Aftermath Mission

The Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy Foundation is dedicated to educating the public regarding the nature of psychopathy and its cost to individuals and society.

We seek to support the families and victims of those with psychopathy.

We support research that aims to: prevent or minimize the development of psychopathic traits, reduce the impact of psychopathic traits, and understand and treat the aftermath of psychopathy. Our ultimate goal is to reduce the negative impact of psychopathy on the families and victims of psychopathic individuals.

 

Educating the Public

We continue to believe that educating the public about the nature of psychopathy and its impact on other people is one of our most important priorities. As in prior years, the Aftermath Foundation website is our primary vehicle for providing the public with reliable, current information about psychopathy. During 2016, our main website upgrade was completed, which included:

a new website theme for the primary Aftermath Foundation website;
a new banner for the Aftermath Radio pages;
new categories within our Aftermath Radio pages;
updates to the homepage;
updates to our page of helpful links;
moving of the Aftermath Bookstore to the top menu of the website;
updates to the Forums to make them easier to use;  
and a migration of the website and Forums to a new host to enhance website speed and reliability.

During 2016, we continued to add Web Conversations with psychopathy experts to our website, and two additional such conversations took place in the past two years. We spoke with Dr. Kasia Uzieblo about her ground-breaking work on the impact of people with psychopathic traits on relationship partners and children.  And we spoke with Dr. Adelle Forth about her study of people in long-term relationships with individuals with psychopathic traits.

Because we celebrated our ten-year anniversary in 2016, we developed several brief video presentations which we posted in 2016. We think these videos may be quite useful to some individuals who are suspicious that something is going wrong in a current relationship, and we hope that people in dangerous relationships will watch these videos. (Based on the success of the videos, we developed additional videos but they were not released on the website until later.)

2016 and 2017 were especially good years for posting answers to questions by psychopathy experts. In 2016, we posted answers from Dr. Stephen Porter, Dr. Scott Lilienfeld, Dr. Mark Olver, and Dr. Essi Viding to questions from our members

These were also good years for posting new summaries of psychopathy research on the website. Our research volunteers read scientific articles and then write summaries so that everyone can understand what the research is showing. There were several new summaries posted in 2016 and 2017.

Moreover, because we know that there are people with psychopathic traits all over the world, we also kept working on expanding the number of languages in which website material is presented. During 2016 and 2017, new translations appeared on the website. As a result, by the end of 2017, there were resources available in eight languages. In addition to English, there were posts in Spanish, Dutch, German, Catalan, Turkish, Russian and Polish.

 

Educating Professionals and the Public

Because many professionals still understand very little about psychopathy, we presented two workshops for mental health professionals in 2016-2017 (one at the North Carolina Psychological Association annual meeting and the other at the biennial meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy (SSSP) in Antwerp, Belgium), plus members of the general public were allowed to attend the workshop in Antwerp, Belgium in 2017.

 

Supporting Families and Victims

When people contact us and ask for help in locating resources on psychopathy or in findings mental health professionals who understand psychopathy, we do our best to answer their questions or help them meet their needs. In 2016, we received 69 requests for help. In 2017, we received only 32 (perhaps due to the fact that our website was a construction zone for part of this year).

Beginning in 2017, we also began tracking outcomes for people who request help. Of course, we do not mean we can track long-term outcomes for people who contact us, but we have begun to examine our success in finding professionals who are open to meeting with those seeking help. The figures for our efforts to handle help requests in 2016 and 2017 are shown here.

 

Supporting Research

As noted elsewhere in this report, we also try to encourage researchers to consider the impact of people with psychopathic traits on others by sponsoring legitimate studies on our website.

During 2016, the Aftermath Graduate Student Research Award was given to two graduate students (Courtney Humeny and Mary Ritchie) for conducting excellent work consistent with our Mission. Summaries of their research are available on our website here.

During these years, we also allowed Mary Ritchie to use the Aftermath Foundation website to recruit participants for her research study. A report on the results of that study has been included in this report. Click here to read her report of her research study

 

Self-Evaluation

Self-evaluation of non-profit organizations is widely recommended for improving organization effectiveness and productivity. For this reason, we undertook our first systematic self-evaluation of the Board of Directors of the Foundation during the past two years. Members of the Executive Committee adapted a survey which was recommended for board self-evaluation to help us, and the Board completed the survey in 2017. The Board of Directors is continuing to process the results of this survey and expect to report a summary of the evaluation during the next year.