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Does Pyromania Actually Exist? · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
0:04
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
0:14
Speaker 1: There's Charles w Chuck Brian, and there's Jerry over there,
0:17
Speaker 1: and this is stuff you should know. On our tenth anniversary.
0:22
Speaker 1: How about that. Happy anniversary, Chuck, Happy anniversary, Josh Sheppy anniversary, Jerry,
0:27
Speaker 1: Happy anniversary, Jerry Nice, Jerry Mouth happy anniversary here. Yeah,
0:34
Speaker 1: ten years, Jerry said, ten long years? She did, didn't
0:38
Speaker 1: she She did the longest because I think is what
0:41
Speaker 1: she said. Do you realize if we go another ten
0:45
Speaker 1: we've been doing it for twenty years, that I'll be
0:48
Speaker 1: like approaching sixty years old. That seems weird. It's starting
0:54
Speaker 1: to seem normal to me, being old, speeding toward our
0:58
Speaker 1: ultimate deminds. I'm trying not to think about it like that.
1:01
Speaker 1: I'm thinking more of like picking the drain of having
1:05
Speaker 1: mellowed in age like herring and a can right or
1:10
Speaker 1: um a pickle like a good pickle takes a minute,
1:14
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying. To get just right? Sure,
1:16
Speaker 1: we're at prime pickle age right now. Speaking of pickle,
1:20
Speaker 1: Oh yeah you are pickled? Yeah? You feeling okay? We
1:24
Speaker 1: talked earlier. Emily and I celebrated our tenth anniversary of
1:27
Speaker 1: the show last night. A little too much congratulations, some
1:32
Speaker 1: a little foggy today. Yeah, I can wait to do
1:34
Speaker 1: this Facebook live. That should be interesting. Well, yeah, we're
1:37
Speaker 1: gonna do a Facebook live. By the time this comes out,
1:39
Speaker 1: you guys will have all missed it by a couple
1:41
Speaker 1: of weeks. Yeah, and in true stuff, you should know
1:44
Speaker 1: fashion we probably should have recorded something to be released
1:48
Speaker 1: today on our anniversary. We didn't, but we're releasing it
1:53
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks after we released the Uni Bomber today,
1:56
Speaker 1: which I think was a good episode. Sure, so it
1:59
Speaker 1: was a fine ten year anniversary. Yeah, okay, either way,
2:04
Speaker 1: ten years, ten years it happened. It's so chuck. I
2:09
Speaker 1: know what'll clearly the way, the cloudiness, the fogginess, um,
2:13
Speaker 1: some smoke, bloody Mary, okay, smoke chuck from a fire. Yes,
2:18
Speaker 1: And I have to say I admit to getting pumped
2:22
Speaker 1: up for this one by listening to deaf Leppard. I
2:26
Speaker 1: was hoping you'd mentioned def Leppard. I just did take
2:29
Speaker 1: it away if you weren't, I was going to. Yeah.
2:33
Speaker 1: The album's named Pyromania. The song is rock of ages,
2:37
Speaker 1: but he does say, what is it? No serenade, no
2:40
Speaker 1: fiber gade, just pyromania? Come on, yeah, what do you want?
2:47
Speaker 1: What do you need? I want rock and Roll's right, man.
2:51
Speaker 1: And then after that I was like, oh, what else
2:54
Speaker 1: came from this air? So I ended up on like
2:55
Speaker 1: Steve Perry and Journey and some other stuff. But I'm
2:58
Speaker 1: pump Nonetheless, did you ever did you go to a
3:01
Speaker 1: little uh? Yes, light e face a little bit. Yeah,
3:05
Speaker 1: I think a little boys do. This article by Craig
3:09
Speaker 1: Freud and Rich PhD uh as far as I know,
3:12
Speaker 1: the only PhD to ever write at how Stuff Works.
3:15
Speaker 1: He very wisely pointed out that a fascination of fire
3:19
Speaker 1: is basically universal among kids. It's a good It's a
3:23
Speaker 1: good way to get introduced to things you shouldn't do,
3:26
Speaker 1: is doing them early on, at a young age, before
3:29
Speaker 1: you can actually go to the store and buy gasoline
3:32
Speaker 1: and start a real fire. You know. It just kind
3:34
Speaker 1: of messing around with a little lighter fluid and a
3:36
Speaker 1: lighter hairspray and a lighter Yeah, that's another one. Don't
3:41
Speaker 1: do any of us, by the way, kids, But I'm
3:43
Speaker 1: just saying, messing around with fire in small, basically harmless ways.
3:49
Speaker 1: It's a pretty natural part of your development. Yeah, I mean,
3:52
Speaker 1: I think, I think I remember very specifically one time
3:57
Speaker 1: when I was playing in the woods. We grew up
3:59
Speaker 1: a you know, a couple of acres in the woods,
4:01
Speaker 1: the clean woods that your neighbor cleaned up and died in. No, no, no,
4:05
Speaker 1: that that was my friend. Oh those are different woods. Yea. Um.
