Alternate anecdata:
Having met people like this the initial incidents are usually to try and right a perceived wrong. Being slighted on a bonus when another employee was over-compensated (from the perspective of the embezzler). An earned sales commission that was unpaid or underpaid. Things like that.
The embezzler spots an opportunity to get back some of what they are owed, they strike, and are successful. Then it spirals from there. Sometimes they get 'forced' to continue, the initial fraud case involved a fictitious vendor, or a subscription, or some other thing that is expected to be ongoing and would raise suspicious to suddenly stop.
In other cases I've seen the root cause just be straight up drugs and gambling addictions. An employee needs fast money, and probably need to hide it from family members, so a little embezzlement gets the job done. Then of course that never goes the way they intended, and they wind up doing it again and again until the whole thing implodes.
> Alternate anecdata: Having met people like this the initial incidents are usually to try and right a perceived wrong. Being slighted on a bonus when another employee was over-compensated (from the perspective of the embezzler). An earned sales commission that was unpaid or underpaid. Things like that.
Altnernate anecdata (N=1): One person I knew intimately enough definitely used a perceived wrong as a pretext to start something they had been looking to do already because of other issues.
I agree. It might not be that the person was truly wronged, only that the perception that they were slighted can be used as a pretext to excuse their own slights (getting progressively less slight).
> embezzler spots an opportunity to get back some of what they are owed, they strike, and are successful. Then it spirals from there.
This strikes me as the typical fraudster more than embezzler. Making up the gains versus having actual profits that they then steal. Madoff was a fraudster; Bankman-Fried more an embezzler.
If someone is caught in a vicious spiral not only does Therapy sound like a better option than prison but even just a one time bailout might allow them to self-correct... I still think it'd be a good idea to have the therapy in place though.
At the end of the day - people make mistakes, helping people out of those mistakes results in recidivism less often than you'd suspect.
I know of an employer at which one of the finance people had embezzled about 50K over the course of one or two years (from their employer). And at the same time they also embezzled 5K from the community sports league for which they did volunteer accounting/finance stuff.
They ended up being arrested and convicted for stealing from the sports league, and they went to jail for a few months but they had some arrangement where they could leave every weekday morning to go to work and then return to jail in the evening.
Their arrest and conviction was well known by and within their employer (from which they were known to have embezzled the 50K) since they needed to request leave to show up to court and also because the local papers covered it extensively due to it impacting the sports league.
They were not fired, presumably because their employer did not want to run the risk of tarnishing its sterling reputation of properly managing its finances.
Lots of things sounds like a better option when you remove the constraints of actual human behavior (see also: economics). Unfortunately human behavior is what it is regardless of whether your strategy accounts for it or not. So again, for the cheap seats, therapy is a complete waste of time in 100% of instances where the individual in question isn't genuinely pursuing change.
Yes - but it's very difficult to tell whether someone is a sociopath if they're good at it. I think it'd probably be safer to err on the side of therapy and let the therapist's recommendation or repeat offenses dictate whether jail time is justified.
> I think it'd probably be safer to err on the side of therapy and let the therapist's recommendation or repeat offenses dictate whether jail time is justified.
Repeat offenses as a signal? Sure!
Therapist's recommendation? I'm skeptical. Their primary data is whatever the subject self-reports, and their secondary data is their somewhat subjective opinion on whether the subject has improved.
If the subject does not want to stop and they are smart enough to figure out how to embezzle or to get high enough to embezzle, there's very little chance that the therapist would see through them.
It's like EQ tests - the subject can make the test results say whatever they want the test results to say.
Conversely they will often only go to rehab at the threat of imprisonment or abandonment by friends and family. I'm sure there's an underlying logic to addiction, but it creates behaviors that are extremely contradictory.
I was once told that the difference between a behavior being an addiction or the same behavior not being an addiction is that the non-addicted do the thing for some positive physical or psychological effect. The addicted do the thing in order to avoid a negative physical or psychological effect.
In this view, for example, people start using an addictive drug because it makes them feel good, but once addicted they use the drug in order to avoid withdrawal symptoms.
Going to rehab means to stop using, which brings withdrawal. I think this view explains why some addicted would only do it when they'll incur an even greater negative effect than withdrawal.
> I was once told that the difference between a behavior being an addiction or the same behavior not being an addiction is that the non-addicted do the thing for some positive physical or psychological effect. The addicted do the thing in order to avoid a negative physical or psychological effect.
I'm not an expert, but as far as I know, the logic is just a failure of long-term planning to dominate over short-term planning. "I know I shouldn't smoke, but this one cigarette will feel so good".
That's definitely one way people get addicted, but I suspect not the most common.
A huge proportion of drug addicts (and I suspect addicts of sex, gambling etc I'm just less familiar with those addictions) started taking their drugs because of how tough their life was. And even if you know that starting to take opiates or whatever drug of choice might not be a sensible plan long term, if you feel so bad that you'd rather kill yourself than live in your head sober, it's possible to actually want to keep using what you re addicted to because you don't believe that life without that drug can be any better.
