Are there autistic serial killers or only psychopathic ones?

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Now you're changing the parameters. Not everyone who kills multiple people does so shamelessly and without remorse. Some of them are police officers, some are soldiers.

The definition of psychopathy involves a lack of affective empathy, a lack of capacity for guilt and remorse, shallow emotions, and other criteria that do not require actual killing to meet.

Psychopath isn't a defined condition right now, and is a subject of great debate. Neither ICD nor DSM define 'psychopath' and currently they would be a grab bag of disorders, like some of the personality disorders and delusion disorder and substance abuse disorders often with other comorbid disorders.

Active abnormal or violent social behavior are indeed part of the majority of the current psychopath testing's traits, however.

I strongly suggest looking at existing literature, specifically Robert Hare's work as well as Hervey Cleckley's Mask of Sanity. Psychopathy is not a condition in the ICD or DSM, but it is fairly clearly defined.

The paramaters have not changed, and I'm not talking about killing in general (cops and soldiers follow orders of their superiors, that is NOT what I'm talking about), I'm talking about murder. Secondly, I never said one had to kill to be psychopathic, I said that people who kill (murder) multiple people is psychopathic, and once again, I'm not talking about the kind of killing that cops and soldiers do in the line of duty, I'm talking about cold hearted murder where said person has no remorse, nor sympathy for the victims.

Although there are published works, we really are talking specifically about PCL-R, right? There is plenty disagreement and criticism of this diagnostic method and criteria, so much so that the official stance of the American Psychiatric Association as presented in the DSM-IV-TR is that psychopathy and sociopathy are misnomers

Your precise words, quoted above, were:



You did not specify murder, nor conscience, nor remorse, nor empathy. Just "kills multiple people." You also did not distinguish between different kinds of killing to exclude the kind of killing done in the line of duty.

I am not arguing that you must have only meant precisely what you wrote. I am pointing out that you have given three different explanations for what you meant, and you did not provide sufficient information to interpret your writing to include the information you have added in subsequent replies. I cannot read the above sentence and conclude that you meant "shamelessly and without remorse" nor that you only meant "murder" and not killing in general.



I am not talking specifically about the PCL-R. It is one of the things that should be referenced. However, the existence of psychopaths and descriptions of psychopathy were first provided in Masks of Sanity and later elaborated upon by others, such as Robert Hare.

The DSM-IV-TR does not include sociopathy or psychopathy (although the difference between the two is so poorly defined that no one seems to be able to agree on what the distinction is), but instead attempts to provide a replacement in anti-social personality disorder. ASPD is not, however, psychopathy.

There is plenty of research on the topic of psychopathy, and the term is used in that research rather frequently. Your statements that it is not a defined condition are simply factually incorrect. The DSM-IV-TR is not the beginning and the end of these definitions. A factually accurate statement would be to point out that psychopathy is not defined in the DSM-IV-TR. However, to claim that it is not defined is utterly false.

Robert Hare also has rather substantial criticisms of the removal of psychopathy from the DSM and the construction of ASPD in its place.

There are no Autistic serial killers.
Serial killers have to have at least 3 victims with cooling off periods in between. Many have very high IQs and high counts of victims.

Many sociopaths/psychopaths are masters at mimicking other disorders and can fool people even into thinking they are nice NTs when indeed they are bad bad evil people.

Maybe some may prefer to be asocial to go along with their antisocial personality disorder diagnosis. Many do not like humans at all.

Some are organized, some disorganized. Some may appear to be disheveled and live on the fringes of society, while others may be the nice neighbor next door with the wife and kids. That is the scary thing about it. How could we ever read that?

While I think they're fully independent, given the nature of ASD, I would say it would be extraordinarily harder for someone with Autism to be a serial killer than a NT person. The combination of minds being focused on our special interests, with the preference for more "alone time" and often extreme adherence to morals, IMO, makes us the group of people where this is the least likely of all.

Just because a killer is socially awkward does NOT make them autistic. If anything, people with ASD are the most likely to be killed, and the least likely to be a killer of ANY group of people, so we've got to stop these threads unless you want to repeat this point.

I'd agree only in this extent that modern society makes killing valueless to an aspie, my guess is we were quite good at killing in past times.

Killing a person does not need to occur through some disorder. Killing is a relatively easy thing to do if one is motivated, "problem" is people in today's society have little reason to harm others. The reason of course is like credit card fraud one has to be desensitized to the act. With crimes like credit fraud their are slipperly slopes which make the desensitization process far more gradual.

In the modern world there are almost no slopes to killing a person, one has to be already desensitized, which is why the act typically only ever happens with the mentally disturbed.

I'm sure if one was routinely in fear of losing everything, I'd be far more willing to kill, which of course was the case before the age of modern police forces.
Although my sense of sympathy is exceptionally strong, I can turn it off in an instant if the situation dictates so, this is something most aspies have in common. If you've ever worked extensive customer service you'd be amazed how fast one is desensitized to emphatic or sympathetic responses.

It happens though, when I was reading about autism in professional books I read about a case of a young man with autism who totally freaked out when his girlfriend told him that she wanted to make babies, because he didn't know how to say that he didn't want that he poisoned her and she didn't survive it, what was the purpose, because he didn't know how to deal with it.

You should take in consideration that these kind of things can happen with autistic people.

I just wondered if it's possible because if an obsessive interest is involving crimes, I 'm interested in it. Of course I 'm aware that most autistic people aren't like that and most are good people. We can't deny though that there are bad ones too.

No-one's saying it can't be the case, instead we're saying that the evidence supports that it's unlikely.
In fact, because there are more non-autistic people in the world, it's a lot more likely that a killer would be non-autistic.

For the bolded part: That is the situation with every society/group. Of course there are good and bad people in each group, that's just how it is and can't be prevented, but in reality that only proves that it's not autistm that causes violence.

ummm aren't you planning to become a doctor? If you hold such thoughts then I would reconsider your career choices. Only a suggstion.

I'm sure doctors know more ways to kill someone than about 90% of the people in the world, so I don't think there's much of a reason to fuss about it unless this person actually has homicidal tendencies (and from where I'm sitting, it sounds like that's not the case).
If thinking about things was a crime, everyone would be a prisoner in maximum security prisons.

I'm not sugesting they aren't already out there. Just gently putting it to Aspie giraffe that people with psychopathic fantasies are not really a good fit for occupations that involve saving lives.

Someone with no remorse or regard for human life is a psychopath, whether or not they have killed anyone. And they may not have. Lack of concern about killing others doesn't necessarily mean you actually want to kill others. You could just not care either way.

Someone who kills multiple people could be a psychopath, if they do so without remorse and without the belief that it serves a higher moral cause (which is a condition where remorse can be turned off in non-psychopaths). But the average soldier is not a psychopath despite killing multiple people. In addition, someone who kills others because the voices tell them it's necessary to save the world isn't a psychopath either (instead they're psychotic). Someone who kills others because he/she feels the world would be better off without them, or they would be better off dead, is also not a psychopath (although psychopaths could use that as an excuse, only a non-psychopath would genuinely act on that belief).

Weird, because sometimes I can react in a violent way due to autism, because I don't understand other people etc. or because they piss me off I can throw with chairs for instance (not at them by the way). I 'm not sure at all if your claim is true.