4:09
Speaker 1: I remember very specifically when I was a kid, I
4:12
Speaker 1: was probably like ten, we need the Waynes world, Like
4:17
Speaker 1: I think I built. I built a thing. I don't
4:19
Speaker 1: even know what it's called, but it's you take like
4:21
Speaker 1: a coffee can and you dig into the side of
4:23
Speaker 1: a hill and you stick the coffee can in there
4:26
Speaker 1: and then put a little stovepipe in it, you know,
4:30
Speaker 1: like a chimney, right, what do you mean? Like made
4:33
Speaker 1: from what I can't remember what I used. Might have
4:36
Speaker 1: been PBC or something, um, And then I don't know
4:41
Speaker 1: if you're supposed to cook in it. It was some
4:42
Speaker 1: sort of like legit camping thing. But I started a
4:46
Speaker 1: fire in it and it got kind of big and
4:49
Speaker 1: it was just smoking a lot, and I remember hearing
4:52
Speaker 1: a siren and freaked out because I thought it was
4:56
Speaker 1: coming for me, which it of course was not. No,
4:58
Speaker 1: so you didn't burn down the woods. No, I didn't
5:00
Speaker 1: burn down the woods. And on looking back, it was
5:02
Speaker 1: probably a very small fire because it was in a
5:03
Speaker 1: coffee can, yeah or not, you know, one of the
5:06
Speaker 1: big coffee cans. But still I remember thinking that I
5:10
Speaker 1: did something bad and they've gotten me, right, But then
5:12
Speaker 1: you ran away, and you're like, oh, I got away
5:14
Speaker 1: scot free. I should try something bigger next. No, but
5:17
Speaker 1: I did run away and think like, oh boy, that
5:19
Speaker 1: was a close one. Did you learn your lesson? Yeah?
5:21
Speaker 1: I don't remember. I mean, you know, I told the
5:23
Speaker 1: story about lighting coat hanger and rings on fire for
5:26
Speaker 1: the evil knevil jumps and things like that, but that's all,
5:29
Speaker 1: you know, pretty run of the mill stuff. I don't, right,
5:32
Speaker 1: So I agree it's fairly running the mill. Imaginative, but
5:36
Speaker 1: still fairly running the mill. Right, What about you? I
5:39
Speaker 1: feel like I remember a fire of some sort, but
5:43
Speaker 1: the fact that I blocked it out makes me think
5:45
Speaker 1: it may have been a big fire. But you didn't
5:47
Speaker 1: try to like burn down a house being built or anything. No, no, no,
5:51
Speaker 1: And I was never like I was, you know, kind
5:53
Speaker 1: of fascinated with fire and everything, but you didn't dabbling Arson.
5:58
Speaker 1: I just I feel like I feel like in time
6:00
Speaker 1: one almost got away from us. And of course it
6:02
Speaker 1: was the woods. Yeah, I mean that can happen. But
6:04
Speaker 1: I think our fascination with fire, my fascination fire quickly
6:08
Speaker 1: translated into using lighters to light cigarettes in the woods. Again, yeah,
6:14
Speaker 1: mine did not so, but there's a fascination with fire
6:18
Speaker 1: that people go through. According to our buddy Sigmu Freud,
6:22
Speaker 1: if you go through a weirdo psycho sexual development, which
6:27
Speaker 1: is to say, not exactly like what Freud thought you
6:30
Speaker 1: should go through, you could conceivably come out the other
6:34
Speaker 1: side hanging on to that fascination with fire, to where
6:39
Speaker 1: it is an outlet for your stress, okay, your impulsivity.
6:46
Speaker 1: It can become a central focus of your life, like
6:49
Speaker 1: what you think about is fire. And if you check
6:52
Speaker 1: these boxes and some other ones, you could conceivably be
6:56
Speaker 1: considered a person with pyromania, which we have reached the
7:01
Speaker 1: pinnacle of political correctness now because I refused to say pyromania,
7:07
Speaker 1: it's a person with pyromania. It's entirely possible. There is
7:10
Speaker 1: not a single person alive on planet Earth who is
7:13
Speaker 1: a true person with pyromania, but we're still going to
7:16
Speaker 1: say person with pyromania just in case. Yeah, I mean,
7:19
Speaker 1: it's um after reading through this stuff and doing the research,
7:22
Speaker 1: it's a little squirrely to pin down for sure, because well,
7:27
Speaker 1: for a lot of reasons. But the d s M
7:30
Speaker 1: four five, they do have some criteria that goes as follows,
7:36
Speaker 1: and with each one it really whittles down like just regular, Hey,
7:41
Speaker 1: I'm drunken and I'm starting a fire to uh to
7:46
Speaker 1: I want to collect on this insurance. Yeah, so here
7:50
Speaker 1: we go. Number one. They must have set fires deliberately
7:54
Speaker 1: and purposefully more than once. So that's a lot of people.
