‘I’m a liar. A thief. I feel no guilt or shame’
Stealing before she learned to talk, DR PATRIC GAGNE always knew she was different to other children. So she studied psychology to find out why. She takes Julia Llewellyn Smith inside the mind of a sociopath
Patric Gagne is a happily married mother of two. She’s a successful therapist and a member of a country club, she owns a dog and a cat, and right now she’s smiling so widely I fear her face might crack in two as she tells me, ‘I’m a sociopath. And I love it!’ ‘I’m a liar and a thief. I’m emotionally manipulative. I don’t feel guilt. I don’t feel shame,’ continues Gagne, who does school drop-off and pick-up every day with other mums who are just like her – on the surface.
With her specs perched on the end of her nose, Gagne, 48, is attractive, friendly and upbeat – but I’m still a bit scared of her. After all, this is a woman who freely admits to adopting a charming persona to make people like her. She’s also confessed to stealing regularly, joyriding and breaking into people’s houses just for the hell of it. When she was seven, she stabbed another child in the head with a pencil (no longterm harm was done, but still…). Once, bored, she even tried to strangle a cat.
Sociopaths, according to Gagne, exist on a spectrum. While they can feel love and sadness (if sporadically), the ‘social emotions’ such as jealousy, empathy, shame and guilt are inaccessible to them. This emotional void is a frightening place to be, so they try to access feelings through bad behaviour.
If you google ‘famous sociopaths’ you’ll find dictators Hitler and Stalin, serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and Harold Shipman and notorious fraudsters such as Bernie Madoff. Yet here’s Gagne, sitting in her book-lined office on the US east coast (she doesn’t want to reveal the location), happily aligning herself with these villains. In her book Sociopath: A Memoir, she not only tells her extraordinary story, she also – and this is a sentence I never thought I’d write – urges us to be more understanding of sociopaths, who, she says, suffer from an ‘emotional learning difficulty’, lacking the conscience that keeps most of us on the straight and narrow.
After all, sociopaths are estimated to make up approximately one in 20 (about