Antisocial Personality Disorder VS Conduct Disorder

Antisocial Personality Disorder – Child version

Conduct disorder is a severe children and adolescence mental and behavioral problems. It is more severe than oppositional divine disorder.  Simply put into words, most of the people view conduct disorder as delinquency behavior rather than a mental illness.

In Hong Kong, there are about around 6% of prevalence in conduct disorder among children aged below 18.  Antisocial behavior is one of the contexts in conduct disorder. The behaviors include stealing, lying, disobeying, destroying properties, which are reported common by 50% of parents. Boys are more common in childhood, but relatively equal by adolescence.

The main difference between antisocial personality disorder and conduct disorder lies on the age of 18, one of the criteria of antisocial personality disorder. Below 18, children and adolescence would only met the criteria of conduct disorder.

Antisocial behaviors externalized by adolescence – a mix of impulsive, overactive, aggressive and delinquent acts, has independent sub-dimensions

Delinquent (rule violations)	Aggressive (Fighting)
Overt (Visible acts – fighting)	Covet (Hidden acts – Lying)
Destructive (Cruelty to animals)	Nondestructive (Arguing)

As we are quite familiar with antisocial personality disorder (If not, please refer to my earlier blog entry), there are some profile information of Conduct Disorder.

Children suffering from CD display at least one symptom before age 10, boys are more likely to be suffering CD. Also, those children do not display empathy, and concern of others; rather plain affect. About 40% of CD children develop into Antisocial Personality Disorder, a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of the rights of others, as well as involvement in multiple illegal acts.

Moreover, they tend to have verbal impairments, which contribute to the lack of development of self-control, emotion, and social cognition.

To conclude, additionally, the success of failure in treating antisocial behavior depends on the type and severity of child’s conduct problem. SES (Socio-economic status) is one of the factor of treatment as well.

Serial Killer with ASPD (crime)

Antisocial Personality Disorder can be concluded that, patients suffering from destructive thinking, abnormal perception of situations, and have no remorse. Also, they violate rules, have no idea of right or wrong.

Another hallmark of patients having antisocial personality disorder is they are charming, however they treat people around them as instruments to achieve their goals.

In the history, there were criminals with antisocial personality disorder committing serial killing. Applying the characteristics the serial killers look just like everyone else, but charming, polite, soft-spoken.

In this article, a famous serial killer with antisocial personality disorder will be discussed: Edward Gein. He was the inspirational of several movies portraying serial killer: Psycho, The Texas chainsaw massacre, etc. 

Most of the antisocial personality disorder patients do not show remorse of what they have done. If they get caught, for instance, they do not think there is anything wrong with the behavior, instead they will blame on themselves on getting caught, and how they will not get caught next time. 

As the patients do not show remorse or regret to their behavior, serial killer with antisocial personality disorder treat their victims brutally. Edward Gein skilled his victims, exhumed the corpses, and used the parts of the bodies as decoration in his home. 

Above only showed the behavior in common between antisocial personality disorder patients and serial killers. Is there any common cause and background between the two ?

Usually genes play a role in personalities. There are aspects of a person's personality passed on by his/her parents, such as optimistic, shyness. Nurture play an important part extra to nature. Environment or life situations, for instance childhood (Alcoholic parents, etc), relationship with families (Being abused), parenting style (Not Empathetic to own children). Most of the serial killers in history seem to have had a dysfunctional family structure and setting, and were abused in their childhood, either emotionally or physically. The abusive behavior received seems to activate some kind of psychological trigger in their deep down mind, increasing the feeling of inadequacy, low self-esteem, desire to hurt others as a form of self-release. 

In the case of Edward Gein, he had an alcoholic father, domineering mother, a criticizing brother. His father was violent when using substances; his mother may had abused Edward when he was a child, while warning Edward about pre-marital sex. After his dad died, his mother took over the family, decided everything herself, and tyrannized Edward and his brother's life. His brother died in the same year with his mother's death, and Edward was suspected to be the one who killed his brother who criticized Edward for his excessive love to his mother.)

While he was the only one who left alive in the family, he started to withdraw from society and reality, and that was when his life became more and more bizarre. He dug up a woman body from a cemetery, using real body as experiment, and stored the organs for later meals. Most importantly in his background, he killed women mostly around the same age as his mother when she died.)

To conclude for this entry, there are risk factors for antisocial personality disorder patients to become criminals. Above, Edward Gein was only one of the symbolic serial killer in history of America. While researchers identified that they kept trophies of their crime to refuel their fantasy, they are still looking for an explanation of how fantasy wrap up the thrive in insolation, and the need to live the isolation out.