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Sociopathy

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Edited by Martin Cadwell, Wednesday 1 October 2025 at 16:05

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' to eliminate caldwell returns (take note of the position of the minus sign) or 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

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silhouette of a female face in profile  four highly stylised people facing each other. One is red.  Mental Health

[ 4 minute read ]

As we move towards The World Mental Health Day on the 10th October this year, I thought I might offer snippets on what shape mental ill health may take.

Sociopathy

'Sociopathy is a form of ASPD, characterized by a lack of empathy, disregard for others and persistent breaking of rules' - https://health.clevelandclinic.org/sociopath-personality-disorder

APSD is Anti-Social Personality Disorder. The most obvious symptom is 'having a consistent disregard for the rules and rights of others' (Cleveland Health Clinic). These people are not evil or mad or dangerous by default. I have a neighbour who has APSD. He rides his motorbike sensibly in built-up areas. Being young, he exhibits behaviour consistent with being young (such as he lacks experience in some things; he is trying new things; he is trying to find out where he fits in),  so being able to recognise that he has a mental illness is beyond almost everyone who is not a mental health clinician. My GP refers people who profess to having mental illness to a mental health team. She is not confident that she can diagnose someone as evil because they get in trouble with the law a lot. 

The Cleveland Health Clinic website goes on to say '“Sociopath” is an outdated, harmful term once used to describe someone who’s been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD).'

They go on: '...nearly all signs of this condition involve significant, consistent and persistent disregard for other people.'

  • Strong disregard for social norms, laws or rules at home, at work, in school and other public places
  • Violating the rights of others
  • Minimizing others’ feelings and how they affect other people
  • Chronic manipulation, gaslighting, denial and deceit
  • Difficulty forming healthy relationships
  • Callousness and lack of remorse
  • Acting impulsively without concern for consequences
  • Attempting to gain power and control through aggression
  • A tendency toward petty crime, physical violence or fighting
  • Substance misuse

Like I said, a teenager who falls in with the wrong crowd.

Realistically though, the key thing to be aware of is, their behaviour must be 'significant, consistent and persistent'. Thankfully, even though I question reality, I do it from a position of trying to get a better understanding of reality. I also have a difficulty in forming healthy relationships. PTSD will make sure that the sufferer trusts no-one not to hurt them or to suddenly physically fall apart in instances of combat. 

A distinction can be made between PTSD as a result of domestic violence by a spouse, partner, sibling or parent, wherein the sufferer draws away from what may well be future beneficial relationships for them; and someone who due to having consistent disregard for others, acts impulsively, and is callous and remorseless, may have ASPD (Anti Social Personality Disorder). I think that someone with PTSD is the victim of someone who attempts to gain control and power through aggression, and is not the instigator of it. Indeed, there are many people who attempt to gain control with passive-aggression, as in 'I am right; You should think like me or you are wrong.' My brother would publicly ridicule my naivety to make a comparison to his three years more experience. Essentially, he got the support of a group to shore up his claims of superiority.

Let's face it; if you only have conversations within your own social group of people who only believe in the one and same thing, it is pretty easy to think everyone else is wrong. Thankfully, I only ever say what I think and never back it up with what someone else thinks. I don't overwhelm with numbers. 

When my neighbour with ASPD punched me in the face because I told him he nearly knocked me over on his moped, he didn't care. He acted impulsively and lashed out without thinking of the consequences. He was attempting to gain control using aggression. Another neighbour came along and told me that nobody likes me. I had only been living in my road for six weeks. What she was trying to do was gaslight me with passive-aggression, by trying to persuade me that because the majority have a singular opinion, then my perception of reality must be wrong. She showed a symptom of Anti-Social Personality Disorder. But, she doesn't consistently do this, or even persistently.

So, if I hear that someone has Anti-Social Personality Disorder I am first going to try to imagine what this person's goal is, and how do they shape their behaviour to get it. I am not going to think they are monsters of deception. The likelihood, if we apply only what we are told about people with ASPD is that anyone I meet with ASPD can't act in a consistent way to ever reach a goal anyway. That is plainly not true. While their behaviour and inclination to disrupt may inhibit their own progress we have to allow that every one of us exhibits something in the list above in greater and lesser degrees at different times of our lives, including before our first cup of coffee in the morning; after a divorce; or when we are stressed like immediately before an exam.

I suggest, that we be aware that pretty much all mental illness has crossovers in behaviour and attitude.

I invariably find that it is the person pointing the finger at someone else that is the most interesting person in the room. I find that they are trying to distract people from focusing on themselves. But Why? 

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martin cadwell AA1 mental health

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Edited by Martin Cadwell, Thursday 25 September 2025 at 06:01
 

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' to eliminate caldwell returns (take note of the position of the minus sign) or 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media.

