What it's like living as a female psychopath

Psychopathy is a condition that reviles and fascinates many people in equal measure, but the deeply entrenched stigma surrounding it means the disorder is still poorly understood – especially when it occurs in women.

Victoria knew about her boyfriend's wife, but after a couple of years she suspected that he had other lovers. There was no proof, but his body language was giving him away, she says. His stories weren't lining up. His face looked different when he lied.

"I happen to have superb memory when it comes to conversations," she says. "He was not at all a good liar. I'm not sure why his wife never caught him."

A mental flipboard of ways to punish him flipped in Victoria's mind until she landed on one. It would take a little time, and she'd have to act like she knew nothing. Over the course of several months, while still seeing him, Victoria sent naked photos of her boyfriend to his wife.

He came to her distressed, asking who could possibly be doing such a thing. His wife was devastated. He confessed to Victoria that he was, indeed, sleeping with other women. He did not suspect her, and she comforted him.

And then, when Victoria got bored and ready to end the relationship, she sent his wife a final gallery of pictures, the last one a photo of herself with the woman's husband. With that explosive reveal, Victoria exited their life forever.

When Victoria used to tell people this story, her flippancy would alarm people. "People asked me 'Why would you do this to his wife? What did his wife do to you to deserve this? How did she hurt you?'," she says. "And I would think, 'Well, life is unfair'."

She pauses.

"I suppose that is a good example of an extreme psychopathic trait I used to have. Callousness."

Psychopathy is not an official mental health diagnosis and is not listed in the fifth and latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Instead it is grouped under the wider term of antisocial personality disorder, although psychopathy is widely used in global clinical environments. It is broadly understood to be a neuropsychiatric disorder, where a person displays unusually low levels of empathy or remorse, often resulting in antisocial and sometimes criminal behaviour. The term was used by doctors in Europe and the US in the early 1900s and became mainstream by 1941, following publication of the book The Mask of Sanity by American psychiatrist Hervey M Cleckley.

"The world's leading academics have debated the definition of psychopathy," says Abigail Marsh, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Georgetown University, in Washington DC. "You'll get very different explanations of psychopathy depending on whether you are talking to a forensic psychologist or a criminologist."

Marsh says that criminal psychologists tend to classify people as having psychopathy only when they display violent and extreme behaviour. For her, however, the condition displays itself as a spectrum with other, less dramatic behaviour that can vary from person to person.

Psychologists and psychiatrists generally agree that between one and two in every 100 people in the general population meet the criteria for psychopathy, but Marsh claims that as many as 30% of people in the general population display some degree of psychopathic traits. For those who have psychopathy, it can mean they struggle to maintain close friendships and put themselves in risky situations, but the condition also takes its toll on the people around them too.

"Being around a callous or manipulative person is often devastating for people who are close to them, and exhausting for people living with extreme psychopathy," says Marsh.

She says that the majority of studies concerning people with psychopathy have been conducted on criminal offenders. Some of these studies point to psychopaths – or those showing psychopathic traits – as making up a disproportionate number of people in prison, although there is some dispute about how prevalent it really is. In general, the research suggests that psychopathy is higher among male offenders (accounting for perhaps 15-25% of prisoners) than female offenders (where it is found in 10-12%).

But it is a field that is still understudied in the general population, while even less research is conducted on women.

While a number of studies suggest that psychopathy is more prevalent in men than women, Marsh argues this may be due to how the testing was devised in the first instance.

"Initial psychopathy scales were primarily developed and tested on a prison population of men in British Columbia by Bob Hare," she says.

Canadian psychologist Robert Hare developed the Psychopathy Checklist (now called PCL-R) in the 1970s, and a revised version is often regarded as the global gold standard for testing for psychopathic traits. It is now the most frequently used and validated diagnostic tool for assessing psychopathy. The PCL-R measures the scale of emotional detachment someone might have, such as their willingness to manipulate someone to a desired outcome irrespective of the consequences, and also their antisocial behaviour, such as aggressive or impulsive choices that might be violent or involve abruptly abandoning responsibilities.

"Adaptations of that scale are used today in non-institutionalised samples, including women and children in several countries, but it's an open question of whether you would have come up with the same items to start with if you were starting with looking at non-criminal women," says Marsh.

One analysis by researchers in 2005 also contrasted core characteristics of women and men with psychopathy. They suggested that women often exhibited traits like debilitating impulsiveness (such as a lack of planning), thrill-seeking in interpersonal relationships, and verbal aggression. The researchers argued that psychopathy in men meanwhile tends to manifest with physical aggression and violence. At the time they stated, however, that not enough research had been conducted into why this may be the case. Seventeen years later, not much has changed.