7:57
Speaker 1: That's pretty baseline. Yeah, and don't think they're talking about
8:00
Speaker 1: fireplace fires. Uh, we'll get into that, Okay. Must be
8:07
Speaker 1: tens or exhibit outward emotional behaviors before setting fires. It's excitement,
8:13
Speaker 1: facial expressions, changes in voice, that's you may have like
8:16
Speaker 1: you must have your tongue sticking out of the corner
8:19
Speaker 1: of your mouth while you're lighting the fire. Uh. Must
8:22
Speaker 1: be interested in, curious about, fascinated with, and or attracted
8:25
Speaker 1: to fires. But but there's a big one that we
8:28
Speaker 1: have to add here. Attracted to fire should not have
8:31
Speaker 1: anything to do with sexuality. That is apparently an entirely
8:35
Speaker 1: different disorder that is even rarer called pyrophilia, and that's
8:39
Speaker 1: a sexual arousal disorder from fire. Interesting. Yeah, people are
8:46
Speaker 1: so interesting, So we need to do a paraphilia episode
8:49
Speaker 1: at least in necrophilia episode once. Yeah, there's like a
8:53
Speaker 1: lot of Surprisingly, there's a decent amount of research on
8:57
Speaker 1: that UM number four experience. It's pleasure, tension, relief, or
9:02
Speaker 1: gratification after setting the fire or watching the fire, but
9:06
Speaker 1: not sexual gratification. No, God help you, right, it's not
9:11
Speaker 1: a person with pyrophilia in that case. Uh So, like,
9:16
Speaker 1: if you start a fire in the woods and you
9:18
Speaker 1: get an erection, it's in your pyrophiliac. If it goes born,
9:23
Speaker 1: then you're a pyrophiliac. Other psychological disorders cannot account better
9:29
Speaker 1: for the behavior. So in other words, if you have
9:32
Speaker 1: a manic episode and you start a fire, it's due
9:35
Speaker 1: to the manic episode and not pyromania. Which now we're
9:39
Speaker 1: getting to the point where you start to wonder, like
9:41
Speaker 1: is there such a thing as is true pyrophilia? Well,
9:44
Speaker 1: especially with this last one, no other motivations for setting
9:47
Speaker 1: the fire um like collecting insurance, um. Like burning down
9:52
Speaker 1: a political rivals office. Yeah, you can't shout like anarchy, right,
9:56
Speaker 1: or being just angry at somebody or burning a body,
10:00
Speaker 1: that doesn't count, uh, improving your living circumstance. So I
10:05
Speaker 1: found something about that. One there was back in the
10:08
Speaker 1: medieval times, not the one where you can go to today,
10:12
Speaker 1: but like the real one, not the restaurant. Right, there
10:15
Speaker 1: was like this this kind of thing that like if
10:18
Speaker 1: you hired or basically kidnapped a medieval servant girl, there
10:23
Speaker 1: was a good chance that she was going to burn
10:25
Speaker 1: your house and your children down so she could go
10:27
Speaker 1: back home. So that would be an example of that interesting, uh,
10:33
Speaker 1: responding to delusions or hallucinations and then finally impaired judgment.
10:38
Speaker 1: And that's what I was talking about, being intoxicated or
10:41
Speaker 1: if you have dementia or something like that. Right, and
10:44
Speaker 1: even chuck, from what I understand, even if you are
10:48
Speaker 1: doing this, if you're starting fires just to start fires
10:54
Speaker 1: for fun, that would technically not qualify as pyromania. You
11:00
Speaker 1: you would basically just be an arsonist. Like there's there's
11:03
Speaker 1: actually so there's an umbrella term fire setting, which is
11:07
Speaker 1: a behavior arson is a crime, Pyromania is a psychological diagnosis,
11:15
Speaker 1: and they're all kind of wrapped up together, which is
11:17
Speaker 1: why it makes getting things like how common is it?
11:20
Speaker 1: It's really tough to kind of pinpoint that, right. So
11:22
Speaker 1: Freud and Rich says, if you are a diagnostician and
11:27
Speaker 1: you're presented with the person who sets a lot of fires,
11:30
Speaker 1: and they're like, they don't drink, they don't even purchase
11:34
Speaker 1: insurance because they consider it a form of gambling. They
11:36
Speaker 1: don't have an erection, no erection to be found. Um.
11:40
Speaker 1: They like, once you whittle all this stuff away, you'd
11:44
Speaker 1: be like, oh my god, this person is making my
11:46
Speaker 1: career right now, I found a genuine person with pyromania.
