I was tested using the PCL-R at the behest of my psychologist, due to the severity of my Callous-Unemotional traits and some weird things surrounding my lack of a concrete self-identity. I scored high enough to be considered a psychopath. I didn't even know that I had been tested until months afterwards, but the whole test took a lot longer than 5 hours. Here's what I can tell you about "psychopathy," from my experience and what I learned from my clinicians.


There's no such thing as psychopaths.

Depending on who is administering the test and why, you will score differently. The "cut off" points of 25 in Europe and 30 in the US on the PCL, for instance, are completely arbitrary. Even when you take specific studies into account, which have their own ways of rating psychopathic traits, each study tends to focus on a specific psychopathic trait and have its own threshold.

This line between "highly psychopathic" and "definitely a psychopath" is really a construct designed to give criminal attorneys an edge in court. There's debates over whether even well-known psychopaths like ME Thomas, Ted Bundy, James Fallon, and Jeffrey Dahmer can be considered psychopaths.

And, if we're being honest, no mental health diagnosis is really set in stone. They're meant to be used as guidelines for treatment. While they can function to group symptoms together and give you a label for what you're struggling with, it's not as exact a science as you would think.

But, according to Hare, around 1 in 4 people with ASPD would meet the criteria for psychopathy as he outlines it. There are correlations between the various tests for psychopathy. It's not really that psychopaths don't exist as much as it is that psychopaths are hard to really define, even with the tools that we have.

At the end of the day, "psychopath" is just a term for people who are highly psychopathic. Whether one qualifies for that term can be highly contextual, and even a little subjective. That's why AsPD is in the DSM and not Psychopathy.

I don't consider myself a psychopath, I'll put it that way. I think the term is too broad. Some "psychopaths" are highly boastful and vain, some feel some degree of anxiety whereas others are fearless, some are hotheaded whereas others have cold, spiteful contempt. There's too much variety in even diagnosed psychopaths for the word to mean that much. "Psychopathy" refers to a group of traits that make people more likely to fall into criminal recidivism, and not much more.