Ana Sanz Garcia, a psychology PhD student at the University of Madrid, and her colleagues conducted a more recent analysis in 2021 of published research studies that included over 11,000 adults who were evaluated for psychopathy. She agrees that there need to be more studies that focus on women and non-criminal people with psychopathy. She told the BBC that the studies to date show women with psychopathy show less propensity for violence and crime than men, but more examples of interpersonal manipulation.

"It would be interesting to study the factors that explain why among women high in psychopathy have a lower probability of committing antisocial and criminal acts than males," says Sanz Garcia. "If these factors are discovered, a programme could be designed to prevent both women and men high in psychopathy from committing those antisocial and criminal acts."

Again, there has not been enough research to determine why, but one recent study in France points at a potential answer – coldness and lack of emotion appears to play a far more central role in women's psychopathy than it does with men. Women also exhibit fewer of the violent and antagonistic behaviours seen in male pyschopathy.

Victoria says her own manipulative behaviour began appearing as a way of keeping herself amused.

She was born in Malaysia to a working class family. Her father's alcoholism and lack of personal accountability for the consequences of his drinking made her home an unhappy one. She thrived academically at school but was often bored. For fun she would enjoy passing on confidential pieces of information people told her, secrets she had sworn to keep. Who hated whom. Who had a crush on whom. Tensions between the children at secondary school could often be traced back to her. Victoria knew how to manipulate others to take responsibility for mistakes she made, or what to say to get out of trouble. She convinced a teacher that she threw a chalk at her due to peer pressure.

"It was what she wanted to hear," she says. She wanted to believe that the clever child wasn't a bad child, just an easily led one." More recently Victoria has been getting help to manage her impulses. But she has also been finding support, perhaps rather strangely, from others like her.

Victoria's train of thought is interrupted when a thick, orange, swishy cat tail suddenly pops up on the video call and gently tickles her cheek. "His name is Gibberish," she says, reaching to pet a body that is out of frame on the table.

Is that his real name?

"He has many names," she says.

As Gibberish prowls Victoria's desk, I ask her about several recent videos entitled "the psychopath challenge" that have gone viral on TikTok, amassing more than 20 million views. They discuss how viewers might "spot a psychopath". The tag "psychopath" is one of the more popular on the social media app, with over two billion views. It's used to mark several subjects, including footage of people with psychopathy on trial, and is used as a slur for bad behaviour. What's clear is that people find the subject of psychopathy, and those possessing it, both fascinating and repulsive.

Victoria doesn't find these videos offensive. 

"Part of being a psychopath is not caring what people think so it doesn't bother me," she says. "But it does show how little people understand the full spectrum of the condition."

What she does take exception to are those videos that discuss whether people with psychopathy are more prone to harming animals. "Many of us prefer animals to humans," she says curtly, looking down at Gibberish, who purrs out of vision.

The "us" Victoria is referring to is an online community of women like her. It centres mostly around the blog of writer ME Thomas, perhaps one of the most well-known women with psychopathy. Thomas scored over 99% when assessed for psychopathy by John Edens, a forensic psychologist at Texas A&M University.

Thomas' blog Sociopath World, details what life is like with psychopathy. Thomas  says she used the word sociopath instead of psychopath as she felt it was a term more people would understand. Sociopathy is not a widely accepted clinical term, and psychologists like Marsh say it is sometimes used by individuals who may feel a stigma attached to the word "psychopath".

A literary agent discovered Thomas's blog and it led to a book deal. A Life Spent Hiding in Plain Sight, was published in 2012 and translated into more than 10 languages. A film starring actress Lisa Edelstein based on the book is currently in the works.

"I see myself as a formula, not a person," Thomas says. "It's like being an Excel spreadsheet where I work out what to do and say by calculating the possible outcome."

An example might be telling someone she loves them when she wants something from them, says Thomas. It is something she has done a few times, she says, and it has led to the breakdown of several relationships.

One 2012 study at the University of Zurich also found laughter is often used by people with psychopathy as an intentionally manipulative device, helping them to control the conversation, for example. Or at times laughing at, not with, the person they were speaking to.

Thomas says her agent tells her not to use the word "manipulative" when talking about herself, but instead say that she knew how to influence people from childhood. But manipulative is the word she uses. She said that quality helped her become a good lawyer, which is still her profession.

