I find it very troubling that the a large part of the 'she is an adult' argument that I have seen the Barnetts putting forth in the media is that she has been 'diagnosed' with a personality disorder that only adults are diagnosed with - that she is a psychopath or a sociopath. Many have pointed out psychopath is not in the DSM-5 and that the diagnosis would actually be that she has an antisocial personality disorder.
But the reasoning here is
so backwards. And it is not really right to describe a personality disorder as a psychological or mental 'illness.' The diagnosis is based on inflexible patterns of thinking and behaving, with evidence that those particular behavioural/emotional/thought/relational patterns or traits have been in place over pretty much the entire (adult) lifetime of an individual. And because people with personality disorders are not necessarily going to see themselves or describe themselves accurately, the patient's history (work, education, criminal history, family and other relationship history, including interviews with friends and family if possible) is important in coming to a diagnosis of a personality disorder. So is ruling out any other potential physical or psychological causes. I hope I don't cause offense but the way I might try and get students in a Psych 101 college class to start thinking about the problems that coming to a personality disorder diagnosis might pose, would be to ask them to come up with a way to diagnose someone as being clinically 'an a**hole' (or some other type of personality, maybe 'a social butterfly' or 'a grouch' or whatever). You cannot just ask the person, they probably do not think they are just an a**hole - they experience life from their own point of view and have their own reasons and motivations for behaving as they do. For example, they may have been an a**hole to a cashier, but they think that the cashier was just being too slow (and maybe they were) and so they got mad at the cashier, for example. You cannot just point to one instance or even one period in a person's life when they were an a**hole, because maybe they were an a**hole at that time because they were going through other things (emotional, monetary, medical, psychological, neurological - there are a whole host of reasons our 'personality' can be altered for short or long periods of time). Because the diagnosis is assumed to be permanent and 'inflexible' you wouldn't want to diagnose a child as being
clinically 'an a**hole' even if they acted like one, because their personality is still developing and because you don't have a long enough history to reliably make that decision. So it isn't that you are a 'psychopath' and therefore you must be an adult, but just that the diagnosis is pretty much only able to be made in adults because of the nature of a personality disorder diagnosis. With an adult, you could look back at their adolescent or perhaps childhood years and see that there were signs of a personality disorder that they were later diagnosed with, but with a child or adolescent you just do not have enough data and all the data you have is uncertain because there is so much other stuff going on with children and adolescents and they are still developing and all that.
This child in particular had a lot happening with her that could have been causing some of the behaviours that might have been completely inappropriately interpreted by members of the Barnett family to mean that she is a 'psychopath.' How much do we know about her life before she was adopted? It would not surprise me if she experienced some neglect in her early years. That will change a child's brain, they will not be able to develop appropriately, they will struggle with the way they relate to the world and other people. It just breaks my heart to think this child may have been struggling with something like Reactive Attachment Disorder, and/or other challenges, and that instead of helping her to heal by surrounding her with the level of care and love she needed (which may have been a lot and may have been extremely challenging), her adoptive family just said 'no, she is a psychopath and therefore she is an adult' and they rejected and abandoned her. I mean, the level of devastating that would be for a child with attachment issues is so heartbreaking that I almost hope she is an adult with antisocial personality disorder. This is all speculative and MOO.
Those behaviours that the Barnetts have mentioned sort of in reference to her being a 'sociopath or psychopath' do not lead me to believe she is a sociopath at all, in fact they lead me to believe she is a child. Like the quote from Kristine Barnett in
this article saying "She would make statements and draw pictures saying she wanted to kill family members, roll them up in a blanket and put them in the backyard." Sounds exactly like a child with emotional difficulties to me, and not at all like a 22 year old sociopathic criminal mastermind. MOO.