The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I am sometimes reminded of how bad life can get.
My dad's cousin has a 14 year old grandson, that he wants to bring on their annual fishing trip.
Turns out the boy is a furry (hearing my dad describe it without the word or understanding of what a furry is was entertaining), but this was the least bad thing. The boy was recently arrested for molesting his younger ten year old brother. His younger brother lives with his mom (who is apparently a prostitute). His dad remarried and has a younger daughter, he has threatened to molest his step sister too if he moves in with his dad. The boy can't be placed in foster care because he is a danger to other children. It's looking like the main option might be juvi.
A few weeks ago I got about 60% of the way through writing an effort post on "some people I have known," and it just got too long and convoluted... but this seems like a place to tell one of those stories.
I have some neighbors with a 12 year old daughter and a couple younger sons. Beginning when the daughter was 4 or 5, she would leave the house and come knock on neighbor's doors (including mine)--when the door was opened, she would walk right in and ask for something to eat, or invite adults to come play with her, or start rummaging through people's belongings. Sometimes she would ask if she could live with them. Refusal was met with pouting, bargaining, and sometimes screaming fits. Some neighbors would call the mother, some would call the police, depending on their level of integration into the neighborhood community; you would not guess from looking at this girl, or speaking with her, that she has any particular mental disability or whatever. Within a couple of months (during which time they made various attempts at education and discipline and other behavior-modification) my neighbors installed deadbolts on all exterior doors that had to be unlocked with a key from either side. Apparently nothing short of literally locking their daughter into the house could prevent this behavior.
This became particularly apparent when they sent her to school, as she would simply leave school any time something happened to upset her--and then resume knocking on the doors of houses that appealed to her. She was placed into one of those "special" classrooms for discipline cases and slow learners. Within a few years she had received an official diagnosis of "oppositional defiant disorder" with a side of "level one autism spectrum disorder." She made some friends and things seemed to be progressing in a good direction.
When the girl was 9 or 10, inspired in part by the girl's progress and by the growth of their younger sons (who were also generally "locked in" as collateral damage, and who wanted the freedom to play outside without being let outside, or let back in), the family removed the key-only deadbolts. Within a year or so (by now the girl was 11), early one morning, the girl let herself out and took a walk. She left our neighborhood; I don't know how far she walked, but she knocked on a stranger's door and asked to live with them, because her parents were sexually abusing her.
Naturally, these people called the cops. What happened next my neighbor would relate to me later--would relate to most of our neighbors, later, as he canvassed the neighborhood sharing information in hopes of preventing another such incident. From his perspective, the story went like this: after realizing his daughter was gone (maybe half an hour after the daughter had slipped away), he called the parents of a couple of her friends. When none of them knew of her location, he took a short walk around the block, looking for her. Finally, he called the police, who informed him that they had his daughter in custody and would be by the house shortly.
When the police arrived, they left his daughter in the cruiser. They arrived with a social worker. They separated him from his wife and interviewed each of them individually, during which time they asked a series of increasingly upsetting questions. Eventually it was revealed to them that their daughter had given an exceedingly graphic description of violent sexual abuse, which she reported she had suffered at the (joint!) hands of her parents. His wife produced documentation from the girl's psychologist, emails from school administrators and teachers, and contact information for neighbors who could corroborate certain events. The authorities glanced over all of this without much comment.
My neighbor said he couldn't imagine how his daughter had even learned about some of the things she'd accused him of (their internet is pretty locked down, and his daughter does not have a cell phone), but he's pretty sure it was just information gleaned from her "friends" (and their smartphones) in the discipline-case classroom. Despite grilling him to a distressing degree, he says the cops didn't find his daughter's story very credible--but as a matter of policy, child abuse allegations are of course taken very seriously even when they are clearly fantastical. When the grilling was done, they brought the daughter into the house--screaming all the while that she hated her family and was in mortal danger--told the parents "good luck" and beat a hasty retreat.
