Psychopath and sociopath: what the words mean, how they differ, and whether the tests can be trusted

In the news and in drama, “psychopath” and “sociopath” are words for frightening people, but neither is a current official diagnosis. The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines psychopathy as “a synonym for antisocial personality disorder” and sociopathy as “a former name for antisocial personality disorder”, and lists “psychopath” and “sociopath” as former names for a person with antisocial personality disorder (APA, 2018a; APA, 2018b). The same dictionary summarises antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) as “a chronic and pervasive disposition to disregard and violate the rights of others”, with manifestations such as repeated violations of the law, exploitation of others, deceitfulness, impulsivity, aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of self and others, and irresponsibility, accompanied by lack of guilt, remorse and empathy. It notes that the disorder has been known as dyssocial, psychopathic and sociopathic personality, that it is among the most heavily researched of the personality disorders and the most difficult to treat, and that it is included in DSM-5-TR (APA, 2023). This guide does not reproduce the DSM criteria list. A diagnosis is made by a clinician in an interview, not by counting how many items on a list seem to fit.

The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 has no category called “psychopathy” and none called “antisocial personality disorder” either. ICD-11 uses a single diagnosis of personality disorder, rated mild, moderate or severe, with prominent trait domains added; the core feature of its “dissociality” domain is disregard for the rights and feelings of others, encompassing both self-centredness and lack of empathy. The essential requirements of personality disorder itself are problems in functioning of aspects of the self, such as identity and self-worth, or in interpersonal functioning, persisting over an extended period, “e.g. lasting 2 years or more”, showing across a range of situations, and associated with substantial distress or significant impairment. The trait domains, ICD-11 states, are not diagnostic categories but are continuous with normal personality characteristics in people without personality disorder (WHO, 2024).

In research, however, “psychopathy” is not the same thing as antisocial personality disorder. An Annual Review of Clinical Psychology paper describes two roots of the current concept: a clinical one, in Cleckley’s early case studies, and an empirical one, the research that accumulated through widespread use of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R); the review notes that Cleckley’s clinical profile rested on an unrepresentative sample of patients (Hare & Neumann, 2008). A public-policy review explains that the PCL-R has come to dominate clinical and legal practice over recent years and that its items cover two content domains, an interpersonal-affective domain with core traits such as callousness and manipulativeness, and an antisocial domain of disinhibition and chronic antisocial behaviour. The same review writes that few psychological concepts evoke as much fascination and misunderstanding at once as psychopathy, and that people with psychopathy are typically misconceived as “fundamentally different from the rest of humanity and as inalterably dangerous” (Skeem et al., 2011). The UK NICE guideline likewise treats people who meet criteria for psychopathy as “a small proportion” of people with antisocial personality disorder (NICE, 2009). In short, “psychopath” is an everyday word, psychopathy is a research construct measured with tools such as the PCL-R, and antisocial personality disorder and ICD-11’s dissociality domain are the diagnostic terms clinicians use. mind.io does not offer a psychopath test. This guide prints neither the PCL-R items nor its score thresholds, and it does not judge any particular person to be “a psychopath”. It sets out what the words mean, what the traits are, how they differ from each other and from narcissism, how common they are, what online tests and the “successful psychopath” story are really worth, the treatment evidence, and what helps when someone’s behaviour frightens or harms you.

ICD-11’s description of the dissociality domain is the most official portrait. Self-centredness shows as a sense of entitlement, believing and acting as if one deserves whatever one wants “without further justification”; actively, as expecting others’ admiration, seeking attention to stay the centre of focus, and anger or denigrating others when the expected admiration is not granted; passively, as a kind of obliviousness that other people matter as much as oneself. Lack of empathy shows as indifference to whether one’s actions inconvenience or hurt others emotionally, socially, financially or physically; as a result, deception and manipulation, exploiting people and situations to get what one wants, are common, and in the extreme this can reach callousness about others’ suffering, ruthlessness in pursuing goals, physical violence with little or no provocation, and even pleasure in inflicting pain. One clue matters here. ICD-11 notes that this lack of empathy does not necessarily mean the person cannot cognitively understand others’ feelings; rather, they are not concerned about them and are likely to use that understanding to exploit others. It adds that not all of these manifestations are present in a given person at a given time (WHO, 2024).