I don't know how common this is, but anecdotally I've known two people who used high dose prescription painkillers (obtained illegal) to give them enough positive feelings to be able to work on their mental health problems, both who would've been described as problematically addicted by most medical professionals, but who managed to use the opiates to work on their core mental health issues until such a time that they felt ready to not need opiates, at which point they found it relatively easy to stop. Because as horrible as it is to get the withdrawals, it's actually not very last longing and it can be considerably less painful than the pain of having such severe mental health issues that you were desperate to kill yourself before you started the drug use, not because you started the drug use. (Of course there's also people who get addicted because they think it will be fun, and end up suicidal because of it. And I also wouldn't recommend using opiates to work on your mental health, because despite my two anecdotes I believe the almost universal knowledge in medical circles is that it's much more likely to worsen your mental health than to improve it.
Yes, that agrees with the addiction theory of Johann Hari, who has a TED talk and a book[0]. Experiments with rats show a rat will quickly be addicted when the choice is only between water and an opiate. But give the rat something other than a stark lonely existence, like exercise and sexual partners and rat friends, and they hardly use the drug. Similarly, many US servicemen in Vietnam became addicted to heroin while in country, but almost all simply stopped heroin when they were back home around friends and family.
> Similarly, many US servicemen in Vietnam became addicted to heroin while in country, but almost all simply stopped heroin when they were back home around friends and family.
I think this may be ahistorical, or at least vastly overstated. See Jeremy Kuzmarov’s research, published in “The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs.”
Ah, yes, I'm not talking so much about how they start, but about why it's hard to quit. The short term pleasure is always more compelling than the long term benefit of not being an addict.
But my point is that's not the only way people find it hard to stop.
If you're addicted because your life was roughly fine, but you discovered that a drug make you feel amazing, keep taking it too much, and get to the point where withdrawal is so painful that it's impossible to resist taking another dose to feel good again, then that's exactly how you describe it.
But if you're using heroin or whatever drug as a mental health treatment, e.g. because if you hadn't started using you would instead have killed yourself, then sure you'll still have the nasty withdrawals when you stop, but it's a totally different equation. For many addicts, taking illegal drugs is the only way to feel OK about life. Some of these people never manage to get clean, but the ones with this reason for addiction who do (or who try to) get clean, it can be surprisingly easy to deal with the withdrawals, because they're aware of how shit life was before they first started using the drug, and the idea that the rest of your life will be as shit as before you
started using drugs can be a far more scary thought than someone who's life was basically good except for their getting hooked on a drug.
To quote one of the all-time great TV shows, and surely the best about authentic portrayals of drug users, dealers, and cops - The Wire - Waylon, a former addict and narcotics anonymous sponsor, says “Getting clean’s the easy part. And then comes life.” I guess that's true for both types of addict I've talked about, but it's even more true for the addicts who turned to drugs because they hated their lives than for people who had lovely lives until they accidentally got addicted to a drug that they thought was fun to try.
Given the number of possible things wrong with a human that leads to bad behavior, it seems like an extreme claim to suggest that desire to make a change is a necessary component in any successful therapy. Part of therapy can be building that desire.
For example, therapy for issues stemming from learned helplessness are a counter example, as learned helplessness implies lacking a desire to make a change as they have already been conditioned to seeing it as impossible. The therapy involves building up that desire by having minor successes that end up breaking down the mental block which formed.
> A "sincere desire to make change" isn't quantifiable in the first place.
Well, that's my entire point: why use it as a metric or target? How do you tell if you achieved the objective when the target metric is unmeasurable?
When the goal is (in GP's words) "building that desire to make a change", you can never tell anything about progress towards your goal: when you've achieved the goal, when you've not achieved that goal, when you're making progress, when you're making it worse - those things are all subjective.
All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings.
> When the goal is (in GP's words) "building that desire to make a change", you can never tell anything about progress towards your goal:
> All we can do when treating sociopaths is to release them into the world again and judge their actions, not their self-reported feelings.
What's the purpose here, to treat the condition of being a sociopath, or just to enforce enough structure on them that they don't cause other people harm?
My problem with what you said is that the entire idea of "sociopathy" is that a person lacks what the diagnoser considers to be "emotion" and is simply "pretending" to be a "normal" human by copying how they see other people behaving. That diagnosis isn't quantifiable in the first place; it's the diagnoser deciding they know what's happening in a patient's head by (guess what?) observing their words and actions.
Farther up-thread, people were arguing sociopaths should go to prison and not receive therapy (particularly if they say they don't want therapy, but more generally if they've committed a crime). You're now taking that farther by saying even if they express a desire to make change, that shouldn't be taken into account when determining any treatment/punishment, because that's only an observation of words coming out of their mouth-- but that's the same route they were diagnosed via in the first place, so I find that hypocritical.
If you're just saying criminals should be punished without regard for their mental health/conditions simply because their victims were victimized regardless, that's a valid utilitarian view. But realize (it at least sounds like) you're essentially arguing that therapy for mental conditions is generally impossible/pointless.
