Mental Health Matters 🧠 - Ask me anything!

What's up, Cadre fam? Evan here, your resident mental health and addiction therapist. This is mental health. Mental health. Yeah. That's how you pronounce it, not mental health. Mental health matters. This is where we talk about all sorts of topics regarding mental health addiction. I answer your questions, and that's what we're doing today. This is our bi weekly Ama. Ask me anything. I always wonder is like, bi weekly, does that really mean twice a week or every other? Well, in this case, I mean every other week.

Sometimes that's kind of confusing, and I don't know if there's actually a pure answer to that. Anyway, I brought some topics for today. Questions that I've gotten through you, all through social media, and remember that if you have any questions for me on mental health addiction, I will answer them for you. All you got to do is. Is go to the community feed, tag me, ask me whatever. You could go on any of my videos if you have questions about those, or just in general, if you comment on the videos, I'll usually see that.

Or you could just hop in live and ask me live, and I'll answer it right here and there for you. So those are the ways to engage in the AMA. But if you can't always catch the lives, live, you know, tag me in one of those, and then you can go back and watch this later, and I will answer. So, a few different questions. We're going to span a few different topics. So which one should we start off with? Let's start off with a fun one. I did some posts recently about what's called the dark triad or the dark tetrad traits.

Now, this is popular in pop psychology because it's really interesting. You see a lot of this in the criminology true crime series, those dark triage. What makes people do some of the worst atrocities possible? What are those traits, and what do we refer to those in psychology? And a good way of understanding it is it's broken down into usually three or four different traits that represent, you know, can represent different disorders or be part of different disorders. So you have one, narcissism.

And this is probably the most commonly talked about, which is really like an obsession with oneself. And this translates into, it's like a constant comparison of, like, needing an admiration and to feel superior to others, a pursuit of power, wealth, beauty. So it's like an obsession and basically doing whatever to feed one's ego, because under it, there's usually a lot of insecurity, and that causes a lot of trouble in relationships. It can lead to a lot of, like, abuse behaviors of other people, especially to those closest to you, and some other unsavory outcomes.

So that's one, narcissism. Number two is a fun one called machiavellianism. Where the heck does this come from now, really? Machiavellianism is manipulation of others for one's personal gain, that set of traits. And it comes from Nicolae Machiavelli, I believe, italian politician who was just known for being cunning and manipulative. And he actually wrote a book about it called the Prince, which is basically a guide of how to manipulate others. I think in the end it caught up with him and he was executed.

Don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty, pretty sure that's all true or close to true. Basically, a really cunning politician who wrote this book or was written by. I don't know. Of course, I'm getting a little too broad here. But anyway, that's, it comes from that politician known for being cunning and manipulative, Nicolai Machiavelli. So that's where you get that. And then you have, we call it. So there's a. There's. What is it? So there's those two. And then, like, the third one is like, essentially antisocial and, like, psychopathic behavior, which is like taking advantage of other people, criminal type, like hurting, you know, pleasure, and like, hurting others, which is sick sadism, which some people will consider to be the fourth trait.

Why am I blanking on, like, usually I could just recall this, but I'm blanking on what that's actually called. Sadism, narcissism. And I'm just going to look it up. But it's basically like antisocial. Antisocial personality traits, like psychopathy. But what do they refer to? I'm just, like, still waking up here. So dark triad is. Oh, yeah, psychopathy. Okay, so I was right on that. I wasn't sure what they officially referred to it as. So now how do these traits actually translate into real life?

Or how do we, as people who work in psychology, mental health psychologists, how do we all view these traits and how does it apply to, like it, mental health? So let's take. Okay, so you have narcissism, which translates most narcissistic personality disorder. So the disorder in and of itself, Machiavelli. There's no machiavellian disorder. Right. That usually is a set of traits that comes with narcissism and psychopathy. It's usually like kind of, it's almost like more like a tool that's used. And psychopathy is most associated with antisocial personality disorder.

And the term psychopathy comes from. More from the criminal justice criminology forensic world as a very defined set of traits. And this is often most associated with people like serial killers and that type of. So there's 20 traits that are, in that forensic psychology world world, associated with psychopathy, and it's scored by this, most commonly the hair test. Not hare, named after Robert Hare. And he is a forensic psychologist who's, like, kind of the grandfather of the study of psychopathy.

And it's basically 20 traits that he's identified as most associated. And the interesting thing with psychopathy is it is very, like, based in both genetics, you know, and environment. But it's a very defined. Like, you could actually see this and, like, people's brain waves, and it could show up, and it could show up more subtly, and people could be, like, more functional with it, and we could talk about that in a sec. Or it can be just so in depth that these folks almost always wind up in prison prison because of a lack of behavioral and emotional control.

And so I won't list all 20, nor do I think I could do it off the top of my head, even though I did some videos on this. But essentially, it's folks who.