As soon as the cops were gone, the daughter stopped screaming, assumed a totally flat affect, and asked for something to eat. Her parents explained to her that she had put them and her brothers in quite serious danger, and the daughter responded that she didn't intend for anyone to get hurt, but she wished she had a family that was more "fun," and that was all she was trying to accomplish.
That is in broad strokes the story my neighbor told me, stoically, as he provided me with a color printout of his daughter's face on a list of contact information--not just his and his wife's, but also her psychologist, her school resource officer, some nearby family members. He apologized for the imposition but asked me to please call whoever I felt most comfortable calling, if his daughter ever showed up at my door or even if I just saw her wandering around unattended.
I've known children prone to fits and outbursts, prone to theft and prevarication, prone even to inexplicable physical violence. But this particular girl strikes me as exactly the kind of straight-up "psychopath" that academic psychologists have been reluctant to recognize as such. If her parents hadn't been meticulously documenting this girl's behavior for years, would they still have custody of their children? Might one or both of them be in prison, right now? And looking forward to her teenage years, assuming she continues to harbor this peculiar impulse to get away from her family, what actions might she take? At the extreme end, maybe she just kills her parents, but in lesser tragedies she might run further away than the next neighborhood over; she might very easily be lured into running away with a predator; at best I suspect she will continue to internalize the negative influences of her discipline-case peers and fall into drug use or theft or other anti-social behaviors. She's not mentally disabled; with daily supervision she could probably live a normal-ish life, but only if she could be persuaded to accept such supervision in the long term, and only if someone is willing and able to provide that supervision. Today, that's her parents, but even if she remains with them well into adulthood, she should outlive them by decades.
Cases like this are not common, I think, but similar situations ("on the same spectrum" we might say) are common enough that they capture something really challenging about living in a society. Low information, low intellect, low agency people exist in dizzying array. Their lives would generally be better if they were supervised. Some of the worst off do get such supervision; if they aren't born into attentive families, group homes and halfway houses and the like also exist. But in our relentless pursuit of dignity and autonomy and equality for all, we have made it all but politically impossible to act on the idea that a meaningful percentage of our population would genuinely be much better off if their lives were managed by someone else. Because the difficult question is always--who?
The second girl I met through Tinder was one of these people who cannot manage her own life. She was definitely the most dysfunctional person I've ever gotten to know well. She kept flunking out of college because she hardly attended any classes and didn't do any work. She would enroll in a new college every other semester and immediately flunk out. She couldn't keep a part-time minimum wage job for more than a few weeks because she wouldn't go half the time. She didn't need the money because she lived with her parents, but she desperately wanted it so she could buy MDMA, to which she was addicted, alcohol, take-out, clothes, make-up, and bus tickets. When she was unemployed, she would borrow money from me and almost never pay me back, denying she ever borrowed it. Any money she earned would immediately be spent. She didn't even have $3 for the bus to go home, which she stole from me at least once.
She lied constantly, even about inconsequential things like the names of her parents. She briefly suffered from paranoid delusions, in my opinion caused by the drugs. She was prescribed an anti-psychotic, which she did not seem to understand the purpose of other than she was "sick" and this was "medicine". She did not understand that her delusion had been all in her head. She told me about it as though it had really happened. She didn't seem to have made any connection between the delusion and the anti-psychotic she was on. I could not convince her to tell her doctor about the drug use.
She had no attention span. When we met, she was very talkative and would ask me questions, but I could rarely get two sentences into an answer before she changed the subject. She could not watch a movie without repeatedly skipping parts she found boring, which was always most of the movie. She often got bored of me and then started texting other guys she knew while still in my apartment.
Before long, we were just friends. She treated me really horribly and it was clear she wasn't right for me, but I stayed friends with her because I just felt so bad for her. It looked like her life was going to turn into a disaster if no one helped her. But it turned out to be a totally wasted effort.
