2012年10月7日 星期日

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.

2 則留言:

  1. I concur with you that environmental factors play an important role to develop a serial killer with anti-social personality disorder. However, lately, I learnt from the Criminal Mind series that there are some genetic or biological basis explanations for serial killer. It mentioned that the neurosciences study of criminal brains (especially Dr. Jim Fallon) showed that most of the sociopaths and psychopaths have low activity or damage to their orbital cortex, a brain area that involved with ethical behavior, oral decision and impulse control. Moreover, it also mentioned that under the effects of high risk gene (MAOA GENE), psychopath brain was bathed in way too much serotonin during fetal development. As an adult this brain is now numb to serotonin’s calming effects. This is a recipe for catastrophe. So when the fetus reaches the day of labor, a potential serial killer is born. So when the child face great amount of stress, violence and traumatized events continuously, it triggers the onset of the violent acts and the real serial killer is born. I think this is really an interesting topic for us to explore.
    Felice

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