Depression or other mood disorders often co-exist with antisocial personality disorder.
“Mood disorders are some of the most common conditions accompanying ASP and are among the more treatable. For reasons that remain unknown, depressed patients with personality disorders tend to not respond as well to antidepressant medication as depressed patients without personality disorders.”
https://psychcentral.com/lib/treatment-for-antisocial-personality-disorder/
“But there’s a big difference between this girl and kids who are frightening or hostile. I think sometimes people who tell kids to be nicer to the classmates who don’t fit in are thinking primarily of harmless but unusual people like the girl who became my friend, but the idea gets extrapolated to bullies and downright scary kids, who need a different kind of response.”
“Have rates of sociopathy actually increased in recent years?”
I’m not sure sociopathy has increased, but awareness certainly has.
Eons ago, in elementary school we had a couple kids expelled for behavior. I remember one kid who was a huge physical bully (and just a huge scary kid) and nobody could deal with him. He got expelled and I don’t know what happened to him afterwards. I don’t think anyone cared except we could finally breathe a sigh of relief in not having to deal with him (teachers included). I’m not sure of the line where schools went from places of learning to social experiments.
I read the op-ed piece. The part that leaped out at me was that the girl looks back horrified that she actually sat there trying to cope with a known bully as part of “peer tutoring”. I’m horrified too. Where the heck have the real adults and common sense disappeared to?
yes, both awareness of, and the potential lethality of the crimes related to sociopathy have increased. I don’t think that has much to do with the increase in anxiety/depression, which is common, compared to sociopathy, which is both rare and frequently untreatable.
Many kids are a mess.
This may have always been true or it may be something new. (I lean toward the former explanation because a lot of kids were a mess back when I was in school myself, including me.)
But I want to make sure that nobody equates anxiety or depression with sociopathy. I wouldn’t want kids who are having a hard time because of anxiety or depression to be afraid to seek help for fear that they’ll be expelled from school because they’re a danger to their classmates. They’re not a danger because of their anxiety or depression (although if they have coexisting sociopathy, they might be a danger because of that).
Our D had a special needs in her class who was a bully and tried to choke classmates. The teacher wouldn’t do anything because she was untrained and the kid was special needs being mainstreamed. We ended up transferring our D out of the school as she became afraid to go to school.
If kids are going to be mainstreamed, the teachers have to be trained and there have to be sufficient resources so none of the other kids are endangered. Sadly unprepared, underresourced teachers are often tasked with teaching in disruptive environments.
When I was a special ed hearings officer, the kid was often a mess, family and classroom, so there was no good and stable place for the kid. It was very heart-wrenching and so many gaps in the “safety net.”
Even prepared, well-trained teachers have problems with kids like this. There are a lot of restrictions in terms of restraining or providing consequences to children in school. And frankly, some kids and adults are psychopaths and they are not curable.
It just feels wrong that one or two kids are allowed to terrorize a classroom. I like the concept of mainstreaming but in practice it doesn’t work if the special needs kid is allowed free reign to bully and attack peers.
The kid was only 7 or 8 and already knew rules didn’t apply to her, in or outside of the classroom
D experienced the same thing in kindergarten too and H spent a weekend teaching D to hit back when hit by bullies in class. The teacher always tried to gloss everything off as “an accident.” The same aggressor and same victim time and again is NOT an accident. Once D hit back, D resolved the problem.
Not teaching special needs kids that they have to keep their body parts to themselves and not hit or hurt others is important for them to function in society. Giving them a pass further isolates them and makes kids dislike them. How is that good for anyone?
Oh dear, the murderer Cruz has a fan club! This is very troubling.