Research descriptions draw a similar picture. The public-policy review summarises the two PCL-R domains as interpersonal-affective traits such as callousness and manipulativeness, and disinhibition with chronic antisocial behaviour, and stresses that this “classical psychopathy” is not monolithic but a constellation of multiple traits present in varying degrees (Skeem et al., 2011). The triarchic model divides psychopathy into three observable characteristics: disinhibition, a general propensity toward problems of impulse control; boldness, the nexus of social dominance, emotional resiliency and venturesomeness; and meanness, aggressive resource seeking without regard for others (Patrick et al., 2009). The Korean PCL-R validation study likewise summarised traits such as callousness, impulsivity, irresponsibility and lack of empathy, guilt or remorse as closely related to criminal behaviour and recidivism (Lee, 2009). This guide does not print the PCL-R items. The instrument requires qualified users, and reading its items to score yourself or someone else is not what it is for.

And these traits are a matter of degree, not of having or not having them. In the British household survey, psychopathic trait scores followed a “half-normal distribution”: the majority had no traits, a significant proportion had non-zero scores, and a severe subgroup with multiple associated social and behavioural problems stood apart (Coid et al., 2009). A study that developed a self-report scale in 487 university students also wrote that its findings were consistent with the view that psychopathy is a continuous dimension (Levenson et al., 1995). ICD-11 says the same of its trait domains, that they are continuous with normal personality (WHO, 2024). So seeing a few of the features above in someone does not make that person “a psychopath”. Everyone has days of not seeing other people’s needs, telling a lie or grabbing their own share first when tired or angry. What a clinician looks at is how long, how widely and with what damage the pattern persists.

Distinctions such as “psychopaths are born, sociopaths are made” or “psychopaths are cold, sociopaths are hot-headed” circulate widely online. No diagnostic system draws them. In the APA Dictionary both words are synonyms or former names for antisocial personality disorder (APA, 2018a; APA, 2018b), ICD-11 has neither (WHO, 2024), and the research literature we reviewed measures a single construct, psychopathy, with the PCL-R or self-report scales, and does not define “sociopath” separately (Hare & Neumann, 2008; Skeem et al., 2011). In other words, sorting people by the difference between the two words is not a method research uses. When someone says “they are a sociopath, not quite a psychopath”, that is an impression, not a diagnosis.

It overlaps with narcissism, but differs. Because ICD-11 places both self-centredness (entitlement, expecting admiration, attention-seeking) and lack of empathy (deception, manipulation, callousness) under the dissociality domain, descriptions close to narcissism and descriptions close to psychopathy sit in the same domain (WHO, 2024). The difference is the centre of gravity. Psychopathy research stresses callousness and manipulation, disinhibition and antisocial behaviour (Skeem et al., 2011; Patrick et al., 2009), while narcissism research defines narcissism as a personality trait characterised by a sense of superiority and a desire for respect and admiration from others (Brummelman et al., 2016). Outward confidence and using people cannot separate the two on their own, and either label, applied without a clinician’s interview, is not a diagnosis. The two faces of narcissism and what helps are covered in the narcissism guide.

The relationship between antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy is “overlapping”, not “identical”. The NICE guideline says people who meet criteria for psychopathy are a small proportion of people with antisocial personality disorder but present a very high risk of harm to others, and recommends that in forensic services the use of measures such as the PCL-R or PCL:SV to assess the severity of antisocial personality disorder should be part of the routine assessment process (NICE, 2009). The public-policy review concluded that psychopathy measures including the PCL-R “appear to evidence no special powers in predicting violence or other crime”, that they are about as predictive as purpose-built violence-risk-assessment tools, and that most of their predictive utility comes from Factor 2, the assessment of antisocial and disinhibitory tendencies, while Factor 1, the interpersonal and affective features more specific to psychopathy, plays at best a small predictive role (Skeem et al., 2011). A psychopathy score, then, has no special power to foresee violence, and most of its predictive power comes from the antisocial behaviour so far.

