Does having violent thoughts makes you a psychopath?

Does having violent thoughts makes you a psychopath?

Today I'm answering a viewer question from Tee. And this is an excerpt of the question, it's not the entire question.

Hi Dr., A few months back I had a breakdown. I was at work and my boss told me that he may have to put me on leave because of the quarantine. I got upset at him and had a vision of him hanging from a rope. I kept working and the next week a coworker told me she could not find a rope in stock anywhere. I asked her why she was looking for a rope and she said we all need it for the virus. Then my mom told me to find a piece of rope to tie a bush up in the backyard. Then my brother started talking to me about tying knots. I thought they were all trying to tell me to kill my boss. I couldn't stand it anymore so I quit my job.

Things calmed down since I've been at home, but I still think Get these weird thoughts from time to time. I'm afraid I've turned into a psychopath. I never wanted to hurt anyone before. I don't understand why I would think about these things. Does this mean I will become a mass murderer? Thanks, Tee for your question. So Tee, it sounds like you had a psychotic experience. And here's how I see the progression of your breakdown. You were probably already having some odd thoughts when your boss mentioned taking you out of work. And that upset you.

What's more, since you were at that point not in a decent spot intellectually, your agitated appeared as a distinctive idea of seeing him dead. We all have primitive, unacceptable impulses. Furthermore, these are brief considerations that may fly into your psyche for an occurrence. A few people allude to this as your reptile mind that thinks in an extremely crude, natural selection sort of terms. Be that as it may, as we develop and adjust to the principles of society, we figure out how to stifle these musings and change our considerations to something increasingly satisfactory. Most of the time it's an automatic process that happens so quickly, that you're unaware that you thought something corrupt. Sometimes these thoughts though, come out in our dreams.

Because when you're sleeping, you can't consciously suppress the thoughts. So here's an example of how this could look for you. Let's say you had already had some issues with your boss, then he tells you that he may have to let you go. That makes you mad, and maybe you even feel singled out. But you don't have any violent images have him at the time. Instead, later that night, you dream that he died in a car accident. That's another way that this kind of concept can play out in your dreams, where your dreams actually reveal your thoughts. But when you're psychotic, it's like your brain has these loose connections so these primitive thoughts can become more prominent and you become more aware of what you're actually thinking.

Since you're insane, you can't hinder those musings from yourself. What you described as other people talking about ropes is what we call ideas of reference. It's a coincidence that they talked about the ropes, but you read other meanings into it. You take it to mean that they're pushing you to harm your boss. That's the part that makes it delusional. It's a false conclusion. Now here's how this is not psychopathic behavior or evidence that you will later become a mass murderer. Even though your thoughts were delusional, you were still able to recognize that they are wrong and that the action you took was to leave your job so that you don't hurt your boss. Psychopathy is a psychological term that's not a diagnosis but describes a person's character.

It's used in psychological legal settings, and there are tests to measure the level of psychopathy that a person has and these tests are usually used in legal settings or for research purposes. There's a lot to understanding psychopathy. But suffice to say that psychopaths behave in a way that they don't empathize with others' feelings. They exploit others for their own gain, and they have no remorse about the mean things that they do. So in your situation, I wouldn't expect a psychopath to quit his job, because he's afraid he may harm his boss. In fact, the psychopath may do something to get someone else fired so that he can keep his job, or steal from the company in some way.

Another important point here is that it's not the thoughts that produce psychopathy, it's the behavior. So you can have these thoughts all day long, but what matters is what you do with those thoughts. What actions do you take? Psychopaths don't let the feelings of others get in the way of what they want to do. That's for the lack of empathy comes into play. But the most important point here is that you really need help with your psychosis.

Psychosis is harmful to the brain, you don't want to just stay that way waiting for it to subside. Sometimes it will subside on its own, but sometimes it can escalate and you can lose control of your reactions. Sometimes delusions can take over and make you do something that's harmful to yourself like sending letters to prominent figures, threatening them, or going to the grocery store naked, because you believe the virus embeds in your clothes. That kind of behavior gets you arrested.

Psychosis needs to be treated by a psychiatrist, this is not something to address with therapy, you wanna find a psychiatrist in your area. There are multiple reasons you can have psychotic symptoms. Some of these are, schizophrenia, mania, depression, drug use, delusional disorder, which is different from schizophrenia and I'll make a video on that. There are also medical illnesses that can cause psychotic symptoms, and this is where the psychiatrist would figure this out with you. See you next time.