betterthanwell comments on Notes on Psychopathy - Less Wrong
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Something like it was tried in Canada, in the sixties, with LSD, in a four year experiment where a group of 30 psychopaths were, at least apparently, temporarily reformed through unconventional means.
This strange and unique program was obliquely referenced in the top post:
The Insane Criminal as Therapist
E.T. Barker, M. H. Mason, The Canadian Journal of Corrections, Oct. 1968.
Here's an account from a recent pop-psychology book, The Psychopath Test:
Several of the 30 participants of the experiment went on to commit violent homicides some years after release.
An internal memo from the experiment: "LSD in a Coercive Milieu Therapy Program" (E.T Barker)
Intriguing.
Cool.
But in case it wasn't clear, I wasn't proposing that as a guaranteed cure, only as an example of a treatment they may not have tried.
The researchers concluded:
It's the OP's jump from "nothing we tried works" to "resistance to all treatments don't work" that I objected to.
I don't see why you would interpret "it's untreatable" as "gasp! how dare he claim that there is no possible treatment and never will be a treatment and they've thought of everything!"
They have demonstrated resistance to all treatment and attempts to change their mind. That is simply the case. And that's when the treatment doesn't backfire...
Because I find that people use "can't be treated" not as a cue to search for a treatment, but as a claim that such a search will be fruitless. "Can't be done", not "we don't know how to do it yet".
And again, they haven't "demonstrated resistance to all treatment", they've "demonstrated resistance to a very finite list of treatments".