In the general population, psychopathy is rare. In a two-phase survey that assessed 638 people aged 16-74 living in households in England, Wales and Scotland with the screening version of the checklist (PCL:SV), the weighted prevalence of psychopathy was 0.6% (95% CI 0.2-1.6), and the authors wrote that, as measured by this instrument, psychopathy “is rare, affecting less than 1% of the household population, although it is prevalent among prisoners, homeless persons, and psychiatric admissions”. Scores correlated with younger age, male gender, suicide attempts, violent behaviour, imprisonment, homelessness, drug dependence, histrionic, borderline and antisocial personality disorders, and panic and obsessive-compulsive disorders (Coid et al., 2009). In the US MacArthur community sample (514 people aged 18-40, a stratified random sample), a four-factor model fitted well and was invariant across sex and ethnicity (Neumann & Hare, 2008); 1.2% of that sample reached the “potential psychopathy” threshold, as a later corporate study reported when comparing the two (Babiak et al., 2010).

Antisocial personality disorder is more common than that. In a national survey that interviewed 43,093 US adults in 2001-2002, the prevalence of antisocial personality disorder was 3.63% (95% CI 3.34-3.92), with the risk greater among men (Grant et al., 2004). In the follow-up survey of 36,309 adults in 2012-2013, on DSM-5 criteria, the lifetime prevalence was 4.3%, highest among men, younger, unmarried respondents, those with high school or less education and lower incomes, and most respondents with an antisocial syndrome were untreated (Goldstein et al., 2017). Prisons are another world. A systematic review of 62 surveys from 12 Western countries covering 22,790 prisoners found antisocial personality disorder in 47% of men (46-48) and 21% of women (19-23); heterogeneity between studies was substantial, but prisoners were about ten times more likely than the general population to have the disorder (Fazel & Danesh, 2002). On gender, ICD-11 notes that the gender distribution of personality disorder overall is approximately equal, but that elevations on dissociality and disinhibition are more common among men (WHO, 2024).

As far as we could find, Korea has no national-survey estimate for psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder. The 2021 National Mental Health Survey used the K-CIDI to assess nicotine and alcohol use disorders, anxiety, depressive and obsessive-compulsive disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicidal thoughts, but it had no personality disorder module (NCMH, n.d.). What Korea does have is the Korean PCL-R, standardised in 2008 by Eunkyung Jo and Soo Jung Lee; its construct-validity study wrote that psychopathy had become one of the most important topics in the Korean criminal justice system and criminological psychology, the need to predict recidivism being one reason (Lee, 2009). So the “psychopath assessments” in Korean news are about criminal suspects and prisoners who received a forensic evaluation, not data on how common the traits are in the general population. Many readers first met the word through crime stories, but as the numbers above show, most people with the traits are not in prison. And since 47% of male prisoners have antisocial personality disorder and only some of those meet criteria for psychopathy, most prisoners do not meet those criteria either.

The riddle in which “she killed her sister to see again the man she met at her mother’s funeral” supposedly marks you as a psychopath is an old piece of internet folklore. The fact-checking site Snopes found that the question was not authored by “a famous American psychologist” and does not come from “a genuine psychological test”, and noted that no single hypothetical can reveal anyone’s mental state; whole batteries of multi-item tests are needed for that (Mikkelson, 2002). We found no study that has tested the riddle either. Likewise, “are you a psychopath” quizzes online are not diagnoses. Of the real assessment tool, the PCL-R, its developer’s site says that users should hold an advanced degree in the social, medical or behavioural sciences and professional registration, have experience with forensic populations and adequate training, and limit its use to the populations in which it has been validated; because a score may have important consequences for the person’s future, it recommends averaging the scores of two independent raters wherever possible (Hare, n.d.). The public-policy review adds that in most Western countries the PCL-R and its derivatives are routinely applied to inform legal decisions that hinge on dangerousness and treatability (Skeem et al., 2011). That is a different kind of thing from a quiz you click through alone.

Research also uses self-report scales. A scale developed in 487 university students has primary and secondary psychopathy subscales, and secondary psychopathy was associated with trait anxiety (Levenson et al., 1995). The Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI), a self-report measure for noncriminal populations, was built on three undergraduate samples and validated in four undergraduate studies, as a research tool (Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996). These scales were made to measure the distribution of traits in research, and a high score on them is neither a diagnosis nor a verdict. What a test can and cannot tell you, as discussed in the MBTI accuracy guide, applies here word for word. A personality test is a tool for understanding yourself, not for screening other people.

