Antisocial personality disorder – what is it, really?

Have you recently experienced someone acting completely out of line or losing control over themselves?

In Psychiatry, patterns of repetitive behavior during childhood and adolescence where the social norms or boundaries of others are violated are called ‘conduct disorder’. I am not a particular fan of this term as it reminds me a bit of authoritarian teachers and governments. But what it actually describes if being used by psychiatrists and therapists, is a symptom range of over-aggressive behavior, bullying, lying, cruel behavior toward people and pets, destructive behavior, vandalism and stealing, that should give you an idea of what it actually means.

Often, affected children come from a difficult family background with abusive, aggressive or addicted parents. If the underlying problems aren’t resolved, these children might develop more serious personality disorders as adults: particularly antisocial personality disorder, bipolar disorders or psychopathy. All of these increase the risk to cause or experience physical injuries, to suffer from depression, addiction, incarceration or even homicide and suicide, as they often intimidate others or initiate physical fights.

Antisocial persons don’t feel much of an inhibition to use weapons, and they have a tendency to deceit, con, steal or destroy property. While their behavior might seem confident and decisive at the outside, they can in fact feel very alone, anxious and hopeless, which often leads to alcohol abuse, depression or other problems.

One cause of the aggressive behavior of antisocial persons can be that they developed a ‘proactive’ but in fact mostly inappropriate, extreme form of self protection or need it as a valve to get rid of the emotional tensions they feel, not only inside themselves but also towards others. Unfortunately, in the case of psychopathic personality traits, this particular kind of relief is often combined with a lack of empathy and sympathetic concern for others, which reduces the hurdles to impose emotional or physical force on others. Thus, it is usually a good idea to avoid any open conflict with such aggressors. They would be unable to empathize with their victim or keep the conflict on a verbal level, let alone resolve it in a constructive manner. The best approach is usually to let them cool off and give them space and to give it another try at another day.