Today’s Word of the Day is psychopathy, a noun that means “a mental disorder in which an individual manifests amoral and antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, failure to learn from experience, etc.” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/psychopathy), although more generally it can mean “any mental disease.”

According to etymonline, the word first appears in the English language in “1847, ‘derangement of the mental functions,’ from psycho- + -pathy, on the model of German Psychopathie. First attested in a translation of Feuchtersleben’s ‘Lehrbuch der ärztlichen Seelenkunde’ (1845),” meaning Textbook of Medical Psychology. Yesterday, we looked at a word that included a combining form of a word. Today we have a word that is made up of two word forming elements, psycho– and –pathy. In other words, while we have a word psycho, that word is really just an abbreviated form of several words that start with that word-combining form, words like psychology, psychopath, psychologist, and psychopathic.

So etymonline gives us etymologies for both of these word-forming elements.

• Psycho-: word-forming element meaning “mind, mental; spirit, unconscious,” from Greek combining form of psykhē “the soul, mind, spirit; life, one’s life, the invisible animating principle or entity which occupies and directs the physical body; understanding, the mind (as the seat of thought), faculty of reason” (see psyche). It also was used to form compounds in Greek, such as psychapates “soul-beguiling” (with apate “deceit”).
• -pathy: word-forming element of Greek origin meaning “feeling, suffering, emotion; disorder, disease,” from Latin -pathia, from Greek -patheia “act of suffering, feeling” (from PIE root *kwent(h)- “to suffer”). In the meaning “system of treatment of disease, method, cure, curative treatment” it is abstracted from homeopathy.

I ran across the word psychopathy in relation to one of the more interesting news stories of the past couple years, at least here in South Carolina, and that is the continuing saga of Alex Murdaugh (pronounced more like Alik Murdick). Murdaugh was a lawyer in the South Carolina low country, from a long line of lawyers who had significant power and influence in Hampton County. According to the accusations against Murdaugh, he stole money from his clients for years, including the children of his long-time housekeeper who died on the Murdaugh property, though we are not sure why. His son Paul, while drunk even though he was not 21, drove a boat into a bridge abutment, killing one of the passengers. Then, according to the jury that convicted him, he killed his wife and his son Paul. Apparently, the court looking into the death of Mallory Beach, the young woman who died in the boat accident, had demanded to look at the family’s financial records, and that is, perhaps, why Murdaugh killed Paul, to stop the trial. Then, to top things off, Murdaugh had an acquaintance, according to the accusation, shoot at him while he was stopped along the side of a road so that Murdaugh could claim that his whole family was under attack.

I have read a good bit about this case, and I’ve listened to a lot of podcasts about it, and it was listening to a podcast today when I heard about the Psychopathy Checklist (or Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised), a psychological tool for identifying the presence and extent of psychopathy in individuals. It was developed in the 1970s by a Canadian psychologist named Hare, and it is primarily for use with criminals.

There are 20 items in the checklist, according to Wikipedia:

• Item 1: Glibness/superficial charm
• Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth
• Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
• Item 4: Pathological lying
• Item 5: Conning/manipulative
• Item 6: Lack of remorse or guilt
• Item 7: Shallow affect
• Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy
• Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle
• Item 10: Poor behavioral controls
• Item 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior
• Item 12: Early behavior problems
• Item 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals
• Item 14: Impulsivity
• Item 15: Irresponsibility
• Item 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
• Item 17: Many short-term marital relationships
• Item 18: Juvenile delinquency
• Item 19: Revocation of conditional release
• Item 20: Criminal versatility

Individuals are given a score of 0, 1, or 2 on each of the items, and a score higher than 30 indicates psychopathy.

The speaker on the podcast said that a lot of people associate psychopathy with criminals and with lowlifes (think the Bates character in the Hitchcock film Psycho), but in reality, people with psychopathy often go into fields which might surprise others, fields that involve having power and control over other people. Alex Murdaugh was, of course, a lawyer. Forbes published an article in 2013 identifying the top 10 jobs that attrack psychopaths. Lawyer was second. Civil servant was ten; police officer was seven (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2013/01/05/the-top-10-jobs-that-attract-psychopaths/?sh=619e5c3a4d80).

Personally, I think the one that scares me the most is police officer because our government bestows on them a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Combining items 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 16 in a person who has a gun is just scary. While the Hare Psychopathy Checklist may be intended for use with incarcerated individuals, it would not be a bad idea if anyone wanting to be a police officer be evaluated using such a tool. There is even an article from 2018 and an academic study from 2020 looking at exactly this issue.

The image today is a picture from The Sun newspaper of a serial rapist who was a police office in the UK. According to the article, his daughter called him a psychopath. It also says that he assaulted 30 women over a five-year period: “It was claimed he told his victims: ‘I am the law, I can do anything I want.’” Mitchell was handed two life sentences by a court in 2011, but in 2018 he was released by a parole board, so apparently he was sort of right.