A Psychologist Called Me A Sociopath When I Was 4

The place was hunter green and tan, and everything was too big - that's my memory of the office, all I can drum up through the haze of early childhood. No one bothered to tell me where we were or why - concepts that would only be lost on a four year-old. So I busied myself as best I could until it was my turn to go into the office, the smaller one.

Some people are intimidated by psychologists, though most of them at least have an understanding of the person to whom they are speaking. What was I to make of this man and the test he was giving me? Logic problems, word games - all pretty boring. The other questions made even less sense than that, and time was moving very slowly, and I just wanted to leave. But I sat in my chair, as obedient and compliant as ever, and did everything I was told.

Many years would pass before I had a solid grasp on what was going on that day. I'd been taken there on recommendation from my teachers and caretakers to my adoptive parents. Everyone seemed to think I was too damn smart and too damn strange - and when you're smart and when you're strange, people get concerned.

Even more time would pass before I got a chance to read exactly what he had told my parents. First, that I was beyond "bright" and practically a genius. Second, that I had the makings of a future serial killer.

In response to your inevitable first question: No, I am not a serial killer (which is just what a serial killer would say). Nor could I tell you exactly what guided his opinion. Popular depictions of the young sociopath land on a common stereotype - the dead-eyed moppet with the hollow laugh, obsessed with knives and fire and a danger to the neighborhood cats. You never see me - the fastidious kid who believed everything the grown-ups told him and got along better with dogs than other children.

In reconstructing this odd bit of my childhood, I've realized that I was sitting at the confluence of three specific socio-cultural factors, and it was this triad that led this man to call a preschooler a narcissistic monster.

First was the state of the nation. The old are always fearful of the young, but that terror runs much deeper in an age of high crime - and in the 80's, crime in the U.S. was as high as it had ever been. Offenses against both people and property had been on the rise for decades, with everyone from serious pundits to science fiction writers predicting (incorrectly, as it turns out) that it would only get worse. Thus began the search for the mythical "superpredator," the irredeemable criminal nurtured and adapted for a violent society.

Second was a nasty little belief - shamefully common among laymen and professionals alike - in something dubbed "adopted child syndrome." The understanding went that adoption was such a psychologically harmful thing that the children could not possibly grow up healthy. It was a belief helped along by anti-adoption groups opting to "help" children by compiling lists of adopted murderers, as though this were the primary cause of their violence (and for the record, it isn't even in the top ten).

Third - and this one is key - was a brand new diagnosis. You see, there was one obstacle stopping mental health practitioners from their quest to stop all those superpredator adoptees: You're not actually allowed to diagnose an antisocial personality in a minor under a certain age. The solution to this problem would come out of post-Communist Romania in the form of reactive attachment disorder.

RAD is typically caused by early childhood neglect of the kind seen in Romanian orphanages under the Ceausescu regime. It's not a subtle disorder - such children can't bear to be touched and are prone to becoming inchoately violent with little provocation. It is a very rare diagnosis...except in the United States in the early 90's. RAD became a loophole enabling unscrupulous mental health practitioners to brand young children as sociopaths, for offenses as trivial as shoplifting or truancy - or just being a bit too odd for comfort.

This experience is something I recall from time to time, usually when some psychiatric condition becomes vogue and people start tossing it around with abandon. At the moment, it's narcissistic personality disorder - a diagnosis casually dropped by both actual experts (who are abrogating their professional responsibilities by diagnosing, en masse, people they've never met) and inexplicably popular non-experts (who are more than happy to expound on anything they've read about on Wikipedia). In the world of pop science, such easy diagnoses explain things so well that it doesn't matter if they're factual.

But I've seen personally what happens when one is careless with their medical terms, so please be cautious when reading or listening to such people - and rein yourself in. Remember, not everyone you think is weird is a serial killer.