According To Thomas Wyatt's Psychopathy?

Spare a student or two who may have transferred in or out of the district over the years, my (rather small) graduating class remained relatively unchanged from elementary school through our senior year. This undoubtedly had both benefits and drawbacks; the one undeniable fact though was that we witnessed each other growing up—through the good as well as the bad. It’s with this experience in mind that I recall one student whose behaviors I now know would be referred to as excessively ‘antisocial’—what seemed innocently as somebody who didn’t quite fit in, however, by senior year ended up as somebody whose aggressive behaviors led to his his forced departure out of the school and into an alternative learning program. In this writing I will review
Wyatt’s case doesn’t reflect interpersonal or affective criteria nearly as much as the lifestyle and antisocial criteria—and while generally psychopathy may be reserved for adults, it seems fair to comment on where Wyatt’s actions aligned with the various criteria for psychopathy’s sub-factors. For example, as a student, Wyatt was rarely in good academic standing—not necessarily as a result of his intelligence, but merely as a reflection of his irresponsibility and lack of realistic goals, two criterion for the “lifestyle” factor. He was often in class with unfinished homework, and often seemed disinterested in any schoolwork, deeming it unnecessary. With regards to the antisocial factor, Wyatt increasingly over the years trended towards ‘antisocial behaviors.’ In elementary school this was “poor behavior controls” in social situations—emotional outbursts weren’t uncommon, generally in the form of anger. Further into high school this followed the lines of “criminal versatility” when outbursts of anger became further disruptive—swearing, tantrums of sorts, and eventually death threats. That’s not to suggest with certainty that Wyatt in adulthood is psychopathy-diagnosable, but his formative years certainly had moments of disruption well within the lines of antisocial behavior and, further,
Viewing this aggression through the lens of Daniel Connor’s “Aggression and Antisocial Behavior in Children and Adolescents: Research and Treatment” textbook, we could characterize it as maladaptive aggression as opposed to adaptive. While adaptive aggression serves to ensure survival, maladaptive aggression “is not in the service of individual or group competition for resources or defense within the context of the rules of a given society” (5). Rather, maladaptive aggression—as is with Wyatt’s case—isn’t serving a purpose directly beneficial at the necessity level. On the scale of covert and overt aggression (“confrontational” as opposed to “furtive”), his behaviors were overt but not extensively physical, somewhere in the 0-1.0 range (Connor