Sadistic personality disorder: symptoms and characteristics

Personality is a construct that refers to the pattern of thoughts, beliefs, ways of seeing the world and behaviors largely acquired throughout the life cycle that are maintained through situations and weather.

Some of these patterns are dysfunctional and do not allow a correct adaptation to the environment due to part of the subject, making him suffer severe difficulties or causing damage to third parties. This last of the assumptions is the one that occurs with disorders such as antisocial or the one that we are going to talk about in this article: sadistic personality disorder, a phenomenon that produces a lot of interest, to the point that there are countless films that talk about this type of people.

• Related article: "Symptoms and Signs of Personality Disorders"

Sadistic personality disorder

A sadistic personality disorder is considered to be a pathological pattern of cruel, vexatious and aggressive that manifests itself continuously throughout life consistently through situations. As with sexual sadism,

the subject feels enjoyment and satisfaction from the observation of suffering and humiliation of others. For this he can use from physical violence to humiliation, lies and rumors to cause damage, without a specific objective beyond the pleasure of doing so.

Violence and harassment are frequently used with the aim of dominating others for mere pleasure, without the cruelty used being a means to achieve other objectives. Likewise, it is common for them to be able to impose their will through fear and coercion. They are usually controlling people and they tend to limit the freedom of those around them, especially with those closest to them, as well as express a fascination with death and violence in general.

It should be borne in mind that this disorder is not limited to a specific person or situation, nor does it refer to the mere use of the pain of others as an object of sexual satisfaction (that is, people who manifest sexual sadism do not have to have a sadistic personality), but what we are talking about a generalized pattern of behavior.

• Related article: "Differences between Love, Sadism, Masochism and Sadomasochism"

Linked to crime

It can be easy to attribute crime to mental and personality disorders, but generally Most of the subjects who commit crimes (including blood crimes) are people without any type of alteration psychopathological. It is necessary to bear in mind that although we are talking about people who enjoy the humiliation and pain of others, This does not imply that they will incur any type of crime.

However, there is a higher prevalence of this disorder and of psychopathy in certain types of crimes: this is what happens with a large part of the serial killers. In other cases the prevalence is much lower, but sometimes in some studies carried out with the prison population it can be find that some of the subjects who commit sexual abuse / assault or maltreatment have typical features of this disorder.

Despite this, it must be emphasized that suffering from this disorder does not necessarily induce crime, being in fact the Most of the criminal individuals without a mental or personality pathology, contrary to what is usually believe.

Causes

Although the possible causes of this disorder are still unknown, as a personality disorder the origin of the Sadistic personality disorder is found in the interaction of biological temperament with experience and environment.

In this sense, it is proposed that in many cases may arise in part from biochemical and brain elements (brain areas such as the limbic and reward systems may be involved) and learning, such as example in situations of intrafamily violence or sexual or physical abuse continued throughout the life of the subject that this one has learned by modeling and associated with power and / or pleasure.

• You may be interested: "Parts of the human brain (and functions)"

Lack of information and current situation

However, there are doubts about its existence as a personality disorder: although it is clear that there are people with sadistic attitudes as occurs with some psychopaths, there are no enough evidence to fully characterize this type of disorder and even determine if we are really dealing with a personality disorder that is different and separable from others already existing.

The diagnostic classifications focus especially on the behavioral without going into depth on the emotional and cognitive aspects. More research is required in this regard in order to get more data. Although recognized by the DSM-III and by Millon as a personality disorder, sadistic personality disorder is currently listed as a category diagnosis proposed for research and included in the appendices of the largest diagnostic manual for the classification of mental disorders in the United States, the DSM.

Link to psychopathy and antisocial disorder

Although at first glance it can be seen that psychopathy antisocial disorder and sadistic personality disorder are closely related (in fact, in many cases they concur in the same subject), these are classifications that are not synonymous.

In all three cases, a dominant attitude is shared and in which they tend to commit deception and violation of rights to achieve their goals, often with the absence or difficulty of empathy and remorse.

However, obtaining pleasure and gratification from suffering and domination, which are at the core of this disorder, they are not absolutely defining neither of the psychopath (not all psychopaths are sadists) nor of the subject with disorder antisocial. In the same way, a subject can be sadistic without thereby circumventing or violating social norms or laws, something strange in antisocial personality disorder.

Bibliographic references:

• American Psychiatric Association (2002). DSM-IV-TR. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Spanish edition. Barcelona: Masson. (Original in English from 2000).
• American Psychiatric Association (1987). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 3rd revised edition (DSM-III-R). Washington, D.C ..
• Horse, V. (2001). An Introduction to Personality Disorders in the 21st Century. Behavioral Psychology, 9 (3); 455-469.