Kent A. Kiehl Quotes & Sayings

Cleckley reported that psychopaths never experience grief, honesty, deep joy, or genuine despair. From my own experience, I would add to Cleckley's observations that the psychopath never ruminates on anything.

Rumination is a process that often contributes to depression and in extreme forms to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The process of rumination is often associated with some anxiety or subjective feeling of concern or worry, and this can help precipitate change in the individual in order to reduce the anxiety.

The psychopath experiences none of this.

Indeed, if you ask a psychopath if he has ever worried about whether he left the house with the stove on (a common problem among those with obsessive-compulsive disorder), he will look at you like you are an alien, in stunned disbelief. — Kent A. Kiehl

Fact: Seventy-seven percent of psychopaths in the United States are incarcerated. — Kent A. Kiehl

Sociopathy and psychopathy are very different. Sociopathy includes a broad, heterogeneous category of individuals who act antisocially, the causes of which are believed to be social and environmental in nature. Psychopathy is a term grounded in biology and genetics and is truly agnostic to causes or etiology. In other words, genetics and the makeup of the brain, as well as environment, contribute to the construct of psychopathy. Although the term sociopathy is not used in modern academic circles to mean "psychopathy" anymore, some people continue to confuse the terms. — Kent A. Kiehl

Another difference between psychopaths and other inmates is that psychopaths don't get distressed by being in prison. Most inmates get depressed when they get inside, and they find prison to be a stressful experience. A hallmark feature of psychopaths' disorder is that they don't get bothered by much of anything. They don't ruminate and they don't get depressed. — Kent A. Kiehl

Gary would become my first perfect score - a 40 out of 40 on the Psychopathy Checklist, one of only a handful that I would find in the next twenty years. — Kent A. Kiehl

Fact: A psychopath is born every 47 seconds. — Kent A. Kiehl

Fact: There are over 29,000,000 psychopaths worldwide. — Kent A. Kiehl

Fact: The cost of crime is $3.2 trillion per year - an amount greater than the expenditures for all health care in the United States. — Kent A. Kiehl

Fact: Psychopaths are six times more likely than other criminals to commit new crimes following release from prison. — Kent A. Kiehl