Is Sadistic Personality Disorder a Mental Illness?
Sadists walk among us, or at least that’s what the latest studies into the minds of sadists seem to suggest.
Sadistic personality disorder remains one of the most controversial disorders or illnesses to diagnose.
Some people suggest it’s a mental illness, others say it’s a personality disorder, and even more recently, there have been suggestions that it’s actually more of a lifestyle choice.
Whatever the case might be, researchers and psychologists are torn up on the issue.
Let’s find out how interpretations of sadistic personality disorder have evolved over the years and what the best way to deal with it is.
Sadism: Basic Definition
While the definition of sadism differs depending on who you ask, we can still understand it on a very basic level.
It describes individuals who gain a sense of pleasure or happiness from inflicting pain or suffering on others. This can be anything from purely physical violence to emotional manipulation and torment.
It can also describe more ‘extreme’ forms of sadism, such as sexual sadism and animal cruelty practices.
Sadism has many levels. At the highest level, it’s a driving motivation for serial killers and rapists. At its lowest, it’s a way of passing time and experiencing something “novel” every now and then.
Sadism: A Mental Illness
Generally speaking, people associate sadism with mental illness because they think sadists are usually psychopaths or sociopaths in disguise.
Without getting off track here, let’s just say that sadists tend to exhibit certain traits that make them prime targets to be called mentally ill.
Some of these traits are:
- Lack of empathy.
- Unhinged Aggressiveness.
- Machavillain behaviour.
- Derive pleasure from pain.
- Engage in impulsive and risky behaviour.
- Cruelty is an end in and of itself.
These tendencies describe more of a mentally warped individual. It seems to be a behaviour that is passed on through teachings or from seeing others, which makes people call sadism a mental illness.
Proponents of this idea claim that people who become sadistic as they grow up tend to come from households that are very abusive and violent.
They grow up and internalise all the heinous acts in front of them and the emotions that are prevalent in their environment, which leads to sadism.
In other words, genetics has no bearing on the development of a sadistic personality.
Sadism: A Personality Disorder
The main reason why sadistic personality disorder was removed as a type of disorder was due to legal reasons.
Psychiatrists asked for it to be removed in order to avoid justifying such behaviour in a court of law.
The same idea here applies. Individuals with this personality disorder were more predisposed to inflicting violence and pain on others to feel good.
The genetic basis behind that is hard to nail down, but scientists agree that a misconfiguration of the oxytocinergic system leads to less empathy on a behavioural and neural level.
It’s quite complicated to explain how all of that works, but it’s food for thought when thinking about the effects of genetics on the development of sadism early in life.
As a personality disorder, psychiatrists believed people who suffered from it were attracted to reaching positions of power within society.
It’s very clear why that is. Sadists love to exercise their power over others to abuse and control them through various direct and indirect means.
Sadists tend to go into law, join the police force, the military, or go into politics. They might also go into medicine and education, where it’s easy to cause harm to others while maintaining a position of authority.
In fact, sadists are VERY good at hiding themselves. For example, studies show that 6% of undergraduate students exhibit some form of sadistic personality disorder without ever showing it in public.
This describes all the bullies and violent jocks that pervade college campuses around the world.
When labelled a personality disorder, SPD is said to be comorbid with other personality disorders, such as conduct disorder and alcohol use disorder.
Speaking in medical terms, while SPD is not included anymore in the DSM, it can still be diagnosed as an Unspecified Personality Disorder.
Who Is Right?
We’ve covered both the cognitive and societal dimensions that describe sadists, so the question now is:
Does it matter if sadism is a personality disorder or a mental illness? The truth is, no.
What is important is understanding the underlying symptoms and conditions that describe a sadist.
The next step is figuring out how to deal with this illness or disorder, whichever you prefer.
Treatments:
Unfortunately, SPD has no clear treatments. It’s well-known that individuals who grew up watching sadistic acts performed in front of them or who have a predisposition towards such behaviour are hard to change.
What can be done is take preventative measures to stop the behaviour from taking root in the first place.
The best cure for sadism is empathy. Teaching empathy at a young age can help quell any violent feelings or tendencies that children have.
It also teaches understanding and cooperation when interacting with others, which are things missing in SPD-diagnosed individuals.
A great exercise in building empathy as a counter to sadism is emphasising the sense of power it provides.
Why power in particular? Because power is one of the driving factors behind the development of SPD.
Sadism is a means by which power can be claimed back, either over others or over oneself. The only difference is that it encourages cruelty and violence to achieve that goal.
Empathy, on the other hand, gives back power to individuals through kindness and compassion.
Really, empathy has been shown to be the only effective treatment for sadists, so keep that in mind going forward.
In Conclusion:
The debate over whether sadistic personality disorder should be labelled as a disorder or a mental illness continues to this day.
Psychiatrists decided to do away with the term “disorder” because it gives legal leeway to individuals who exhibit such behaviour.
However, many experts continue to label it as such, claiming that some people are just truly inherently inclined to do harm to others for the sake of pleasure.
Whatever the case might be, SPD is a bad thing for society. Serial killers, criminals, bad actors, and many abusers are sadists in one way or another.
That’s why rooting out this personality trait is important for the sake of societal order.
Empathy has been found to be the only real cure for SPD, and it bears repeating once more how important it is for giving back control to those who think they’re not in control of their lives.