if you consider sociopathy to be a mental illness.
Nah, because that’s just Antisocial Personality Disorder, which basically boils down to trusting your own judgement over society’s.
That can be very bad, or very good.
Like, Harriet Tubman put her own values over society’s laws, so she broke a shit ton of laws with zero remorse. Hard to say she had a mental illness. But her actions we celebrate today, met a lot of the diagnosing criteria.
It’s just human variation, but it’s likely incredibly undercounted because regardless of if the person is more on the “good” or “bad” side, they all think they have a better line of thinking than society. And fuck man. Take a look around.
Society as a whole isn’t doing too hot lately, it’s a pretty low bar to say you trust your own morals than society’s.
That is one of the diagnosis criteria…
But it’s not a checklist where you gotta score 100%.
And to keep the Harriet Tubman example, legally under society’s laws she wasn’t freeing people. At the time and place she was at she was stealing property from people, relatively expensive property, and in large amounts.
Most people’s experience with someone diagnosed with ASPD are because they have the real bad ones in addition to the others, and someone without them would also almost never go see a shrink of their own free will, because they still have the other parts where they think (maybe rightfully) that they know more than everyone else.
This also skews what the medical community sees.
If someone doesn’t give a fuck about others, they still may realize the benefit of social nicities and benefits from being part of a community.
This ain’t an idea I just had, people have been talking about this undercount since way before we stopped using outdated terms like “sociopath”, and that was decades ago.