong opinions and various directions and different experiences so if you have opinions that are the same mine or different or other thoughts please put those in the comments as always I hope you found my description about risk factors for psychopathy to be interesting thanks for watching

Channel: Dr. Todd Grande

Views: 640,255

Rating: 4.9004679 out of 5

Keywords: Signs of child psychopathy, psychopathic child, bedwetting, arson, fascination with fire, destroying property, hurting small animals, practicing on stuffed animals, cheating, failing to recognize distress, attacking a teacher, dominant with authority figure, fantasizing about a crime, disturbing images scenes, fearless, bullying, cold parenting, neglect

Id: 7pKYmCp3-Hs

Length: 26min 49sec (1609 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 04 2019