11:51
Speaker 1: Very rare. Yeah, And through the years it's been really uh,
11:55
Speaker 1: it's kind of gone on a roller coaster ride as
11:58
Speaker 1: far as uh. The definition of pyromania said, during the
12:02
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years span of legal and medical literature,
12:06
Speaker 1: sometimes people were frequently diagnosed, sometimes they weren't at all. Uh,
12:12
Speaker 1: And it doesn't seem to be any change in behaviors. Rather,
12:15
Speaker 1: um changes in shifts in psychiatry and what we think
12:20
Speaker 1: is diagnosable, right, and what how much personal accountability we
12:26
Speaker 1: ascribe to mental illness. Right. So like with with there's
12:30
Speaker 1: just this constant evolution and it's actually just kind of
12:34
Speaker 1: a circle. It's not really evolving, it's it's when you
12:38
Speaker 1: think about pyromania, UM, the question is is it an
12:44
Speaker 1: on the result of an uncontrollable impulse or is it
12:47
Speaker 1: the result of an impulse that wasn't properly controlled. So
12:52
Speaker 1: is the person culpable or not? And over this one
12:55
Speaker 1: study that you mentioned, over like a hundred and fifty years,
12:57
Speaker 1: they saw it just bounce back and forth and back
12:59
Speaker 1: and forth, and it corresponded to the attitudes of society
13:03
Speaker 1: and psychology of whether or not a person's responsibility for
13:06
Speaker 1: their own actions. And in court also, if you were
13:09
Speaker 1: holding court today, if you said, well, I plead not
13:15
Speaker 1: guilty to that arson by reason of insanity, um, because
13:19
Speaker 1: I have pyromania, that that you would just have automatically
13:23
Speaker 1: shot yourself in the foot right there in the middle
13:25
Speaker 1: of the courtroom. Because part of the criteria of pyromania
13:28
Speaker 1: is that you're not responding to a delusion or any
13:32
Speaker 1: kind of severe mental illness um. So by definition, you
13:37
Speaker 1: would be lucid and know what you're doing. Is wrong,
13:40
Speaker 1: or else you wouldn't be a person with pyromania. Yeah,
13:43
Speaker 1: I didn't know. This is complicated. It's very complicated. Should
13:46
Speaker 1: we take a break. I think we should. All right,
13:47
Speaker 1: We're gonna entangle this a bit more and come back
13:49
Speaker 1: and speak to um. How common this stuff is? So Chuck? Yes,
14:20
Speaker 1: how common is that? Well, like we said, it's kind
14:23
Speaker 1: of tough to say because it's all wrapped up statistically
14:27
Speaker 1: in and arson statistics, and we've already determined this not
14:31
Speaker 1: necessarily the same thing, right, And so consider this, if
14:35
Speaker 1: you are an investigator, a psychiatrist, or a psychologist who's
14:40
Speaker 1: like trying to figure out how many people with pyromania
14:44
Speaker 1: there are, you have to go find people who are
14:47
Speaker 1: in jail for arson. So, by definition, your population sample
14:52
Speaker 1: is skewed one way. Right. What about people who may
14:57
Speaker 1: have pyromania but have have said like, well, I'm not
15:00
Speaker 1: going to jail, I can just start fires in my fireplace,
15:03
Speaker 1: like you were asking, Oh, well, they would still qualify
15:06
Speaker 1: as a person with pyromania. They're just not a criminal
15:09
Speaker 1: arsonist because arson is a criminal act. They're smart enough
15:12
Speaker 1: to not do this. Yeah, And there was Now that
15:14
Speaker 1: I look back, there was no distinction that you start
15:18
Speaker 1: a fire like on someone else's property that becomes dangerous.
15:21
Speaker 1: You literally could start a fire in your own fireplace
15:25
Speaker 1: and make an excited face and feel relieved afterward, not
15:29
Speaker 1: get an erection, and uh, I mean that'd be a
15:34
Speaker 1: great way to I mean, all things being equal, that's
15:37
Speaker 1: not a bad not bad at all. You know, kind
15:39
Speaker 1: of control control your own urge, especially considering that um
15:43
Speaker 1: pyromania is a it's an impulse control disorder, so it's
15:47
Speaker 1: in the same class as like pathological gambling addictions. If
15:52
Speaker 1: you're starting fires in your fireplace and that's it, you
15:56
Speaker 1: could be a lot worse off. Oh yeah, for sure.
16:00
Speaker 1: There was one study though, psychiatrist named Nina Lindbergh in
16:03
Speaker 1: Finland reviewed twenty years of um medical records and psychiatric
16:09
Speaker 1: evaluations of six hundred arsonists, all men, and it's definitely
16:13
Speaker 1: skewed more heavily towards men. Yeah, is that right? Overall?
