Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for an ARC of this book. All opinions in this review are my own.
Let me start by saying that this book is not exactly what I thought it was going to be, but what it ended up being is still great. Dr. Freestone has a PhD in Sociology, and he tells you that right at the beginning, which I appreciated immensely. This gives this book a very different feel from many of the other books I have read about severely mentally ill people, specifically criminals. Dr. Freestone also worked for the NHS (the public healthcare system in England), and worked with a team designed to study psychopaths specifically – his team included forensic psychologists, psychiatrists, and people who worked in the prisons, but he reiterates that he had no formal education in psychology the way his collogues did. It was really interesting to read a book about this population from someone who has training in an associated field but not the field I am used to reading from (and the one I am currently studying), and some of his cases were really interesting.
The book is formatted with an introduction then opening chapter, just setting the tone for how this book is going to be laid out, then a chapter for each case study, and a closing chapter wrapping up final thoughts. Each case study chapter is unique in that it identifies a different “type” of psychopath, from a hitman to a “parasite” to someone with borderline personality disorder. Dr. Freestone also stresses that there is no true diagnostic criteria for psychopathy, like there is for sociopathy (generally it is anti-social personality disorder); psychopathy is based on the score one gets on the PCL-R or the Psychopath Test Assessment. While the questions are not listed in the book itself, the general overview of the test is mentioned, and each of the seven case studies have some mention of their PCL-R rating.
This book is not overly long, as no one case study is gone into too much depth. A lot of this is Dr. Freestone’s reactions and experiences in working with these populations, rather than diagnosing and treating psychopaths (because again, he cannot diagnose based on not having a clinical background). It is more of a memoir than I was expecting, but I still feel like I learned a lot about different types of people who score highly on the PCL-R, and since this is a population I am training to work with in the future, I found it incredibly useful reading material. 5/5