In an era when we've made great strides toward destigmatizing mental illness, we're pretty much all still terrified of people labeled psychopaths.

But what if they've been misdiagnosed? From KERA in Dallas, this is

think. I'm Chris Boyd. By misdiagnosed, I don't just mean that some people might have been

inaccurately identified as psychopaths. I mean, what if psychopathy itself, at least as it is

defined in mental health literature and explored in growing

numbers of research studies since the 1990s, what if psychopathy is not a thing?

Rasmus Rosenberg-Larsen is here to explain why he thinks that is a possibility and why it's a

problem. He's assistant professor of forensic epistemology and philosophy of science at the University

of Toronto, Mississauga, an affiliated scientist at the National Center for Ontological Research

in the U.S., an author of Psychopathy Unmasked, The Rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis.

His recent article for Eon was titled, There Are No Psychopaths. Rasmus, welcome to

think. Thanks for having me. You note right off the top that psychopathic personality disorder,

usually just called psychopathy, is one of the oldest and most researched mental health diagnoses.

Benjamin Rush was writing about this in the 18th century?

That is correct. Yeah, Benjamin Rush, also to refresh in listeners' memory, he's one of the

co-signers of the Declaration of Independence. Yeah, it dates far back.

What symptoms did Rush identify as hallmarks of what he at the time called anomia?

Yeah, so this is the history of the disorder or the diagnosis of psychopathy.

It tracks long back.

And what Rush was proposing back in 1786 to be more specific was the the possibility of a disease that could

impair a person's moral faculty back then scientists believed that our mind or our brain we would

probably say today was divided into different faculties, each responsible of certain types of behaviors.

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