Antisocial Behavior

The antisocial personalities who are responsible for most crime, including violent crime, in the United States are not psychopaths but rather sociopaths, persons of broadly normal temperament who have failed to acquire the attributes of socialization, not because of innate peculiarities in themselves, but because of a failure of the usual socializing agents, primarily their parents.

Psychopaths are difficult to ignore. They are involved in many of today's most serious problems: war, drugs, murder, and political corruption. As a construct, psychopathy has evolved far beyond its confusing origins in a melange of labels into an empirically measurable syndrome. The first text of its kind, The Clinical and Forensic Assessment of Psychopathy: A Practitioner's Guide, translates the robust findings of the past 30 years into applied procedures and methods for all those whose work brings them into contact with this difficult population in mental health, correctional, or court settings. Synthesizing the latest information on assessing psychopathy in children, adolescents, and adults, it offers "standard of care" guidelines for the assessment of psychopathy in general and the use of the Hare Psychopathy checklists in particular. It further: * develops conceptual models for understanding the information processing and emotional experience of psychopaths, * addresses legal and ethical issues, * discusses implications for training and the effective integration of psychopathy assessment into general forensic practice-interviewing, predicting risk, evaluating the relationship of psychopathy to malingering, and writing reports, * describes dilemmas presented by the psychopath in the corporate setting and offers suggestions for managing them and for weighing the necessity of incorporating psychopathy assessment into institutional evaluation procedures, and * considers the relationship of psychopathy to sexual deviance, substance abuse, and the criminal personality. The Clinical and Forensic Assessment of Psychopathy: A Practitioner's Guide constitutes a major new resource for anyone who seeks to make fast the link between research and practice. Experienced professionals and their trainees and students alike will learn much from it.

Recent decades have seen a steady rise in the incidence of antisocial behavior in youth. Possible direct consequences aside, such behavior is predictive of chronic emotional, educational, vocational, and emotional impairment that is associated with hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to overtaxed mental health, social services, special education, and juvenile justice systems. Written by an eminent group of international experts, Conduct and Oppositional Defiant Disorders: Epidemiology, Risk Factors, and Treatment offers the first comprehensive cutting-edge overview of all the major aspects of conduct disorder (CD) and oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) in children and adolescents. It is organized into three sections. The first summarizes classification and assessment, epidemiology and comorbidity, as well as course and outcome. The second examines factors that put children and adolescents at risk to develop CD and ODD: contextual, familial/genetic, and neuropsychological and neuroendocrine. The third presents numerous empirically supported approaches to prevention and treatment. An epilogue reviews recent progress and unresolved questions, and suggests needs for future research. Special attention is devoted to gender and developmental pathways in etiology, symptom expression, courses, and outcomes. This volume will be crucial reading for all mental health professionals whose work involves them with these exceptionally difficult clients.

Kernberg (psychiatry, Cornell University Medical College and The New York Presbyterian Hospital-Westchester Division), Weiner (psychology, at the same institutions), and Bardenstein (psychology and psychiatry, Case-Western Reserve University) have assembled both the evidence and a theoretical framework to suggest that personality disorders can be diagnosed and treated in children and adolescents. A developmental perspective informs their identification of emerging pathological features at all levels of personality organization -- neurotic, borderline, and psychotic. Special attention is given to the relationship between personality disorders and gender identity, suicidality, substance abuse, and cultural and family background. The authors inflect their review of differential methods with material from the published literature, as well as evidence drawn from their own clinical research and practice.