Then again can modern mental health professionals really do anything for sociopaths?

Not really. It's a personality disorder. They simply lack the capacity to feel empathy. Your best bet is to train them to be a stockbroker.

I don't care that we talk about him here, but backchannel and blocking is not stuff we encourage discussing on the boards.

Mostly I think it is a waste of everyone's energy. He's not very interesting, nothing new to the story, sad and pathetic much like any number of people we encounter on the interwebs.

I thought that i was special, getting the request. I didn't know him well back in the day, but I clearly remember the drama when he "died".

Good point, msbelle.

That said, at least he didn't create twelve sockpuppets like that girl Jessie did.

... or did he? t gives Tommyrot the side-eye

Is it bad to admit I never really cared for him when we thought he was a real soooooper physicist (or whatever) who got bit by a weremonkey and had Superman for a son and had a squatter living in his house?

Not bad, and not just you - he was that kind of (sociopathic) charming at first that sweeps people up in its wake, but then (at least for me) he quickly degenerated into the kind of sociopathic not-charming that sucks all the oxygen from the room and makes it all about him.

Even when he was still here, he seemed to me like a major asshole; by the time he started dropping out for months at a time and then coming back to bask in the attention that the latest wild stories got him, he was already a bad-actor, communitywise. He'd come in, make it all about him, derail existing conversations, shine the thousand-watt smile at a handful of people, blow off or frankly insult a lot of other people, and vanish again. In the mean time, he fucked with people in real life, he blew off his promises to the community, he was a dick.

I'm'a vote no secret FB group. I'm kinda sick of backchanneling about it, of feeling like we can't talk about it here -- I frankly don't care if he's lurking, because that just makes him more obviously a coward and a buffoon. It also might help us to get beyond flinching every time: good on flea et al for bringing it up here rather than going elsewhere to say "OMG" under lock and key. (I'm incidentally totally surprised that I feel this vehemently about this. It just came over me.)

Then again can modern mental health professionals really do anything for sociopaths? Can therapy even do a lot for assholes?

Personality disorders can be managed, but not 'cured.' Sociopathy, narcissism, borderline tendencies, psychopathy, are the most difficult to identify internally. That makes them rarely addressed at all.

As for the assholery, I bat about 800, success-wise. Then again, any asshole who makes it to my couch has a different sort of motivation.

That said, at least he didn't create twelve sockpuppets like that girl Jessie did.

If I were to do that, I would keenly feel the sudden shortfall in actual socks.

Then again, any asshole who makes it to my couch has a different sort of motivation.

Took me a while to work out you weren't on the couch with them.

As you were! Don't mind me!

Took me a while to work out you weren't on the couch with them.

Does it scream how sad my life is that I wouldn't mind that?

Mostly I think it is a waste of everyone's energy. He's not very interesting, nothing new to the story, sad and pathetic much like any number of people we encounter on the interwebs.

Yes.