Diagnosing Logan and Jake Paul as sociopaths?

I was aware of this at the time they came out but didn't have anything to really say. But I stumbled upon this article by Self , "What Mental Health Experts Want You to Know Before Watching the Buzzy New YouTube Series ‘The Mind of Jake Paul’,: that interviewed some of our friend researchers that I thought had some good information :

Although the word pops up in everyday conversation, it is not actually a medical term, Steven Siegel, M.D., professor and chairman of psychiatry and the behavioral sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, tells SELF.

“We try to avoid the term because it just doesn’t have any formal meaning. It’s a colloquial word and it’s not used consistently,” Scott Lilienfeld, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Emory University, tells SELF.

“It has no clinical content,” Ronald Schouten, M.D., J.D., director of the Law & Psychiatry Service of the Massachusetts General Hospital and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, tells SELF. “It’s used as an epithet.”

As Dr. Siegel explains, sociopath is generally a label that some people give someone they believe is a bad person.

Sociopathy is really an outdated, slippery term for what is known today as antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), according to the American Psychological Association (APA). As Morton notes in episode two, “The Dark Side of Jake Paul,” ASPD is the technical term most clinicians prefer to use today. (The terms are still sometimes used interchangably, according to the National Institutes of Health).

“Antisocial personality disorder is psychiatry's way of trying to classify people without using the pejorative or derogatory terms,” Dr. Siegel explains. “It’s a way of commenting on a pervasive pattern of behavior that spans someone's adult life and that may inform why they experience life the way they do.”
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“personality disorders are notoriously difficult to diagnose,” Katherine Dixon-Gordon, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and assistant professor in the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, tells SELF. “This diagnosis is a really complex thing to undertake, and requires these long interviews.”

Even having all the relevant information doesn’t always ensure a reliable diagnosis. “They are so complicated that even among psychologists and psychiatrists, we can’t agree on how to diagnose personality disorders,” Dixon-Gordon says. “Even when we undertake these incredibly complicated interviews with people, experts don't always agree.” She explains that two well-qualified clinicians could evaluate the same person and not necessarily come away with the same assessment.

In reality, the behaviors some experts may link to ASPD span a spectrum. “All of these personality disorders describe being at an extreme end of a spectrum of normal human behaviors,” Dr. Siegel says. Dixon-Gordon adds, “By definition, [personality disorders] represent maladaptive variance of normative personality functioning. So often that line between what’s adaptive and what’s maladaptive and what’s normative and non-normative is a difficult one to find.”

In episode two, Morton cites a statistic that one in 25 people is a sociopath. (This stat is arguably outdated and was derived from several studies dating back to the ‘90s.) While there are not many reliable epidemiological studies on how prevalent ASPD is—although several experts noted that figure sounds high—Lilienfeld argues that the stat is misleading for a different reason.

“Saying ‘one in 25’ implies that [people with ASPD] are different in kind, rather than in degree, from the rest of us,” Lilienfeld says. “In my view, there’s no real distinction in nature that clearly tells you [if somebody has ASPD or not]. There’s no categorical cutoff. It’s almost like asking, ‘How many people are tall?’ Depends on where you draw the cutoff for tall.”

Dixon-Gordon makes a similar argument. “In the same way that the cutoff for whether or not you have high cholesterol changes from year to year, these [diagnostic cutoffs] change,” she explains.

These complicated, nebulous aspects of personality disorders mean that attempting to diagnose them even in a professional setting requires extreme care and caution. “All of these things are reasons why diagnosis is so, so nuanced and complex and contextual,” Dixon-Gordon says, “and really requires [...] not jumping to conclusions.”

Interestingly some of the researchers quoted worry that the webseries is trying to glamourize what they describe as a "dangerous" disorder. But maybe watching were concerned about the opposite, that it was attempting to demonize and stigmatize. So much so that Shane Dawson included an apology at the beginning of episode 3:

“I do actually want to apologize because there was some backlash from people feeling offended and feeling like I was making a horror movie out of an illness or a disorder. And I 100% understand [...] to treat a person like a scary monster is like, not cool, and I shouldn’t have done that. So I apologize for that genuinely.”