16:16
Speaker 1: Supposedly so, Freud thought it was a expression of misdeveloped
16:22
Speaker 1: or yeah, misdeveloped male psycho sexual um urges. All right,
16:30
Speaker 1: But they found that most of these arsonists, you know,
16:34
Speaker 1: again they started chipping away, most of them had mental disorders.
16:38
Speaker 1: Personality disorders. Sixty eight percent of the arsonists were drunk,
16:43
Speaker 1: which is really interesting. I think it is so that
16:46
Speaker 1: that whole thing about not being drunk and not being
16:49
Speaker 1: uh considered to have pyromania. Some people reported their sense
16:55
Speaker 1: of the like the arousal was um excited by drinking,
17:00
Speaker 1: So how is that work? And they also were choking
17:03
Speaker 1: themselves out with a belt, right, They're going for the
17:06
Speaker 1: full Montya, the trifecta. Uh. Then they separated the group
17:11
Speaker 1: into two things, criminal arsonists and pure arsonists. Um, these
17:16
Speaker 1: are people, like you said, that had not committed a
17:19
Speaker 1: crime of arson. Um. Well, but it's interesting. I thought
17:24
Speaker 1: they started out as arsenists. Now, oh no other criminal activities. Okay, yeah,
17:29
Speaker 1: all right, that makes sense. And then finally they applied
17:32
Speaker 1: the old d s M at the time for criteria
17:36
Speaker 1: and only twelve of these six hundred dudes met that
17:39
Speaker 1: that criteria, although it says that nine of them admitted
17:43
Speaker 1: to being drunk. So how did they fit that criteria?
17:46
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. Like even confusing, even if you
17:48
Speaker 1: look at the history of the d s M, the
17:50
Speaker 1: d s M one, it starts out as being listed
17:53
Speaker 1: as an obsessive compulsive disorder doesn't make any appearance at
17:58
Speaker 1: all in the second edition, and by the third, fourth,
18:01
Speaker 1: and fifth it's considered um an impulse control disorder. So
18:06
Speaker 1: just from to you know, the current time, there have
18:11
Speaker 1: been all these different bouncing back and forth about what
18:13
Speaker 1: it is and they still have no idea. Well but
18:16
Speaker 1: anyway you slice it, it looks like it's a very
18:18
Speaker 1: small number of people. Yeah if, like you said, even
18:22
Speaker 1: if it's a thing at all. Right, So there's another study,
18:25
Speaker 1: um by these two researchers, Grant and Kim. They sound
18:29
Speaker 1: like a folk duo. Two Yeah. Um. They got their
18:34
Speaker 1: hands on i think twenty one or twenty seven, twenty
18:39
Speaker 1: one subjects who had been clinically diagnosed with pyromania okay um,
18:45
Speaker 1: and strangely, eleven were male, ten were female, which is
18:49
Speaker 1: kind of surprising since this is supposedly excused. Eleven male,
18:54
Speaker 1: ten female. Um, And they found some really interesting stuff.
18:58
Speaker 1: They said that um MO to them, the onset began
19:01
Speaker 1: an adolescence or early adulthood, and supposedly that's like the
19:05
Speaker 1: risky time for a lot of impulse control disorders. UM
19:10
Speaker 1: that they basically all reported feeling arousal or excitement not
19:15
Speaker 1: necessarily aroused like you think, like sexual arousal. No, can't
19:19
Speaker 1: be right. It's just got to be like you're you're
19:23
Speaker 1: just wound up, and the only way to get unwound,
19:26
Speaker 1: and you know it is to start that fire. And
19:28
Speaker 1: then when you start that fire, you feel a tremendous
19:32
Speaker 1: sense of relief, you may feel excited. And then from
19:36
Speaker 1: what I understand, and this really goes with kleptomania, you
19:39
Speaker 1: remember kleptomania or episode about that it was like that
19:43
Speaker 1: you could not not steal. The only way to to
19:46
Speaker 1: to turn the switch off in your brain was a steel.
19:49
Speaker 1: In this case, the only way to turn the switch
19:51
Speaker 1: off in your brain is to start a fire. But
19:53
Speaker 1: you immediately regret it, Like, but I think of them
19:57
Speaker 1: reported immediately having verer distress after starting a fire, so
20:02
Speaker 1: you know it's wrong. And this is this is probably
20:05
Speaker 1: the saddest thing about the whole thing. UM one third,
20:08
Speaker 1: which is so seven out of twenty one, that's still
20:11
Speaker 1: a significant number reported UM considering suicide as a means
20:15
Speaker 1: of controlling their fire starting Like they felt that bad
20:20
Speaker 1: about this that they wanted to just kill themselves so
20:22
Speaker 1: they wouldn't start fires anymore. So there is like a
20:25
Speaker 1: real there's a real cost to it, in addition to
20:27
Speaker 1: the fact that this is a really dangerous impulse control
20:32
Speaker 1: of the story. I mean, gambling is bad enough, but
20:34
Speaker 1: what are you doing with gambling. You're ruining your life.