UPDATED 21:48 WEDNESDAY 24TH SEPTEMBER 2025

hegemo.co.uk (one of my websites) accepts anonymous messages either at the bottom of the home page (index page) or via the 'Contact Us' message box. You can use any name you want, but I advise you use a memorable one that should be unusual enough to be recognised as not the same as someone else. The purpose of the site is to allow anonymous messages from users who want to express how they feel. I have publicly shown myself within this blog, hold down the CTRL key for a new page and click the tag 'interview', on the right of these posts to read two posts. Here is the link: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=interview

Search yourself as I have done and share how you feel. Some advice: If you identify that you have a urge to hurt someone don't write it down. That is, in all probability, not really you. Even if you want to write, 'Sometimes I want to punch my boss', don't claim it as yourself; instead hand it off to someone else, as in: 'If someone punched my boss I would celebrate or laugh. OR 'If that nasty woman in high heels punched my boss I would buy everyone a drink because she will be sacked.' Stuff like that. The hardest part is being honest with yourself. Once you are honest, claim it as being you. My outpouring says I am mean and cruel - I am, I am also kind and considerate. I chose not to include that because I was exploring my PTSD, and that means finding the bad stuff. Recognising myself is part of the process of 'habituation'.

Your messages will only go to an email address 'info@hegemo.co.uk' and from there, I will add them to a subdomain blog page which allows tags; so include the tags you want. You can email me at info@hegemo.co.uk in the normal way from your email account, if you want to discuss anything and want a reply. 

silhouette of a female face in profile  four very stylised people facing each other. One is red.  mental health

 

[ 9 minute read ]

Friday the 10th of October is World Mental Health Day. The World Federation for Mental Health (WFMH) introduced World Mental Health Day in 1992. This post is in preparation of that day. My focus is to rehash one of my websites to meet the 10th October 2025 deadline.

AA1 mental health

This post is the only one tagged, 'AA1 mental health' if you want to come back to it. It is alphabetically first in the tag list on the right. It may be picked up by your search engine in a few days time.

If you click on a link within this post, remember to hold down the 'CTRL' key to open it in a new window so you can continue reading this post.

With a certain amount of patience and guessing, it is possible to make assumptions as to how which of my posts get found from the search criteria that the public use. By typing in my name and recognising that the most used search terms correlate with the rankings of my posts in, at least, the DuckDuckGo page ranking index, I can understand that certain words are used instead of 'mental health', yet are interconnected with it. 

I just can't help thinking that a significant number of people typed 'jaded', 'isolation' and 'connection' but really wanted to type 'help'. Page rankings don't, however, give us the answers we really want though.

jaded - Only good for processing - https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=jaded

isolation, connection, dopamine - The lighthouse of my mind - https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=dopamine

interview - Detached Emotions and It is not you, It is mehttps://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=interview

This last, though, follows a prompt in a very recent post. it has been quite popular though.

I might steer people interested in my understanding of how the World Health Organisation sees mental health and ill-health towards some of my earliest blogs.

If someone types my name and 'mental health; there are a lot of entries in the ranking lists on my posts on mental health; mostly after page one though, and most of them are recent posts. However, the information provided in the ranking shows that 'vegetarian' is the search term that has been used to find 'Can't quite make it out. Can you hear me?'

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=852553&tag=vegetarian

'Can't quite make it out. Can you hear me?' is a post in which I describe how I feel my diet affects my mental acuity. But I have not yet tagged it with 'mental health'.

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=307770

 

'Shredded, the day went well also does not, at the time of writing this post, have a tag for mental health, yet it is ranked if 'mental health; is used as a search term.

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=304766

Clearly, Google and A.I. considered some of my posts to be relevant to mental health issues, perhaps because I have included the word in the post text or because the post is deemed to be about mental health. Sneaky!

I am going to make it clear. We all suffer from mental glitches. While, I am not trained in mental health issues, I do feel that I have some experience of mental ill health, both in myself and people close around me throughout my life. One of my aims is to be honest about myself and share it with anyone who cares to listen. To that end, and with how Google and A.I. rank pages, I shall trawl through my OU blog posts and add 'mental ill-health', mental ill health, and 'mental ill health' tags appropriately. even 'mental helath', because that is a typo I nearly always make.

I also have a website that I had an idea for, but haven't been able to manifest what I wanted it to be. I don't think we are allowed to promote our own enterprises in these OU blog spaces, so I have to leave you to decide how to search for the subdomain which is my personal blog. Stylised image of a figure dancing Right now, there are only copies there of some of my posts you might read in this OU blog. However, I would like to publish raw sentiment on how mental health and ill-health affects me, and other content from other people. In that respect, I will, in the near future, invite people to anonymously submit their perception of themselves, so other people can hopefully glean at least a tiny understanding of how they themselves, and others, feel. THIS IS NOW LIVE (21:00 Wednesday 24th September 2015). Hopefully, we can learn to be gentle. I first have to figure out how I can do that though. I can control the comments so they are anonymous in the sub-domain blog, but cannot, at present, prevent spam from chancers. Even though I can write HTML5, JavaScript and CSS (v. 3.01, I think), my website is written with A.I. and I have no experience of changing the code without crashing the site, so I haven't tried.

