Elizabeth Holmes CEO of Theranos is charged with massive fraud. I'm watching her interviews on YouTube from her rise to her fall. On YouTube comments sections, some people say she's a psychopath and some say she's a sociopath, usually without providing strong argument. Is it safe to say that she's got psychological disorder without any mental health investigation?
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Welcome to Psychology.SE! For a number of reasons outlined in this meta post we can not, and will not, give advice for any individual. Therefore, if you was seeking advice for yourself or a friend, this question would be off-topic.
One of the reasons is that we cannot properly diagnose any psychological disorder here. The same will be said for the person in your question.
Forde (2007) highlights the following concerning assessment techniques:
- reliability means
the extent to which a test consistently measures the same thing,
- validity is
the extent to which the test measures what it is intended to measure
- a test
cannot be valid if it isn't also reliable
- any form of assessment
(and not just a traditional pencil and paper test) must be both valid and reliable, or it is useless.
With this in mind, you cannot say anyone has a psychological disorder without a valid and reliable method of diagnosis (Forde, 2017).
In other situations where someone says someone has a psychological disorder, they can be situations where they are voicing possible but not confirmed psychological disorders, which are personal opinions, which cannot be taken notice of officially without the necessary valid and reliable assessment(s).
References
Forde, R. A. (2017). Bad Psychology: How Forensic Psychology Left Science Behind. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
