Psicopatología

ARTICULO EN THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE: CAN YOU CALL A 9-YEAR-OLD A PSYCHOPATH?

BY: JENNIFER KAHN
PUBLISHED: MAY 11, 2012

One day last summer, Anne and her husband, Miguel, took their 9-year-old son, Michael, to a Florida elementary school for the first day of what the family chose to call “summer camp.” For years, Anne and Miguel have struggled to understand their eldest son, an elegantboy with high-planed cheeks, wide eyes and curly light brown hair, whose periodic rages alternate with moments of chilly detachment. Michael’s eight-week program was, in reality, a highly structured psychological study — less summer camp than camp of last resort.

Michael’s problems started, according to his mother, around age 3, shortly after his brother Allan was born. At the time, she said,Michael was mostly just acting “like a brat,” but his behavior soon escalated to throwing tantrums during which he would scream and shriek inconsolably. These weren’t ordinary toddler’s fits. “It wasn’t, ‘I’m tired’ or ‘I’m frustrated’ — the normal things kids do,” Anne remembered. “His behavior was really out there. And it would happen for hours and hours each day, no matter what we did.” Forseveral years, Michael screamed every time his parents told him to put on his shoes or perform other ordinary tasks, like retrieving one of his toys from the living room. “Going somewhere, staying somewhere — anything would set him off,” Miguel said. These furies lasted well beyond toddlerhood. At 8, Michael would still fly into a rage when Anne or Miguel tried to get him ready for school, punchingthe wall and kicking holes in the door. Left unwatched, he would cut up his trousers with scissors or methodically pull his hair out. He would also vent his anger by slamming the toilet seat down again and again until it broke.

When Anne and Miguel first took Michael to see a therapist, he was given a diagnosis of “firstborn syndrome”: acting out because he resented his new sibling. While bothparents acknowledged that Michael was deeply hostile to the new baby, sibling rivalry didn’t seem sufficient to explain his consistently extreme behavior.
By the time he turned 5, Michael had developed an uncanny ability to switch from full-blown anger to moments of pure rationality or calculated charm — a facility that Anne describes as deeply unsettling. “You never know when you’re going to see aproper emotion,” she said. She recalled one argument, over a homework assignment, when Michael shrieked and wept as she tried to reason with him. “I said: ‘Michael, remember the brainstorming we did yesterday? All you have to do is take your thoughts from that and turn them into sentences, and you’re done!’ He’s still screaming bloody murder, so I say, ‘Michael, I thought we brainstormed so wecould avoid all this drama today.’ He stopped dead, in the middle of the screaming, turned to me and said in this flat, adult voice, ‘Well, you didn’t think that through very clearly then, did you?’ ”

Anne and Miguel live in a small coastal town south of Miami, the kind of place where children ride their bikes on well-maintained cul-de-sacs. (To protect the subjects’ privacy, only first or middlenames have been used.) The morning I met them was overcast and hot. Seated on a sofa in the family’s spacious living room, Anne sipped a Coke Zero while her two younger sons — Allan, 6, and Jake, 2 — played on the carpet. So far, she said, neither of the younger boys exhibited problems like Michael’s.

“We have bookshelves full of these books — ‘The Defiant Child’, ‘The Explosive Child,’ ” shetold me. “All these books with different strategies, and we try them, and sometimes they seem to work for a few days, but then it goes right back to how it was.” A former elementary-school teacher with a degree in child psychology, Anne admitted feeling frustrated despite her training. “We feel like we’ve been spinning our wheels,” she said. “Is it us? Is it him? Is it both? All these doctors...