She really wanted a boyfriend but didn't know how to go about it. I explained to her that a guy who invites her over to his apartment late at night for a first date is not interested in anything other than sex. When she finally got a boyfriend, I explained that he wouldn't stay if she kept cheating on him. She never took my advice.
She somehow got a guy from another city who was too good for her to propose to her. He was really nice, smart, and had a decent job. I seriously considered warning him off of her as I wished someone had done for me, but decided against it. They seemed really happy together. He would regularly make the nine hour drive each way to visit her. He once even drove up to pick her up and take him to meet his family and then, because she was afraid of taking the train home on her own, she convinced him after much resistance to drive her back, adding an extra 18 hours of driving. But the second he left she was meeting up guys and sleeping with them, which she told him about. She was sometimes having multiple one-night stands a week, one of which resulted in a pregnancy which she aborted. Obviously, it didn't work out with her fiancé, who she seemed to really love, but she just couldn't stand being alone.
Early on, when we were dating and I was starting to realize how awful she was, I went through her text messages and found one from her ex-boyfriend, who she always talked about so positively. He just said, without elaboration, that meeting her was the worst thing that ever happened to him. I might say the same.
I didn't get into it much, but despite the incompetence in the rest of her life, she was quite charming and manipulative. She somehow had a few good friends who seemed totally normal. But I find it hard to imagine how she could ever support herself or get a man to do so long-term.
While someone else down thread points out this person probably has BPD (and I agree) it is worth noting that this is how delusions work (although in this case it is not likely a true delusion 'cause BPD).
Delusions are delusions because they are fixed, sometimes they clear or improve with medication but often they don't. If you like you can consider this kinda like "cognitive burn-in" (as in like a monitor), even if the conditions change such that the cause of the fixed and false belief is gone your brain is so used to thinking that...well it's stuck.
Many psychotic illnesses in general have a large component where patient's are in denial as to their illness (Anosognosia).
Borderline functions a bit differently, and while it is somewhat misleading to draw attention to this, the borderline in borderline is the borderline between psychosis and neurosis.
The cause of "delusional" thought content in the two conditions is wildly different on a substrate and biological level however they do appear somewhat similar superficially.
I thought maybe the doctor would explain that her delusion wasn't real. She had been imagining that she could hear her neighbour saying bad things about her through the walls. It had ended by the time she told me about it (maybe because she was on the anti-psychotic), but she told me about this as though it really had happened and no one had ever suggested to her it might not be real.
I'm sure they did (again assuming not BPD).
Imagine you thought you had two arms but you actually have three arms. You have two arms. "Has anyone ever told you have three arms?" "No why would they do that, I only have two arms."
What's that third arm then? "What third arm" "THAT ARM" "I don't know what you are talking about."
It's a delusion because you are convinced, which is why that shit is scary af.
Generally people with delusions will tell you matter of factly or you'll have to be careful about them coming out because "do you have any delusions" always gets "of course not."
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I've known a decent number of girls who were disordered in this particular way, but maybe not to that degree.
Like, they can do the basics of holding down a job, maybe even one with actual responsibilities, keep an apartment, MAYBE keep a pet alive. But their personal and social lives are complete shitshows because they can't keep social commitments, they will lie about things with reckless abandon, and view other people as amusements as best or instruments of their own desires at worst. That is, they care about another person only to the precise extent they can get something fun or useful out of them.
Girls whose aging cars are constantly breaking down or running out of gas but have like a half dozen guys who will show up to bail them out on short notice, and MAYBE get rewarded with sexual contact or at least some drugs.
And sometimes the right kind of broken person can play into that and you can get a codependent relationship that persists for 6 months to a year, then usually ends in spectacular fashion, but the girl, she does everything she can to put up the facade that she has no emotional reaction. And maybe she doesn't, who knows.
USUALLY its downstream of absentee (possibly dead) parents, then the spiral of drugs and self-sabotaging behavior that reinforces itself over the years.
