On Reforming Psychopaths

A recent TED talk came out that seeks to rehabilitate psychopaths, in part through restorative justice.  Here is my response to that talk.

I am all for restorative justice in carefully supervised settings. I am also for rehabilitating inmates and giving them life and work skills, rather than just warehousing them. Yet it still a very open question regarding whether psychopaths are able to change, and also, whether people with constricted amygdalas are able to make significant changes in their emotional responses. So far, the research paints a pretty bleak picture. Check out the work on children of psychopaths–even in this population, it takes extremely concerted ongoing effort throughout child development to produce an adult with a near-normal facility with empathy.

As someone who has worked with individuals who have difficulty experiencing empathy, I can only say that these situations are very hard to treat to bring lasting change.  Of course, there is always hope.  But please don’t underestimate the intense daily effort and teamwork required in these situations.  It takes more than a village; it takes a village that cares and is willing to dedicate resources to rehabilitating these folks.  Let us not be caught up in an ivory-tower Luciferic illusion that all can be brought to healing through purely spiritual methods.  Intense hard work, hour by hour, in interpersonal settings is required.  This in turn requires caretakers that are basically willing to be abused in the process of effecting change for their clients.  This in itself is a mighty practice in astral cleansing for the caregivers.  And even then, change is in slow, small increments, requiring a fierce dedication to hope.  Learning to discern the astral/etheric/physical dynamics of psychological disorders is only one step (and one that I don’t think very much research has been done on in real circumstances).  Effecting change requires repetition of salutatory habits and experiences, sometimes requiring years before effects begin to noticeably impact the physical body (& brain).  This, I believe, is a Manichaean path, and it is not an easy road to travel.