The Hard Sell for Psychopathy Research Funding

Details: Published: November 30, 1999

Last week, The New Yorker ran an article about neuroscientist Kent Kiehl's search for the neurological basis of psychopathy. Kiehl points out that despite the benefit that such research could have, funding is difficult to come by. When asked why funding for research concerning other mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, is more plentiful, he answered, “Because schizophrenics are seen as victims, and psychopaths are seen as predators. The former we feel empathy for, the latter we lock up.” While he's probably right, it's a strange argument. Kiehl's goal is to eventually find a cure for psychopathy, and while this could help psychopaths themselves, the greatest benefit would be to society as a whole. As Kiehl points out, "Crime is a trillion-dollar-a-year problem. The average psychopath will be convicted of four violent crimes by the age of forty." Surely the families of psychopaths' victims would hope for a cure for psychopathy and no taxpayer would mind a reduction in the prison population. However, psychopaths themselves might not want to be cured. A cure might keep them out of jail, but the adjustment from psychopathy to normalcy, complete with a new found understanding of the harm they have caused others and a deflation of their inflated egos, could be difficult. Among other traits, psychopaths are characterized by a lack of remorse and a high sense of self-worth, so it seems unlikely that they would want to change. In a 2007 Nature article, one prison inmate was quoted, "I think my high psychopath score is a talent, not a sickness — I can make good strong decisions, and it’s good to have some distance with people." Perhaps a cure would be the greatest punishment for a psychopath. If neuroimaging can be used to find the cause of psychopathy and eventually a cure, it seems possible that it could one day be used to predict who will become a violent psychopath. This, I believe, is why the public is resistant to funding projects like Kiehl's. Comments about a blog reporting on the New Yorker article have compared the use of his research to Nazis' justifications of the Holocaust and expressed fear that "it's only the poor and powerless who get forced into being 'evaluated' by the mental health industry". This belief--that research into psychopathy could be used both to wrongly help criminals and wrongly target innocent people--is the reason for the lack of psychopathy research funding. But there are ways around it. The study mentioned in the Nature article uses prisoners with psychopathic traits, but its goals are not to cure psychopathy or even to better understand the neuroscience behind it. The study is not "about" psychopathy- it is about empathy. And as people with schizophrenia or autism have an apparent inability to express or possibly feel empathy, empathy research might be an easier sell to the public and potential sources of funding than psychopathy research.

The Hard Sell for Psychopathy Research Funding

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