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Topics: News, World News, Mental Health, Health
Kit Roberts
A man who has been diagnosed as a psychopath opened up about the signs and symptoms of the condition.
Loic De Marie opened up about being diagnosed as a psychopath, and how this has gone on to affect his life.
When he was young, De Marie took a PCL-R test, this is a test designed to rate where someone falls on a 'psychopathy spectrum', with a higher score indicating someone who is more severely affected.
While calling someone a 'psychopath' is commonly used to refer to someone behaving inappropriately or selfishly, this is a more clinical approach to the traits which might make someone a 'psychopath'.
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Someone who scores highly on the PCL-R test might exhibit a lack of emotion, and have no qualms about the effects of their actions on other people even if the impact is very bad indeed.
They might also have cynical views about the people around them, such as thinking that they are very stupid or easy to manipulate.
Appearing on the People Are Deep podcast De Marie, from Belgium, explained some of the things which might set him apart from someone who scored much lower on the psychopathy test.
"No matter what I've done, never," he said. "I don't regret anything. I'm going to live once and I'm going to do it for myself. I don't have any regret."
He revealed that this has had very real consequences for him in the past.
"I've been arrested and I've been conducted to the police station," he said. "I don't give a s*** about what's going to happen. And I don't think about consequences of my behavior."
Giving an example of the sort of behavior he was referring to, he recounted an incident where he took his mother to see a dying friend, but only so he could attempt to seduce the friend's daughter.
"If the person had to die, this is not a matter for me," he said.
He went on to explain how he views other people.
"When you are a psychopath, you tend to believe that people are not smart," said De Marie. "That's why you use them. You see people as objects. You think they are stupid.
"You can get what you want from them. That's why you manipulate people."
Now, De Marie has turned this knowledge around manipulation into a scenario where he is not he one doing the manipulating.
He has done this by working as a life coach instructing people on how they can recognise patterns of manipulation in order to avoid it.
De Marie said: "I can get what I want without destroying anybody else. It's like a contract with me and people."