People tell me that I am not a dog person, and I'm not a cat person. I'm just a pig. And to these vicious critics, I have only one thing to say, that is, better to be a super intelligent, seductively handsome pig, than a sheep.
Okay, and today we're going to discuss a study.
Yes, the researcher thing, a study of whether cats, you know, felines, are psychopaths. I've been suspecting this a long time now. Having been exposed to cats and their claws and other parts of their anatomy, I developed the conviction, however speculative and ill-founded I must admit, I developed the conviction that cats are psychopaths.
Regrettably, most cats I've met refuse to take the gold standard of diagnosing psychopathy, Robert Hare's PCL-R. And in this sense, cats are much more intelligent, the humans, because this test is rubbish, in my view, as I've expressed, as I've analyzed in various videos. So cats won't take the test, because they won't take the test. I wasn't able to diagnose a single one of them officially with antisocial personality disorder, which is the clinical entity corresponding to mild psychopathy.
But, academe to the rescue, here comes a study of cats, which established beyond reasonable doubt that all cats are psychopaths.
But before we go to cats and psychopaths, let's discuss a clinical entity, a diagnosis, which comprises both cats and psychopaths, and that is borderline personality disorder.
I've been asked by a particularly vigilant viewer of my videos, I've been asked, do you know of research that deals with transitioning a personality disorder into borderline in order to make him or her react to DBT and schema therapy?
Is the successful treatment for borderline personality disorder dependent on not having comorbidities?
These are actually two questions.
The first question is, I keep saying that people transition between or cycle between or circulate between personality disorders, but there's no such thing as different personality disorders, that all personality disorders are one single clinical entity with different manifestations at different times throughout the lifespan.
So, narcissists who, for example, experiences mortification, is likely to present as someone with a borderline personality disorder.
So, the viewer is asking intelligently whether in such a situation where the narcissist clinically becomes borderline, will the narcissist be amenable to treatment as a borderline is? Because we know their dialectical behavior therapy, schema therapy, they're very effective with borderline personality disorder.
So, why not? The narcissist has lost his primary diagnosis for whatever reason, and now he is open to intervention. It's a window of opportunity.
And right you are, dear viewer, it is a window of opportunity.
I kept saying in my videos dedicated to mortification that it's an opportunity for healing. With appropriate intervention, the narcissist can get in touch with his emotions. Several very beneficial dynamics can happen, and he is likely to become a lot more human, a lot less obnoxious, abrasive, antisocial, and in-your-face exploitative and disempathic.
Actually, cold therapy is based on this insight. What my new treatment modality cold therapy does, it traumatizes the narcissist to the point that the narcissist decompensates, loses his defenses. And once he or she had lost the defenses, this narcissist is open to attack, open to therapeutic intervention.
So this is the essence of cold therapy, re-traumatize the patient in order to remove the defenses, destroy the false self, and open the patient up to help, to help via a treatment modality.
As to the second question, is a successful treatment for borderline personality disorder dependent on not having comorbidities?
No, it does not depend on this.
Even people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and other disorders, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, depressive illnesses, or other personality disorders, even such people can be treated successfully and are treated successfully with treatment modalities such as DBT.
And the reason is that the borderline's emotional dysregulation affect instability, take over the manifestations and expressions and symptoms of the other disorders.
In other words, whenever there is a comorbidity with borderline personality disorder, the borderline side dominates, while the other disorders are recessive.
So there's always a dominant disorder and recessive disorders. There's a dominant self-state and recessive, submissive, background self-states.
And so treatment of someone with borderline, regardless of comorbidities, ought to be equally successful given all other things given.
Okay, let's talk about cats.
You've been waiting with bated breath, looking at your cat suspiciously, developing the secretary delusions, paranoia, staying away and distancing yourself from your feline companion. Does your cat ever give you the creeps? Does he enjoy staring contests with you? Does he have what is called frenetic random activity periods? F-R-A-Ps, I repeat, frenetic random activity periods. They're also known as zooms.
Does your cat have late night zooms? Does he ramble all over the apartment, destroying things like carpets and other very precious commodities? Is he defiant? Is he contumacious? Does he reject your authority contemptuously? Does he spit on you? Literally sometimes. Does he always scratch you even without any provocation? Does this little bundle of fur, this little fur of happiness, this little ball of fur, this little fur baby, whatever you want to call him, does your cat randomly attack you, climbing on top, a high shelf and jumping all over you to maximize impact and damage?
Yes, your cat definitely loves you, or rather the food that you hand out to it.
So what do we, professors of psychology, have to say about your cat?
I mean, having finished dissecting and discombobulating and dissembling and de-analyzing everyone in the environment, we are left with no human subjects.
So we are moving on. We are developing the field of psychiatry and psychology to include cats, dogs and giraffes. Yes, giraffes in one of my next episodes.
It seems that most cat owners just accommodate themselves. They just accept that the cat, their pet, doesn't really love them, that their pet is indifferent and apathetic to them, that they couldn't care less if they were to die tomorrow.
Most cat owners, a small minority of cat owners, would deny this and they would say that cats are as loving, as capable of attachment, as loyal as dogs, but that's a small minority and we have them now in treatment with medication because they are bloody wrong.
A recent study by researchers at the University of Liverpool, what's happening in Liverpool? Grandown is from Liverpool. This study is from Liverpool. Something very odd is happening in Liverpool. It has a university called John Morris. Can you believe this? Anyhow, scholars at the University of John Morris made a study and their subjects were cats.
The study claims that the activities I have mentioned before, zooming, jumping, scratching, clawing, destroying property, juvenile, feline, delinquency, these activities may mean that you are living with a psychopath. A psychopath clad in fur, a purring psychopath. You know the sound. That's the most dangerous type of psychopath.
