The Psychologist Who Is a Sociopath

When you picture a therapist, you probably picture an empath. What if a former therapist is, by her own account, a sociopath? This episode looks at Dr. Patric Gagne, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology and wrote the 2024 memoir Sociopath, and at how her story has landed with readers.

In this episode

• Gagne’s background: a BA from UCLA, a master’s degree in psychology from the California Graduate Institute and a doctorate in clinical psychology from The Chicago School.
• What the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R) measures, and why, as the hosts explain it, “sociopath” is no longer a clinical term and is treated as a subset of Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD).
• Her blog post “Pleasure Delayer,” in which she describes putting off small pleasures and bodily needs, including a story set at a White House event. The hosts treat it as a psychological anecdote, not a political one.
• The hosts’ take on risk, boredom and under-arousal in ASPD, and whether “pleasure delaying” is a habit worth examining.
• How a Reddit thread in r/sociopath reacted to the memoir, as the hosts describe it: some readers said they felt seen and that the book helped them, while others called it exaggerated, disliked the ending, and questioned how she describes primary and secondary psychopathy.
• The comparison to M.E. Thomas, author of Confessions of a Sociopath, and the larger question of who speaks for a whole spectrum.

Sources discussed

What the hosts read for this episode: Patric Gagne’s Wikipedia entry, her own website, a blog post of hers called “Pleasure Delayer,” and a Reddit thread in r/sociopath where people talked about her 2024 memoir, Sociopath. Everything here is one person’s account of her own life plus what some readers said back. None of it is medical advice, and none of it is a diagnosis of anyone.

Photo: patricgagne.com