So, I shall go through my OU blog posts re-tagging, and shape my blog on my own web site for the publication of raw emotion and sentiment; regret; hope; disillusion; frustration and anxiety; joy and happiness; even unrequited love, familial and romantic. If you feel you might want to contribute, you would do well to understand that I am not an advocate for crushing people with rules or convention. Pigeon-holing is out, for me, too. Mental ill-health is like a ball of mercury; If you put your finger on it, or try to pick it up, it will move and coalescence somewhere else. The purpose is for contributors to have a space to be heard and in the letting go of their emotions find some solace by helping others. The principle behind this is: whoever takes charge in a group of people caught in an emergency is least likely to panic. Bad decisions could be made yet inevitably those people are hailed as heroes because things usually work out well. Quite simply, these people have overridden their fears and forsaken their own emotions for the good of others. Isolation can be tempered with satisfaction, no matter how it is contrived.

if anyone wants to contribute in another way......

I just can't help thinking that someone typed 'jaded', 'isolation' and 'connection' but really wanted to type 'help'. Page rankings don't, however, give us the answers we really want though.

All of my OU blog posts that include mental, or ill health tags will also include the Samaritans phone number and website address:

Samaritans phone number 116 123 https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/

Their strap-line is: 'If you need someone to talk to, we listen. We won't judge or tell you what to do.'

Their webpage has a very simple cookie management process, so you can easily disable any tracking by declining cookies.

In the meantime, clicking on the mental health tag, to the right of these posts, and scrolling down the results will give you snippets such as the following, in the post I wrote on the 10th October 2024 titled, 'Hope and Recovery:

Hope and recovery:

Under the Equality Act 2010 an employer or service provider has a responsibility to consider how the individual can be best placed in the work-force and ergonomics need to be assessed accordingly, in order for the individual to continue in work or be a recipient of a service. This Act really applies to disability, which as an umbrella term, includes long-term mental ill-health.

In 1958, Marie Jahoda suggested that there were six criteria that needed to be fulfilled for ideal mental health. Of course, this was also a time when calisthenics was ‘The’ exercise and women were subjugated, either by their own beliefs, or by men who believed that women only had a specific role, or more likely, by both through indoctrination. However, Marie Jahoda seems to have recognised both a woman’s plight and mental ill-health, with the following criteria for mental well-being:

  1. Positive attitude towards the self

  2. Self-actualisation

  3. Autonomy

  4. Resistance to stress

  5. Environmental mastery

  6. Accurate perception of reality

It is part of a series of cuts and pastes from how I answered the questions for a level 2 certificate on 'Mental Health and Mental Health Advocacy in the Workplace' by attempting to use the null hypothesis to prove the positive hypothesis (though mostly unsuccessfully). All my answers to the assignments are uploaded as posts except the answers to one question on specific mental health conditions that need trigger alerts.

Also, I answer questions such as: 

Outline stigma and stereotypes relating to mental health illness

which is also the title of the OU blog post that addresses it. (9th October 2024)

https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=287136

In 'Can policy support the mental health of individuals?' (11th October 2024) I answer the following sub-question in a playful way.

Describe how policy can support the mental health of individuals, including the provision for health and well-being.

'We have come a long way from when witches were drowned or burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages. Burnt or drowned simply because some men and women demonstrated behaviour, such as visions, that may, or may not, be indicative, to their peers, of evil possession by a demon, or suchlike. It is fairly well understood that there were more ‘witches’ in the damp late Summers than when Summer culminated in a dry period. Mould, and mildew, and particularly ergot (which grows on damp rye) were prevalent, and set in, in the prolonged damp and warm days. Ergot is an hallucinogenic. Now, in the modern world, we have killed most of the witches, and both men and women are only prone to mental ill-health instead.

Gall’s Law states that ‘A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.’ - John Gall, systems theorist.

Obviously, trying to see whether someone drowns when held underwater, or burn when tied to a stake surrounded by fire, is not a good system to ascertain whether they are merely unwell or spiritually overrun. But at least, they tried.

Making a single rule to apply where it works well is a good start to making a simple system........'

 

If you are logged in, and think you can help, or want to contribute with either your written piece or in some other way, you can find my email address by clicking my name at the top of my posts.

Seek help from your family, your tutor, the Samaritans, Student Services, or especially a medical practitioner. Just don't be silent.

This post is the only one tagged, 'AA1 mental health' if you want to come back to it. It is alphabetically first in the tag list on the right. It may be picked up by your search engine in a few days time

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