Charm turned on to the maximum. Indifference tantalizing and provoking. The kind of psychopath you just can't resist. The kind of psychopath who sneaks into your bed at night and does unspeakable things to you.
And this team of United Kingdom based researchers, where else?
This team devised a survey. It's a survey for cat owners. They couldn't interview the cats, I've been told. The cats were reluctant to collaborate and they didn't regard the scientists' verbal skills to be sufficient. So the scientists have been reduced to interviewing the cat owners in order to determine whether the cats might actually have cat psychopathy.
So that would be antisocial cat personality disorder or antisocial cat disorder. They interviewed 549 unlucky owners of cats. They asked them to complete a survey.
At first, they measured what we call the triarchic traits. These traits are common in psychopathy and they include boldness, meanness and disinhibition. We measure these traits in the lesser species, humans, in order to determine psychopathy.
But cats being a much more evolved form of life would require more.
So to start with, they measured the triarchic traits.
But in the case of cats, they added two factors, human unfriendliness and pet unfriendliness.
All in all, the survey was comprised of 46 questions and they named, they christened the test. The cat triarchic plus test or the cat triplus test sounds very high tech. A high tech test for a high strong cat.
So 46 questions about your cat's behavior and these behaviors were very common among beloved felines. Does your cat mew excessively? Does he zoom in zoomies, not using zoom software, etc.
And then they published a study. They asked owners of pets questions such as, my cat vocalizes loudly, mews, yowls for no apparent reason. My cat runs around the house for no apparent reason and my cat does not appear to act guilty after misbehaving.
To be honest, I would shepherd all 549 respondents to the nearest mental asylum if they bothered to answer these kinds of questions. But they did. They did, luckily for science and luckily for us, it's the greatest development after relativity theory which was well over 100 years ago. Freud would have been jealous. He's turning in his grave. How come he didn't think of interviewing cat owners? It could have revolutionized psychology 100 years ago.
The study settled on the conclusion that all cats are psychopathic to some degree.
Most questions actually described average cat behavior and the study found that all cats have some level of psychopathy and the reason is simple, evolution.
The Journal of Research and Personality says, in an ancestral environment that demanded self-sufficiency, wild cats that had higher levels of psychopathic traits may have been more successful in acquiring resources such as food, territory and mating opportunities.
And if you think that this is a fair description of Donald Trump, you are right. You are right for cats. It is.
So cats come exactly like Donald Trump, from a long line of psychopaths. The cats we have as pets today come from a very long lineage and pedigree of felines with psychopathic traits. It was the only way to survive in the jungle and because our civilization resembles a jungle more and more, it's not surprising.
There is an exponential proliferation in cat ownership around the world. Cats have priorities not unlike certain politicians.
So the cat might be a psychopath, but he doesn't want to eat you. He wants to eat what you have to offer.
Yes, he doesn't want to eat you. It may come as a surprise or a shock to you and it may fly in the face of all the evidence that you have accumulated over decades of relationships with cats, but it's been established once and for all. The cat has no culinary aspirations or dreams or wishes or fantasies when it comes to its owner. The fairy friend you have, aka cat, cares only about running the house, eating your food and being a desirable mate.
This one of the researchers was aptly named Rebecca. Rebecca Evans and she helped develop the study. She spoke to Motherboard. Motherboard is a publication by Vice, run by Vice, and they asked her, why did you choose to study the unusual subject of cat psychopathology? And she answered, our cats and the differences in their personalities inspired us to start this research.
Indeed, cats are capable of transmitting viruses which affect the brain.
Now, I have no doubt of this.
Evans continued, personally, I'm also interested in how owner perceptions of psychopathy in their cat can affect the cat-owner relationship.
My cat, Gumball, scores relatively highly on the disinhibition scale, which means it can be quite vocal, proximity seeking, and excitable.
Sounds like a leaf out of the dating scene.
Anyhow, Motherboard, the publication by Vice, also spoke to another author of the study, probably because they were shocked by Dame Evans.
The other author was even more aptly named Mina, Mina Lyles.
She said that after studying psychopathy in humans, rodents, and primates, the authors who all love cats, I wonder what he says about the authors, loving psychopaths.
Okay, the authors who all love cats, she said, decided to join our forces.
It sounds like the invasion of Britain decided to join our forces and see if psychopathy is something that is relevant in our feline friends too.
So, here's a takeaway.
Bold cats may well be psychopaths.
Lyon said that her cat, Axel, who partook in the study, shows some signs of being a feline psychopath.
Probably to her dismay, I'm not sure, because she doesn't say.
What she does say is this, Axel is totally bald, bald like dairy, and known to go into neighbor's houses, cars, and garages to search for food.
I know many homeless who do this, and they are not cats last time I checked.
So, the conclusion is that more research is needed, and presumably more funding.
It should be stated that, the authors conclude, it should be stated that more research is needed to really prove that cats are psychopaths.
The questions asked in the study are pretty generic, such as my cat demands attention, or my cat disobeys rules, or behaviors that are pretty standard for the species.
So, we need to study behaviors which are non-standard, presumably cats who read books, or watch Netflix, or have an Instagram account.
These would be truly psychopathic cats.
Dogs and people, don't forget, may also be considered psychopaths, using the very same standards of the study.
If we were to apply the same questions to our pet dogs, or even to ourselves, by the study's own standards, we may all be psychopaths.
Haven't I been saying this like forever?
We are all becoming narcissists and psychopaths. It's my world babies, it's my world fur babies, it's my world. Welcome to it. I'm waiting.