Sociopath

• Author: Patric Gagne
• Genre: Memoir
• Publication Date: April 1, 2024
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Thank you to libro.fm and Simon & Schuster Audio for providing me with an ALC of this audiobook in exchange for an honest review.

A fascinating, revelatory memoir revealing the author’s struggle to come to terms with her own sociopathy and shed light on the often maligned and misunderstood mental disorder.

Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected it was because she didn’t feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn’t like the way that “nothing” felt.

She did her best to pretend she was like everyone else, but the constant pressure to conform to a society she knew rejected anyone like her was unbearable. So Patric stole. She lied. She was occasionally violent. She became an expert lock-picker and home-invader. All with the goal of replacing the nothingness with…something.

In college, Patric finally confirmed what she’d long suspected. She was a sociopath. But even though it was the very first personality disorder identified—well over 200 years ago—sociopathy had been neglected by mental health professionals for decades. She was told there was no treatment, no hope for a normal life. She found herself haunted by sociopaths in pop culture, madmen and evil villains who are considered monsters. Her future looked grim.

But when Patric reconnects with an old flame, she gets a glimpse of a future beyond her diagnosis. If she’s capable of love, it must mean that she isn’t a monster. With the help of her sweetheart (and some curious characters she meets along the way) she embarks on a mission to prove that the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren’t all monsters either.

This is the inspiring story of her journey to change her fate and how she managed to build a life full of love and hope.

While browsing through the ALC offerings that libro made available for April, this one obviously caught my eye. As a person with an interest in psychology for as long as I can remember, and someone who worked in the mental health field and loved it, there was no way that I could possibly just scroll past this book. Everything about this book makes it stand out—the combination of the title being simply the word Sociopath, underlined, beneath a photograph of a young girl that looks like she might be taking school pictures, except she looks rather disheveled, isn’t smiling, and sort of has a dead look in her eyes. All the animation that makes children look like children seems to be missing in this photograph.

Sorry for the focus on the cover, but that’s what comes up on the screen while listening to the audiobook, so I had a lot of thoughts to share about it. Even better, the book is narrated by the author, which I fully appreciated in this case. I loved hearing the author reading her own words to me, putting emphasis where she wanted it to be.

This book is both a combination of a memoir and a primer on sociopathy, without ever feeling like a textbook. Initially, we are walked through Patric’s earliest years, where she becomes aware at a young age that there is something about her that causes others to feel uncomfortable around her, and taken through her adolescent years, when she realizes that she doesn’t experience emotions like others do. But in order to fit in, she is forced to constantly play a role that doesn’t come to her naturally—and it’s exhausting for her. The constant pressure and stress, plus the desire to feel something leads her to act out in various ways: picking locks and breaking into other people’s houses, stealing, lying, and on the rare occasion, becoming violent.

While Patric’s early years were interesting, I really found the story to become fascinating when she reached college. Because it’s in college that she starts learning about psychology, and discovers a term that sets her on a mission. That term is sociopath. 

But what she finds when she tries to search for that in the university library is a bust. Instead, she discovers two other terms that are often used interchangeably with sociopath—antisocial personality disorder and psychopath—even though each of these disorders has distinct and unique features as well as overlapping criteria. What I know of each of these is that they’re more commonly diagnosed in males, which makes it even more intriguing to read a book about a female sociopath. 

This leads to Patric asking about how they’re treated, and learning that there is no treatment and basically no hope for a normal life for a person who is diagnosed with sociopathy. Except Patric realizes, once she’s reconnected with an old flame, that she’s been in love before, so maybe there is hope for her. She decides that if there isn’t any kind of treatment for sociopathy, maybe she should become a therapist and learn how to treat it. And that’s exactly what she does.

In this book, she really focuses on deconstructing the view that society has of sociopaths as evil monsters who are all dangerous to humanity. While Patric freely admits to doing some things that are not healthy or appropriate, it’s clear that she consistently fights against harmful urges and is always working to find a more effective ways to deal with them. I love that she took the initiative to learn more about her own disorder, and views it as a challenge to overcome, more like an emotional learning disability than a disorder that means she’s going to commit a violent crime. By learning more about herself, she’s contributed to a much-neglected area of psychology, and created an immensely readable book that reads like fiction yet isn’t.

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