On Friday 3 March there was a presentation in the School Theatre for our Year 13 English class, ‘Psychopaths, Sociopaths and Other Cool People’, where New Zealand Criminal Psychologist, David Scott, who works for the NZ Police, came in to share some information.

David Scott is from Auckland and has a Masters Degree, amongst a range of other high-level qualifications, in Criminal Psychology. His presentation was within the New Zealand context and we discussed the percentages of people in New Zealand prisons, people who have issues like Antisocial Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality and much more. He also covered deviant personalities, which is when people don't follow societal rules. Another topic we discussed was psychopathy/sociopathy and towards the end of the presentation he showed us some of the cases he has dealt with.

The presentation was full of good information that helped us understand a lot of important ideas, such as what makes a psychopath/sociopath. He tells us sociopathy is not as common as people might think it is. Also that everyone is born with traits of a psychopath, however, it depends on the environment they are growing up in that determines whether they develop their psychopaths traits. 

David Scott stated, “Nature loads the gun and nurture pulls the trigger.” We learnt a lot throughout the presentation and are very grateful for Mrs O’Toole, our English teacher, for organizing the day and for David Scott for taking his time to do the presentation.