ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the psychological assessment data to provide the reader with management and treatment strategies for these complex and difficult patients. Psychopaths place a significant burden on any treatment setting. The effectiveness of treatment in reducing violent recidivism among psychopaths has remained, at best, questionable. Treated psychopaths had significantly greater rates of violent recidivism than their untreated counterparts, whereas the reverse was true for the non-psychopaths. The chapter describes the cognitive and personality functioning of psychopathic and non-psychopathic patients, and offers suggestions for management and treatment. Although these measures all showed significant trends, only community violence and frequency of disciplinary offenses statistically differentiated the psychopathic antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) from the non-psychopathic ASPD. The guarded "character pathology" of the ASPD paranoid schizophrenic may regulate a superficial adjustment, which masks the severity of the underlying psychosis.