20:36
Speaker 1: You're ruining your family's life, maybe your parents. It has
20:41
Speaker 1: a finite amount of reach with with fire setting. It's
20:45
Speaker 1: that's like you could kill any number of people. Yeah,
20:48
Speaker 1: offend it interesting to that. Uh, they're kleptomania, like these
20:52
Speaker 1: impulse control disorders. We talked about, you know, being a
20:56
Speaker 1: little kid and stealing something. I think a lot of
20:58
Speaker 1: kids go through playing around with fire, playing around with
21:02
Speaker 1: stealing things. I guess gambling is sort of the only
21:05
Speaker 1: one that's really not I don't know a lot of
21:07
Speaker 1: ten year olds that are, you know, playing three card money.
21:09
Speaker 1: I got in trouble for gambling in elementary, but we
21:12
Speaker 1: were playing with skittles or whatever. And even at the time,
21:15
Speaker 1: I'm like, come on, we're playing for skittles here. This
21:18
Speaker 1: is ridiculous. This is an outrage giving my cards back.
21:22
Speaker 1: But I do remember feeling bad when I stole something
21:25
Speaker 1: once when I was a kid, and uh, but I
21:29
Speaker 1: think that's the point of doing all that. Yeah, but
21:31
Speaker 1: I don't Yeah, maybe so, but I don't remember feeling
21:33
Speaker 1: bad about the fire. I just remember feeling like when
21:36
Speaker 1: I heard that siren, like crap, I'm in trouble. Right.
21:38
Speaker 1: So what you're learning by testing boundaries uh and and
21:42
Speaker 1: following your impulses is oh, doing this makes me feel
21:46
Speaker 1: really bad, or oh, doing this scares me to death
21:49
Speaker 1: because I can get in big trouble for it. And
21:51
Speaker 1: and you get that emotional limbic system learning, Um, yeah,
21:57
Speaker 1: SmackDown exactly, And that's how you really truly learned. Your
22:01
Speaker 1: parents can tell you all day long, right, but you
22:03
Speaker 1: unless you're like al Gore, you're not gonna listen to it.
22:07
Speaker 1: You know, you're not gonna listen to your parents like that.
22:09
Speaker 1: You gotta go test it out yourself, right, Or you're
22:12
Speaker 1: budding sociopath and you don't feel bad, you're like, I
22:16
Speaker 1: want to do this, and that limbic system doesn't smack
22:19
Speaker 1: you down. It says, maybe you should. You don't like
22:22
Speaker 1: that kid down the street, Maybe you should set par
22:24
Speaker 1: to his house or steal his stuff or mistreat that animal.
22:30
Speaker 1: You shouldn't do that. You shouldn't do any of this stuff. Well,
22:32
Speaker 1: that's true, but especially the animal thing. Yeah, but that's
22:35
Speaker 1: like one of the early signs of you know that
22:40
Speaker 1: is that is um of psychopathy. Psychopathy um, that is uh,
22:48
Speaker 1: that is debated. What you're talking about is the McDonald triad. Yeah,
22:53
Speaker 1: I mean I don't I don't think it always does.
22:55
Speaker 1: But a lot of times when you look back at
22:57
Speaker 1: the history of serial killers and things that they started
23:00
Speaker 1: with weird animal things. But I think the problem is
23:02
Speaker 1: that's like so sexy and so made the news. The
23:05
Speaker 1: idea that if a kid um is a bedwetter, starts fires,
23:10
Speaker 1: and mistreats animals, that was two out of three, Right,
23:13
Speaker 1: You're close that you you can basically say, well, there's
23:16
Speaker 1: a serial that kid's going to grow up to be
23:18
Speaker 1: a serial killer, which is not the case. I think
23:20
Speaker 1: it's it's um is that reductive or deductive? Where really
23:24
Speaker 1: it's if you look at serial killers, they tend to
23:27
Speaker 1: have they they check those three boxes. But just because
23:31
Speaker 1: you check those three boxes doesn't mean you're going to
23:33
Speaker 1: be a serial killer. No. But let's say this, if
23:35
Speaker 1: you're a parent and your kid is doing all three
23:37
Speaker 1: of those things, you know, just keep a little eye
23:41
Speaker 1: on them. And eye on the right. Just give him
23:43
Speaker 1: a chipmunk and see what they do. Test them out,
23:46
Speaker 1: give a chipmunk in a match, and just lock them
23:49
Speaker 1: in a room and see what happens. We should probably
23:50
Speaker 1: take a break after that one. Yes, we'll be back
23:53
Speaker 1: right after this. All right. So let's say it turns
24:22
Speaker 1: out that you may be part of the one and
24:27
Speaker 1: not in a good way where you're super rich. Yeah,
24:29
Speaker 1: did we say that that? Like they think one percent
24:33
Speaker 1: of Arsons is pyromaniac, not even one to four percent
24:36
Speaker 1: of the population, not even so. But let's say you
24:38
Speaker 1: are one of those rare people. Um, how would you
24:42
Speaker 1: treat this impulse control disorder? So one thing I saw was,
24:48
Speaker 1: as with any impulse control disorder, but particularly because this
24:51
Speaker 1: is such a dangerous, threatening impulse control disorder, you basically
24:56
Speaker 1: need to keep in touch with a psychiatric caregiver your
25:00
Speaker 1: whole life. That there's remission, there's relapse, and that even
25:04
Speaker 1: if you get your pyromania under control, that it can
25:07
Speaker 1: pop up in other ways like gambling or addiction to
25:11
Speaker 1: alcohol and drugs or whatever. So you really need to
25:14
Speaker 1: have some sort of psychiatric presence in your life. It's
25:18
Speaker 1: just part of your life. Sorry, that's just that. But
25:21
Speaker 1: you can be treated. Sure, there is treatment for it.
