Patric Gagne, PhD, is a passionate mother and wife, an engaging therapist, a charming and well-like friend, member of a country club who throws parties, lives in a nice house, is a writer, cook, she votes and makes people laugh. She has a dog and a cat and waits in carpool lines next to other women with dogs and cats. On the surface, she resembles almost every other average American woman, a happy mommy, a loving partner. Patric Gagne is also a sociopath.
Sociopath: A Memoir is an astounding book that reveals the author’s struggle to come to terms with her own sociopathy and shed light on the often maligned and misunderstood mental disorder. 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. 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 the disorder had been identified a century earlier, 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.
BIOS
Patric, PhD, is a New York Times bestselling writer, former therapist, and advocate for people suffering from sociopathic, psychopathic, and anti-social personality disorders. She earned a PhD in clinical psychology with a dissertation that examined the relationship between sociopathy and anxiety. This research became the groundwork for her continued studies on sociopathic disorder, as well as the foundation for her memoir. She did her undergraduate work at UCLA and earned her master's and doctorate at the California Graduate Institute of The Chicago School.
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Dr. Robin Kissell is Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and a Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. Between 2005 and 2016 she was director of the Borderline Personality Disorder Initiative, a residency-training clinic founded on MBT and designed after the original day-hospital program at Halliwick Unit. Currently she is Director of The Mentalizing Initiative, a non-profit organization offering training to community-based clinicians in MBT and other treatments for those with personality disorders known to enhance mentalizing. In addition to keeping a busy private practice, she supervises clinicians in MBT, teaches the core-curriculum on personality disorders to psychiatry trainees, consults to clinical teams and research projects implementing MBT and speaks frequently at conferences on personality and personality disorders.