With the recent spate of writing about sociopathy—including Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test and a New York Times story on possibly psychopathic children—it was only a matter of time before we got a firsthand account from someone who actually has the disorder.
That someone is M. E. Thomas, and a chapter from her new book Confessions of a Sociopath is excerpted on Psychology Today‘s website. A preview:
The father of a friend in grade school had to pull me aside and sternly ask me to stop beating his daughter. She was a skinny, stringy thing with a goofy laugh, as if she were asking to be slapped. I didn’t know that I was doing something bad. It didn’t even occur to me that it would hurt her or that she might not like it.