25:24
Speaker 1: It can be kept under control. Yeah, behavioral therapy. Of course.
25:28
Speaker 1: They've had some success with s SR eyes selective serotonin
25:33
Speaker 1: reuptake inhibitors that we've talked about a gazillion times on
25:37
Speaker 1: the show, and with anti convulsants too, right, Yeah, this
25:41
Speaker 1: was super interesting to me. This was in two thousand six.
25:45
Speaker 1: There's a letter to the editor of the Journal of
25:46
Speaker 1: Clinical Psychiatry, and there was a dude psychiatrist named John
25:50
Speaker 1: Grant who said he had a case of a patient
25:54
Speaker 1: who said, this person fits this whole the criteria of
25:57
Speaker 1: a person in pyromania. And I examined this guy's brain
26:02
Speaker 1: with uh what's called spect imaging. I've actually never heard
26:05
Speaker 1: of that. No, it's like wonder machine plus or is
26:08
Speaker 1: it minus? Maybe it could be light l I T
26:11
Speaker 1: eh maybe it. It's like I had this machine in
26:14
Speaker 1: here that I made. It's just like a calendar with
26:18
Speaker 1: some tinfoil over it. Uh. Yeah, that is weird. After
26:22
Speaker 1: ten years in and I've never heard of a spect
26:24
Speaker 1: machine ten years to the day. S P. E. C T.
26:28
Speaker 1: I think I just made it it. Uh. So he
26:31
Speaker 1: found a region in the left interior I'm sorry, inferior
26:35
Speaker 1: or frontal portion that had low blood flow. He uh,
26:39
Speaker 1: put this guy through a few weeks of behavioral therapy
26:42
Speaker 1: and this anti convulsant drug for twelve months. This guy
26:48
Speaker 1: lost the urges or had a really big decrease in
26:50
Speaker 1: the urge to set fires. Brought the guy back in,
26:54
Speaker 1: put him in his tinfoil calendar machine, and there was
26:58
Speaker 1: no problem in that front A portion of the left
27:00
Speaker 1: inferior lobe right cleared it right up. Blood flow is fine,
27:05
Speaker 1: which makes sense because the left inferior gyros, I believe
27:09
Speaker 1: is one of the regions associated with impulse control. So
27:14
Speaker 1: it makes sense. Sure. I mean, there's a there's a
27:19
Speaker 1: whole school of thought out there that all psychiatric conditions,
27:24
Speaker 1: all are are biological. We just don't know how to
27:28
Speaker 1: how to catch them or point them out. And we
27:30
Speaker 1: also don't know how most of like the drugs that
27:32
Speaker 1: we use to treat them actually work. We just are like,
27:35
Speaker 1: well it works, kind of you know, really interesting. So
27:39
Speaker 1: I've got another one for you. I'm surprised this is
27:41
Speaker 1: the only kind of good example of that, though. But
27:44
Speaker 1: it's so hard to find the thing that gets me
27:48
Speaker 1: is like, why why if it's co morbid with some
27:50
Speaker 1: other kind of disorder, why is it not pyromania? Is?
27:56
Speaker 1: I think that's what's that's what's confounding everything is. It's
27:59
Speaker 1: like kayatry and psychology have said it's its own thing.
28:03
Speaker 1: I don't know if it is necessarily its own thing. Um,
28:07
Speaker 1: but one one thing that has the one study found
28:11
Speaker 1: and I couldn't find who conducted the study, but there
28:13
Speaker 1: was a study that found basically, if you've ever seen
28:16
Speaker 1: a volunteer firefighter, you've seen a person of pyromania. Yeah,
28:21
Speaker 1: they say that that's a there's a strong association with Hey,
28:25
Speaker 1: I'd like to go. And I've heard that with arsenists too. Yeah,
28:28
Speaker 1: uh that they a lot of times are volunteer or
28:30
Speaker 1: you know, regular firefighter. There was a very famous uh
28:34
Speaker 1: fire captain named John Leonard or who in the eighties
28:38
Speaker 1: in California Sparky. Basically he was a serial arsonist who
28:43
Speaker 1: killed four people and it's not like it was by accident.