The spooky part is that they're capable of dressing well, speaking well, behaving well in contexts where it is needed, and thus the true extent of the antisocial impulses is simply not clear until you've gotten to know them, then maybe you're a teeny bit infatuated with them and learning how bad things are under the hood simply elicits sympathy, which is something she can use to again extract fun or use out of you.
Apparently the part of the brain used to regulate emotional responses and guide 'constructive' behavior is not tied in tightly with the one that produces social cues and the presentation one gives to others.
I didn't talk much about the personal side of it, but we dated for three months before I ended it for a number of reasons. She did not take it well and blew up at me, getting unnecessarily confrontational and throwing things at me and shouting. She reached out six months later and we had a friendship where I kept her more at arm's length.
When we first met, she was extremely nice, although her behaviour was clearly somewhat off from the beginning. That lasted about two weeks and then it was like switch flipped and she treated me like garbage. There was maybe a month where she got really into some weird cult and stopped doing drugs all the time and seemed to be improving, but then she started doing hurtful things to me again and I ended it.
Overall, it was a pretty disturbing experience. I had never met anyone like that and didn't even have any substantial dating experience, and had no idea how to handle it. I didn't meet any of her friends for a while, but wished I had so I could have asked what in the world was going on with her. The part I found the most difficult to understand was how you could go from telling someone he's the love of your life one day and refuse to talk to him the next. There was all kinds of other cruel behaviour she engaged in and in retrospect, it seems obvious I should have completely cut her out of my life early on, but she was good at manipulating people.
Sounds like textbook Borderline Personality Disorder.
I've dated girls like that on VERY short timeframes, but enough to see the switch flip.
And yeah, it is disconcerting. Yeah you can expect emotional outbursts on occasion, but the literal "I love you more than anything" one day to "You mean nothing to me whatsoever" the next 180 turn feels like something humans SHOULDN'T be capable of doing.
Good on you for actually ending it. I kept a friend around with those tendencies at extra long distance for a few years and she had a habit of calling me at random to expound on all the drama that had unfolded in her life for the past few months. What eventually made me cut it off was her tendency to just dredge up and mention every mistake she knew of that I had made, or every way I had allegedly wronged her to hold it over my head for... no apparent reason. I eventually said "look, since I apologized, you either forgive and forget and stop bringing it up, or I stop answering your call every time."
This was a girl I knew from college, who I knew was smart, and had her academic life in order, but otherwise was a disaster.
Oof. The half-assed commitment to improvement that gives you false hope but ultimately everything returns to baseline because of course it does.
Familiar with that too.
I have to thread the needle very carefully on this -- this is obviously very bad and dangerous behavior that endangers other people, sometimes severely. It's very bad, to the point of profound evil.
But I also can't help but feel a real sadness in my heart for people whose internal life is so utterly dichotomous and disintegrated that anything resembling this appears like appropriate behavior for them. I can't imagine the internal anguish this must reflect. That's really what distinguishes BPD from APD: psychopaths will hurt and manipulate you to get what they want from you, and feel nothing, while borderlines will hurt and manipulate you as a part of hurting and manipulating themselves, and feel everything.
It doesn't make their behavior and the damage they do any more justifiable, but I just imagine borderlines as bundles of suffering so radiant in their suffering that the rest of the world gets sucked into their black hole of anguish, a kind of anti-divinity. It's no wonder people are so attracted to what is essentially a dark god! The pervasive feeling of being around a borderline is much like being around a prophet -- everything is extreme, the world is transcendent, and wrong is evil. If you are appreciated by them, you're given a rare gift, a precious pearl of great price. (This is the male equivalent to the "I can fix the abusive husband" meme.) I never dated one, though I certainly wanted to date at least a few before I realized their deep flaws, and for that I am grateful.
