Psychopaths are seldom serial killers, but are more common than usually thought.

This is a short discussion on psychopaths taken from the MSN site ( my homepage).  I submit this observation and question for you:

Since psychopaths are more common than thought, then perhaps they blend in well.  Are any of the characteristics attributed to them thought to be useful today?

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Psychopathy Is Not A Psychiatric Diagnosis

Though the term psychopath is often thrown around in criminal justice settings and hypothesizing media, psychopathy is not a recognized psychiatric or psychological disorder. Psychopathy as a term has been inconsistently used in the medical community for years, but is now recognized as either a subcategory or extension of antisocial personality disorder.

Critics have argued both for and against the idea that antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy are synonymous, but there has yet to be a concrete decision on the issue. The hallmarks of what’s typically seen as a psychopath include a lack of empathy and feeling for others, selfishness, lack of guilt, and a superficial charm that manifests exclusively to manipulate others. Read the rest of this entry »