Is There Any Hope At All For Psychopaths?

New Reforms

The people working at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center (MJTC) in Madison, WI, have devised the so-called Decompression Model which is a cognitive-behavioral intervention which rewards any good deed, big or small. Their rewards vary and go from small stuff like getting dessert to video gaming privileges. This has definitely made a very positive impact on the participants.

Successful Interventions

The  MJTC even let out a statement: “The program had the greatest impact on serious violent offenses, reducing the risk of their incidence by about half. Youth in the treatment group were more than [6] times less likely to engage in felony violence than the comparison group youth.” Youth who did not get the MJTC treatment murdered 16 people while no homicide was committed by the ones in the intervention group. Lindsay Aleta Sewall who works at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada claims that “a growing collection of studies has found that psychopathic offenders who decreased their risk as a result of treatment, demonstrate lower rates of recidivism.”

Conclusions

Sewall makes a good point, stating that even if participants have a high score on the PCL-R psychopathy scale after treatment, it does not necessarily imply that the treatment was not fruitful. It is merely recidivism. The most important thing is to manage it rather than finding a cure. Prof. Buckholtz describes, “The same kind of short-sighted, impulsive decision-making that we see in psychopathic individuals has also been noted in compulsive overeaters and substance abusers.” Let us hope with the proper treatment, a psychopath can one day lead a normal life.