What about the claim that many CEOs are psychopaths? The public-policy review pointed out that popular portrayals conflict, ranging from impulsive, violent offenders to “corporate figures who callously and skillfully maneuver their way to the highest rungs of the social ladder” (Skeem et al., 2011), and a status report on “successful psychopathy” research wrote that, for the claim that psychopathic traits are sometimes associated with occupational or interpersonal success, “rigorous evidence for this assertion has thus far been minimal” (Lilienfeld et al., 2015). Here is what the often-cited corporate study actually found. When 203 managers and executives (77.8% men) whom seven US companies had selected for management development programmes were assessed with the PCL-R, mean scores were low and similar to a community sample, but a larger share scored high: on screening-version equivalent scores, 5.9% reached the “potential psychopathy” threshold (1.2% in the MacArthur community sample), and 3% reached the equivalent of the PCL-R research cut score (0.2% in the community). The authors themselves noted that the participants were not a random selection of corporate executives in general and that only one rater scored the PCL-R, and psychopathy scores were positively associated with ratings of charisma and presentation style but negatively with ratings of responsibility and performance, such as being a team player, management skills and overall accomplishments (Babiak et al., 2010). So it was not a sample of CEOs, and it was some way from “success”. A meta-analysis of 92 independent samples found a weak positive correlation between psychopathic tendencies and leadership emergence, a weak negative association with leadership effectiveness and a moderate negative correlation with transformational leadership, with a gender difference in which men’s psychopathic tendencies correlated weakly positively with effectiveness and women’s negatively, and the authors concluded that “concern over psychopathic tendencies in organizational leaders may be overblown” (Landay et al., 2019).

“Psychopaths cannot be treated” has long been taken for granted even in clinical circles. Yet a review of 42 treatment studies of psychopathy concluded that “there is little scientific basis for the belief that psychopathy is an untreatable disorder”, and named three problems that make the belief hard to support: considerable disagreement about the defining characteristics of psychopathy, poor understanding of its causes, and relatively few studies of the psychopathy-treatment relationship and even fewer that followed people up after treatment (Salekin, 2002). Later work points the same way. A 2014 review noted that criminals with psychopathy had historically been thought resistant to change and unresponsive to treatment while very little research had actually investigated treatment or change, and summarised a small, recent literature suggesting that (a) psychopathic characteristics, especially those most related to offending, can change over the life course, (b) although these adults are among the hardest to work with in treatment, treatment causes them, like other offenders, to reoffend less, and (c) there is no good evidence that they take advantage of treatment services to wreak havoc on therapists or the community (Polaschek, 2014). The public-policy review likewise wrote that current psychopathy measures do not appear to moderate the effects of treatment, and that an increasing number of studies suggest these individuals are not “uniquely hopeless cases who should be disqualified from treatment” but “general high-risk cases who need to be targeted for intensive treatment to maximize public safety” (Skeem et al., 2011).

The supporting studies come mainly from correctional settings. In a study that followed 156 federally incarcerated sex offenders treated in a high-intensity inpatient programme for 10 years, participants high in psychopathy were more likely to drop out, yet almost 75% of them completed treatment, and positive treatment change was associated with reductions in sexual and violent recidivism after psychopathy and sexual recidivism risk were controlled (Olver & Wong, 2009). In a comparison of 141 juvenile offenders with high psychopathy-feature scores, the 85 who received treatment as usual in conventional juvenile correctional institutions were more than twice as likely to violently reoffend within 2 years as the 56 who went through the intensive programme of the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center, and treatment remained associated with slower and lower rates of serious recidivism after controlling for nonrandom assignment and release status (Caldwell et al., 2006). Neither study was randomised, though, and findings from offender samples cannot simply be transferred to people with no criminal history.