When she talks, people can't place her accent. They think she may be from Israel or Eastern Europe, although she has lived her entire life in California. "You get accents from being socialised into having an identity. I've never got an identity," she says. "I have a really weak sense of self."

On her blog, she shares her daily thoughts and interviews other people who live with psychopathic traits. Many of her readers find refuge in her posts and videos, she says, as it's a place where they recognise their own patterns and share experiences free from judgement.

Another reader is Alice, a 27-year-old German woman. Alice says that it is frustrating to read articles or watch depictions of people with psychopathy as evil individuals who must all be avoided.

"We exist on a scale like everyone else."

Like Thomas, Alice is immediately likeable, perhaps because she smiles a lot. She admits early that she is mimicking what she knows is socially appropriate. Alice has done this her whole life. When her grandmother died, she observed her sister's grief and mirrored her behaviour.

She says she also pretends to be sarcastic as it allows her to get away with saying what's on her mind without causing alarm. She learned this early at the age of 12 while on holiday on a ship and she wondered out loud what it would be like if they had an accident and to watch people drown. The reaction from her parents and their friends taught her that it was important to frame it like a dark joke, rather than a dark thought.

While Thomas describes her dominant psychopathic trait as manipulation and Victoria says her is callousness, Alice's points to her own lack of empathy as being her most conspicuous trait.

"I don't have any emotional empathy, but I have a lot of cognitive empathy," she says, her smile still in place. "So if someone gets hurt, like hurting their knee or breaking their arm, I may not feel anything for them emotionally but I know I am supposed to get them help so I will."

But this, she says, makes her a good person to have around in emergencies.

"People tell me their problems and I am not emotionally clouded so it doesn't affect me, and I can listen to them, give them rational advice," she says. "Other people may want to distance themselves because it triggers their own emotion, but that doesn't happen to me."

Alice is not alone in thinking that her traits could be a benefit to society. The "positive" traits of psychopathy is explored by Kevin Dutton, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, in his book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success. In 2011, Dutton ran a survey in the UK titled "The Great British Psychopath Survey". Boardroom chief executives, journalists, police officers, the military, surgeons and lawyers were the professions where people displayed the most psychopathic traits. Dutton argues that certain personality traits within the psychopathy spectrum – including a coolness under pressure and less empathetic response to interpersonal interactions – can help people to deliver on their work without being, as Alice would call it, "clouded".

"Everybody knows somebody with psychopathic traits," says Marsh, who has co-founded a non-profit called Psychopathy Is. It provides one of the few online platforms offering support for both people with psychopathy and those close to them.

Marsh says their aim is to demystify psychopathy and provide screening tools so people can assess themselves with reliable instruments and then get good information on what to do.

"Psychopathy is not a category, it's a continuum," she says. "It is distributed amongst the population in varying degrees. Some people cause continuous destruction and some just need their symptoms managed.

"When we don't discuss it openly, people's minds go to Ted Bundy and Hannibal Lecter, and then we see TikTok trends filling the void of expert information."

Many experts, Marsh included, believe it is time to dispel the myths and stigma surrounding psychopathy.

The underlying causes of psychopathy are still poorly understood, although a growing body of neuroimaging research is helping to pinpoint some of the potential neurological abnormalities in the brain that may explain the symptoms.

Research, for example, has indicated that men with psychopathy have a reduced response in regions of the brain related to processing fear and there are some hints that similar effects can be found in women. Some researchers have also pointed to differences in the neural circuitry of the amygdala, a key structure of the brain responsible for processing emotions, but like most research on psychopathy, these findings are far from robust and still need to be studied further.

Genetics and the environment someone finds themselves in are also important components to the puzzle. But to get to those answers will require wider society to develop a more mature relationship with psychopathy, Marsh believes.

"I really admire what the autism research community did in the nineties," she says. "They decided to get rid of the stigma by telling people the truth about it. That it's a spectrum disorder. We as researchers in psychopathy need to agree on an approach to really throw ourselves into developing better interventions that can help people with psychopathy live flourishing, productive lives."

Until this happens, people with psychopathy are being failed, she adds.

"That means people – people with disorders and their friends and family – aren't getting the help they need. And that harms everyone."

Victoria, Alice and ME Thomas use meditation, psychological therapy and peer-to-peer support from their online community to help manage their disorder.

"It's helpful to not be in the shadows," says Thomas. "But there is still a stigma to the word 'psychopath'. There's still a lot of work to do and a lot more open conversations to have. The reality is we exist."

* Megha Mohan is the BBC's gender and identity correspondent

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