Extreme behavior often summons extreme adoration and affiliation, even if temporary, which is almost certainly the evopsych explanation for the existence of all the cluster B personality syndromes (psychopathy, narcissism, histrionic, and borderline). Crucially, the cluster A and C syndromes... are rather less adaptive even at subclinical levels, since they universally include behaviors that actively turn people away even without a "turn" (and avoidant PD sufferers, for instance, believe no one could ever like them, while schizoids don't really like anyone).
I guess what I'm saying is... remember that every extreme behavior has some sort of function, in moderation, and that people with extreme problems like this aren't ontologically different from the rest of us, even if, tragically, the only thing that can often be done for them is to keep them from harming others. My point is to demonstrate the reason why these traits persist and have attraction, while not endorsing the exaggeration as the truth. This is how people are made to feel -- in other words, those around a borderline sufferer are drawn into the cycle of intensity and delusion as much as the individual is. And so both sides are understandable, but in the way that a plane crash is "understandable."
Yeah, I have to agree with the general sentiment that you have the essence of BPD there. My own mental shorthand has been that BPD really epitomizes the proverbial lead role in a cage, but I really like the way you've described it! I'm convinced that my mother is high-functioning BPD and radiant suffering has been my mother's MO for as long as I can remember. And the pearl of great price... also yes. Jeff Foxworthy's old quip, "when mom ain't happy, ain't nobody happy," hit home for my entire family and on the other side, when mom was pleased with us and willing to show it, it was sunshine. The distortions that I've internalized from my childhood are still so prevalent that I still struggle with them frequently. I mean, except for all of these crazy off-the-chain examples mom wasn't that bad! But when I really step back and think about that a little more deeply, I realize that it's really just that mom was usually able to escape or at least mitigate the consequences of her actions.
And FWIW, yeah, I've been drawn to a certain level of intensity in my own relationships as well. While I haven't been attracted to BPD women per se, I'm pretty sure all of my serious partners have had BPD mothers, up to and including my MIL.
The rebrand of BPD as emotional dysregulation syndrome or something similar does a lot of work in capturing the much of the practical matter of the illness.
I think a lot of people also miss that most people with APD aren't true sociopaths and are also rendered miserable by the illness (especially later in life).
...and both seem to be mostly caused by a combination of genetics, trauma, and other shit you aren't in control of.
Man I miss free will.
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As someone with a mother who most likely suffers from BPD (Mercifully, she's been pensioned off on VA disability and has embraced the "disabled veteran" identity in middle age, so she's mostly not my problem now.), I think you more or less nailed it. It's hard to describe, but if mom loved you, you were invincible. If she hated you, you were an enemy combatant to be destroyed. If someone else you loved was the object of her ire your only recourse was to stay out of the way.
It's an amusing instead of awful story (There were plenty of those.), but to give an example when I was seven years old right after my parents had divorced my father took me mud riding in his SUV. As a little boy into all things motorized of course I had fun mud riding with dad, but when I came home and expressed that I'd had fun mother took it to mean that I loved dad more than her, and so she kicked me out of her house, threw every belonging of mine out of onto the front yard, called my dad, and told him that he could have me. Of course, it couldn't be that easy. After dad showed up and dutifully packed all my stuff into his car mom changed her mind and there was a fight. Mom won, I stayed with her, and I'll never watching my clothes sway in his his back window as he fishtailed making the turn away from her house. My parents' post divorce "co-parenting" wound up being a 15 year War of the Roses.
I'm not sure it's entirely possible to come out of that experience without a mis calibrated emotional Richter scale. I find myself drawn to emotional intensity and struggle with finding women who don't have that to be...boring (The trick is to find someone who has an intense affect, but is otherwise relatively sane.). I have a sufficiently developed fear response that the actually violent borderline types (Mom was one, but they're a minority relative to the unfixable dysfunctional black holes.) will make me run quickly, but those who are skilled at eliciting care/pity have been a sore spot in my life. I'd be lying if I said with certainty that I wouldn't ruin my life for the right combination of hot/smart/crazy. Being on the right side of it is that good.