Guidelines and evidence on antisocial personality disorder are more cautious. The UK NICE guideline says to “consider” group-based cognitive and behavioural interventions in community and mental health services to address impulsivity, interpersonal difficulties and antisocial behaviour, group programmes focused on reducing offending for people with a history of offending, and, for people who meet criteria for psychopathy, interventions adapted by extending their nature and duration and adding booster sessions, continued follow-up and close monitoring. Medication “should not be routinely used” for antisocial personality disorder or its associated aggression, anger and impulsivity, while comorbid disorders such as depression and anxiety are treated according to their own guidelines. The guideline itself states that “the evidence for the treatment of antisocial personality disorder in adult life is limited and the outcomes of interventions are modest” and stresses the potential value of prevention with at-risk children, young people and their families (NICE, 2009). The Cochrane reviews reach the same conclusion. A review of psychological interventions gathered 19 randomised trials, but usable data came from only 10 studies with 605 participants (4-156 weeks); of eight interventions with data on the primary outcomes, only three, contingency management, schema therapy and dialectical behaviour therapy, showed evidence that they “may be” more effective than the control condition, “no intervention reported compelling evidence of change in antisocial behaviour”, and the certainty of the evidence was low or very low overall (Gibbon et al., 2020). The review of medication gathered 11 trials with 416 participants (6-24 weeks, no follow-up), but no study had recruited participants on the basis of having the disorder, the evidence came from single, unreplicated studies of mostly older medications, every outcome was rated very low certainty, and the authors judged the evidence “insufficient to draw any conclusion” (Khalifa et al., 2020). In short, “they never change” does not fit the evidence, but the evidence is also too thin to say “there is a good treatment”. The firmest ground is that correctional programmes reduce reoffending; the weakest is medication.

Before working out whether someone is “a psychopath”, look at your own safety. If there are threats, violence, intimidation or control over your money or movements, that is abuse whatever name you give the person, and you can get counselling and protection. In immediate danger, call your local emergency number. US: National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-7233 · UK: National Domestic Abuse Helpline 0808 2000 247. In Korea, the Women’s Emergency Line 1366 offers anyone, men and women alike, who is struggling with domestic or dating violence initial counselling 24 hours a day (MOGEF, n.d.). Honestly, within what we could find there is no self-help method with proven effectiveness for the partners or families of people high in psychopathic traits. What follows is general counselling advice, not a method proven by research. First, do not confront the person with “you are a psychopath” when the situation is unsafe. A label will not change them and can make things more dangerous. Second, watch behaviour, not the person. As ICD-11 says, lack of empathy does not necessarily mean not knowing what others feel; it may be closer to using that knowledge (WHO, 2024), so repeated behaviour is more reliable information than apologies or tears. Third, write down what happened and when, and keep an outside view by telling someone you trust exactly what is going on. If you keep hearing things that make you doubt your own memory and judgement, the gaslighting guide covers that pattern and what helps.

Families have a right to support. The UK NICE guideline recommends that services ask directly whether the person wants their family or carers involved in their care, encourage involvement where the person consents, inform families and carers about local support groups, and pay particular attention to the impact of antisocial and offending behaviour on the family, the consequences of significant drug or alcohol misuse, and the needs of and risks to any children in the family and the safeguarding of their interests (NICE, 2009). Outside Korea, your family doctor or general practitioner is the first place to ask for a referral, for yourself as well as for the person. In Korea, the mental health crisis line 1577-0199 (24 hours) connects you to the nearest community mental health welfare centre (MOHW, 2025), and family members can be counselled there too. If the relationship feels like too much to carry, or you have thoughts of hurting yourself, reach out first to a crisis line: call or text 988 in the US and Canada, call Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or find a line at findahelpline.com elsewhere. If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services. If there are children, their safety comes before everything else.

Some readers, conversely, will feel “I think I am that person”. If you notice that you hurt people without regret, or that lying and using people have become habits, that is something counselling and medical care can work on, and whether it amounts to a diagnosis is for a clinician to judge. The NICE guideline states that people with antisocial personality disorder should not be excluded from any health or social care service because of their diagnosis or history of offending, that staff should recognise that a positive and rewarding approach is more likely than a punitive one to engage people in treatment, and that treatment options should be explored “in an atmosphere of hope and optimism, explaining that recovery is possible and attainable”; co-occurring problems such as depression, anxiety and substance use are treated in their own right (NICE, 2009). A psychiatrist or psychologist is a place to start; outside Korea, your family doctor or general practitioner can refer you. To understand yourself, the Big Five personality test shows broad traits such as agreeableness and conscientiousness and the empathy and emotion style test how you respond to other people’s feelings, but neither is a psychopathy test or a tool for judging anyone. The kinds of empathy and how to build it are in the empathy skills guide.

Q. Is there a psychopath test? A. mind.io does not offer a psychopath test. The PCL-R used in clinical and forensic work is a tool for trained professionals, to be used only in validated populations, with the scores of two raters averaged where possible (Hare, n.d.). Research has self-report scales developed in student samples (Levenson et al., 1995; Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996), but their scores are for research, not diagnosis. Online “psychopath tests” and the funeral riddle are not tests at all (Mikkelson, 2002). The Big Five personality test shows your broad traits, the empathy and emotion style test how you respond to other people’s feelings and the attachment style test how you draw close and pull away in relationships, but none of the three is a psychopathy test.

