Boss may be ‘almost psychopath’

DEAR DOCTOR K: My boss is extremely manipulative and selfish. He doesn’t care how his actions affect his employees. He gets away with it because he turns on the charm with his supervisors. I truly think he might be a psychopath.

DEAR READER: Just being manipulative and selfish doesn’t make a person a psychopath, but those surely are characteristics found in one. In addition, psychopaths show a profound lack of empathy. They have no problem engaging in immoral and antisocial behavior for short-term gains. They are extremely egocentric, and they are not deterred by punishment or penalties.

An increasing number of studies indicate that psychopaths are born that way. Their brains are different from other people. When something terrible and unfair happens to someone else, they don’t feel the empathy that most people feel.

Psychopaths know the difference between right and wrong – they just don’t care. Their only concern is what’s right for them.

Still, not everyone who charms, manipulates or skirts the line between right and wrong is a psychopath. Psychopathy, like many conditions, occurs along a spectrum, with normal behavior at one end and the full-blown disorder at the other.

Doctors increasingly recognize that, for many diseases, it’s not as simple as saying you have it or you don’t. True, some people have absolutely no signs of it, and other people are clear cases. But in between is a gray zone where you could say that a person “almost” has the condition.

Mental health professionals encounter many people who don’t meet the current technical definition of a psychopath. But these people have more than the usual amount of difficulty following rules or understanding how to treat others. They are “almost psychopaths” because they exhibit some of the behaviors and attitudes of psychopathy, but not to the extent that they meet the criteria for diagnosis.