Yeah...that's accurate, and yes it's tragic. My last encounter was very brief (about six weeks), a roommate gone wrong. Her life's story was something akin to Jenny from Forrest Gump, sexually abused by father turned sex worker in her teens/twenties turned to drugs/alcohol to being hopelessly burned out by her mid-30s, interested only in drinking herself to death. There's "self-diagnosed on Tumblr", "diagnosed by a mental health professional but working on it", and "would never dare face a mental health professional but gives me all the heebie-jeebies", and she was firmly in the third category. I had the sense to nuke things quickly and got out of it unscathed, but I still think about her sometimes and hope that she found someone whose variety of codependency can deal with her, because she deserves better than what she's gotten/given herself from life. I just couldn't do it without being dragged down into her Hell, and as intoxicating as her affection was it wasn't worth it (could've been hot enough if she took better care of herself, wasn't smart enough to be interesting).
This is called splitting and is one of the main coping mechanisms associated with the illness.
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It's me.
And yeah, they also have to be smart and, to some degree, self aware.
Unfortunately them merely being aware that they're being unreasonable isn't enough to convince them to STOP being unreasonable.
The smart ones tend to be able to create unique coping mechanisms that work until they have a particularly bad episode and then all collapse at once.
At which point they usually shut down all connections in life, job, friends, living situation, move somewhere new and start over to try again "fresh."
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Fucking hell.
This isn't even the full story. The full version includes possible sexual assault, possible lying about sexual assault, minor physical violence, inappropriate emotional outbursts, more cheating, more erratic behaviour, and more crazy dating experiences.
I will let my comment be: I'm glad you got yourself away from this person. Hopefully no lasting damage to you.
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Reminds me of The Mask of Sanity.
If the parents are smart, they will evict the daughter the second she turns 18, never speak to her again, and focus their resources on the remaining sons. But most parents are not that smart.
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I don't think the girl in question was low information, low intellect and definitely not low agentic. She just seemed fixated on causing chaos, and did everything in her power to do what was "fun" to her.
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Frankly if you don't know a couple different animals wearing human skin that should be put down, you probably don't know enough about people.
Who can really solve this problem? Many of these psychopaths figure out ways to fit in the crevices of society where the state can't or won't get to them. Ticking time bombs.
I'm all for giving kids a fair shake, but once you get into the double digits IMO I haven't seen a freak like this change their stripes.
Many people would call people like you, who call for other human beings to be murdered because you perceive them as animals, a psychopath, or someone with anti-social tendencies at the very least.
So what are you saying here? That there are no such thing as psychopaths? There's never been a human with an outsize negative effect on society? Your moralizing tone doesn't make you any more convincing.
I'm a borderline pacifist that abhors violence. But if you disagree with my assertion you are either a teenager with too little life experience or willfully ignorant.
I am not saying either. Ofcourse there are people who have been a net negative to society throughout their lives. It's good to know that you abhor violence, but your initial statement didn't come across that way. I am saying that even the people who are a net negative to society and are psychopaths are still human (not animals) and don't deserve to be murdered ("put down"). I believe it is immoral to kill people except as a last resort (for self-defense). There are many other things we could do with these people instead of killing them that will still make society safer.
In my (admittedly most extreme) example we're literally talking about people who start by murdering, raping, and robbing other people their whole lives.
Then they have more children, addled by drugs from birth and neglect from the jump. Who kick things off by consuming vast quantities of resources from families that adopt them. The exact same problems, but geometrically multiplied for each generation. And they're fast too, because getting knocked up the first at 16 means more meth quicker.
These are rare examples, yes. Fractions of a percent. But to repeat: it's not a morally superior stance to look at the rivers of blood and treasure consumed by tiny fractions of society, then to just throw up your hands and say "oops, guess we can't fix it!". It's the absolute worst version of the tragedy of the commons.
I agree that the right approach is not to ignore the problem because it is hard, but I don't believe that the only thing we can do to solve it is murder these people.