Q. What is the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath? A. There is no officially defined difference. In the APA Dictionary both words are synonyms or former names for antisocial personality disorder (APA, 2018a; APA, 2018b), and ICD-11 has neither (WHO, 2024). The internet’s distinctions, “born versus made” or “cold versus hot-headed”, are defined nowhere in the research literature we reviewed. Research measures a single construct, psychopathy, with the PCL-R or self-report scales (Hare & Neumann, 2008; Skeem et al., 2011), and clinicians diagnose antisocial personality disorder or ICD-11’s dissociality domain.

Q. Are all psychopaths criminals? A. No. In the British household survey, psychopathy was a rare condition affecting less than 1% (0.6%) of the household population and was prevalent among prisoners, but that does not mean the reverse, that everyone with the traits is a prisoner (Coid et al., 2009). Seen from the prison side, 47% of male prisoners met criteria for antisocial personality disorder, so a little over half did not (Fazel & Danesh, 2002), and people who meet criteria for psychopathy are a small proportion of those with antisocial personality disorder (NICE, 2009). The public-policy review wrote that psychopathy measures show no special powers in predicting violence and that the picture of “inalterably dangerous” people is a misconception (Skeem et al., 2011).

Q. I heard many CEOs are psychopaths. A. The often-cited study assessed not CEOs but 203 managers and executives whom seven US companies had selected for management development programmes, and the authors themselves noted that the sample was not random and that there was a single rater. The shares with high scores (5.9%, 3%) were larger than in a community sample (1.2%, 0.2%), but psychopathy scores were negatively related to ratings of being a team player, management skills and performance (Babiak et al., 2010). A meta-analysis of 92 samples reported a weak negative correlation with leadership effectiveness and concluded that concern may be overblown (Landay et al., 2019), and the review of “successful psychopathy” said rigorous evidence was minimal (Lilienfeld et al., 2015).

Q. Is it inborn or made? A. Both are studied, and no single cause has been established. The annual review wrote that current conceptualisations of psychopathy are informed by extensive empirical research integrating structural, genetic, developmental, personality and neurobiological findings (Hare & Neumann, 2008), and the triarchic model considers disinhibition, boldness and meanness each in terms of relevant etiologic and developmental pathways (Patrick et al., 2009). The public-policy review listed the sorts of causal influences that contribute, and how early in development psychopathy can validly be identified, among the questions still debated (Skeem et al., 2011). The tidy dichotomy of “born psychopath versus made sociopath” appears nowhere in this literature.

Q. My family member or partner seems like a psychopath. What should I do? A. Focus on safety and behaviour rather than on settling a label. If there are threats or violence: in immediate danger, call your local emergency number. US: National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-7233 · UK: National Domestic Abuse Helpline 0808 2000 247. In Korea, the Women’s Emergency Line 1366 counsels anyone affected by domestic or dating violence 24 hours a day (MOGEF, n.d.). When it is unsafe, do not confront the person with “you are a psychopath”; write down what happened and when, and tell someone you trust exactly what is going on. Families have a right to support (NICE, 2009); outside Korea, your family doctor or general practitioner can refer you, and in Korea the crisis line 1577-0199 connects you to the nearest community mental health welfare centre, where family members can be counselled too (MOHW, 2025). If things feel like too much, or you have thoughts of hurting yourself, reach out to a crisis line: call or text 988 in the US and Canada, call Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or find a line at findahelpline.com elsewhere. If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services.

Q. I am afraid I might be a psychopath. A. That judgement belongs to a clinician, not to an online test, and a high score on a self-report scale is not a diagnosis either (Lilienfeld & Andrews, 1996). If you feel that you hurt people without regret, or that lying and using people have become habits, that is something a psychiatrist or psychologist can work on with you; outside Korea, your family doctor or general practitioner can refer you. The NICE guideline says that even people with antisocial personality disorder should not be excluded from any service and that recovery is possible and attainable (NICE, 2009). If this worry weighs too heavily, or you have thoughts of hurting yourself, reach out to a crisis line: call or text 988 in the US and Canada, call Samaritans on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or find a line at findahelpline.com elsewhere. If you are in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services.

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