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Like what? I’m trying to imagine some institutional entity set up to try and maximize the productive labor value of people like this girl; such an entity would need to devote a very onerous amount of money, time, and resources just to making sure she doesn’t fuck something up massively. This is money spent just to make sure she isn’t a huge net negative; that’s long before we’ve gotten anywhere near turning her into a net positive. We also need to make sure such an entity does not give her access to anything important with which she could channel her obvious devotion to cause into a genuinely destructive action.
So, what sort of menial, non-impactful tasks are we setting her to, such that if she decides to do something horrible she can’t have much impact, but she still has the capacity to represent an economic (or even social) net positive, after taking into account everything required to keep her from doing something horrible?
Feature, not a bug. Plus, all the boys and men whose lives are graced by her presence should Have Some Empathy and take her accusations on the chin like a Real Man (where each accusation needs to be thoroughly investigated by The Authorities).
It reminds me of a Reddit thread about a female illegal immigrant committing a DUI homicide (no, not the jetski incident, a different female illegal immigrant homicide while operating a motor vehicle likely under the influence).
The perpetrator was sentenced to multiple years in prison, and a Redditor bemoaned that we don’t treat Persons of Justice Involvement (especially those of Color) with enough Compassion, and it would be better for Society to give her a second chance instead of ruining two lives over a little DUI whoopsie while waiting for her citizenship documentation. A wrongthinker replied that it is awfully coincidental that what’s promoted as good for society always sounds suspiciously similar to what would be good for the criminal(s) under discussion.
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We don't have to necessarily try and maximize the productive labor value of such people. Even locking them up in prison and giving them the necessities to live is better than killing them. Many people with dysfunctional lives have mental illnesses that can be treated, or they can be institutionalized. There are constraints on how many resources can be spent on fixing such people right now because we live in a resource-constrained society. This is becoming less of an issue as we grow wealthier and technology advances though, and eventually I believe we will be able to give everyone what they need due to AI. I think the main reason we don't see a lot of change in mentally ill and psychopathic people is because we don't spend a lot of resources to identify the origin of their issues in detail and give appropriately personalized treatment to fix them in the first place (understandably so, but that doesn't mean that nothing can be done to fix them). I will also note that most psychopaths grow up into productive people because they are intelligent enough to understand the incentive systems created by society.
I think a huge cause of the issue with the girl in question is also that she is a child. I don't claim to understand her mindset fully, but she doesn't seem to want to be purposefully causing harm to people around her. I think her actions would be a lot more destructive if that were the case. I think it is possible that this particular girl will stop trying to do things such as break into other people's house for fun when she becomes older, has more responsibilities and her actions have consequences that directly impact her life. As of now, her actions don't have that many consequences. She gets to live in a decently wealthy house with attentive parents and have all her needs met without having to work for them. Punishments like grounding aren't really negative if you don't care about them much. She would probably also stop it now if she was in a harsher incentive system. I don't think she would behave in the same manner if she had to work to get money for her necessities like food and clothing, she couldn't steal and would be placed in jail like adults if she did anything illegal or harassed people, and had more things to worry about just like adults. We don't do that because it is considered child abuse, but I wouldn't say that we have explored all the options just because her parents take her to counselling, try to make her understand the consequences of her actions, and institute disciplinary measures that don't affect her very much.
But she didn't. She is intelligent enough to understand those incentive systems created by society to purposefully cause harm to others.
Her actions were already seriously destructive. Tantamount to attempted murder, in fact. Preventing it already required her to be locked up, and that has already put the rest of the family in danger.
She really isn't (Western fiction about the age of adulthood aside); note that your suggested solution is to treat her like the adult she clearly is. Mine is too, of course- adults attempting murder get adult punishments (including and up to physical removal), and that's OK. The British hanging tables have data matching youth body types for a reason.
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Not trying to beat you up with responses here, but I both:
You want to be fair to this child. I want to be fair to everyone else.
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