28:47
Speaker 1: He would go start small fires out in like the
28:51
Speaker 1: the um the hills. Don't they have hills in California
28:55
Speaker 1: where they have wildfires. He would go start small ones
28:58
Speaker 1: so that he could go start big fires and the
29:01
Speaker 1: fire department would be distracted out in the hills fighting
29:04
Speaker 1: the small ones when the big one went up. He
29:06
Speaker 1: would set off fires in stores they had people in
29:10
Speaker 1: it while they were open. So he wasn't doing the
29:13
Speaker 1: thing where like I want to start a fire because
29:15
Speaker 1: things are slow and I really want to fight this fire.
29:19
Speaker 1: Like he was trying to hurt people from what from
29:21
Speaker 1: what I understand, yes, um, and he was a fire
29:25
Speaker 1: captain and arson investigator for years, so that is a thing. Uh.
29:30
Speaker 1: And some people if you aren't a firefighter or just
29:32
Speaker 1: too lazy to be a firefighter, but you still have pyromania,
29:36
Speaker 1: you might you might still go to fires when you
29:40
Speaker 1: when you see like a fire truck go by and
29:43
Speaker 1: will go to the fire and watch. Um. And I
29:46
Speaker 1: would guess if you're a firefighter, you probably see the
29:50
Speaker 1: same person here there and they are like, what's up
29:54
Speaker 1: with you? Man? That's a movie. But supposedly like you
29:58
Speaker 1: can find people with pyromania on fire staff, which as
30:02
Speaker 1: long as they're not starting the fires, God bless them. Yeah,
30:06
Speaker 1: that's probably a pretty healthy way to get your your kicks.
30:10
Speaker 1: It's to watch fires to go to fight fires. Yeah,
30:14
Speaker 1: but people with pyromania also will pull fire alarms just
30:18
Speaker 1: to see the fire trucks. It's not just a fascination
30:20
Speaker 1: with fire. The whole thing things associated with fire, to lighters,
30:25
Speaker 1: firefighting equipment, firefighters, and sometimes they will like as the
30:29
Speaker 1: urge is building, they will start accumulating combustibles like little
30:33
Speaker 1: pieces of fuel like paper, and oh, this will burn
30:36
Speaker 1: really well. Oh, these lighters looks awesome. Ike, can't wait
30:39
Speaker 1: to start the fire with and just keep it around
30:41
Speaker 1: and then finally they can't hold it back anymore than wow,
30:44
Speaker 1: but not burn? Right, no erections. That should be the
30:51
Speaker 1: title of the show. I think it might be pyromania
30:54
Speaker 1: colon no erections, exclamation point right doing exclamation point? Wow?
31:00
Speaker 1: Do we just name it? Live with on a monopeia? Um?
31:04
Speaker 1: What else? Do we have anything else in here? No?
31:07
Speaker 1: That's the thing about this, there's not a lot to it.
31:10
Speaker 1: I'm actually impressed that we got thirty minutes out of
31:12
Speaker 1: it because it's so uncertain what pyromania is. Yeah. Actually,
31:17
Speaker 1: here's the one statistical percentage. It said estimated and one
31:23
Speaker 1: point one three percent of the population. Uh, yeah, that
31:30
Speaker 1: they don't know the idea. Um, I've got one for you. Alright,
31:35
Speaker 1: arsons in the US. Supposedly there's over sixty two thousand
31:39
Speaker 1: arsons every year in the US because not a billion
31:43
Speaker 1: dollars and losses every year and um about eight of
31:48
Speaker 1: Arson's result and no arrests. And I also saw that
31:54
Speaker 1: in Australia. Apparently they like to light their fires too.
31:58
Speaker 1: There's a fire that's lit every hour of every day
32:00
Speaker 1: in Australia. Yeah, what is going on down there? Uh?
32:03
Speaker 1: Maybe I don't know. This is hot. We're gonna find
32:05
Speaker 1: out in September and we're gonna find out what. Maybe
32:09
Speaker 1: we should do one on arson at some point because
32:11
Speaker 1: Arson investigation is something I know nothing about and it's
32:14
Speaker 1: fascinating to me. Well, a lot of it's totally made up.
32:18
Speaker 1: Arson investigation. What do you mean it's junk science? What like, Hey,
32:22
Speaker 1: it originated here, Yes, but I'm working on my intuition
32:27
Speaker 1: here and I learned it from this guy who's working
32:29
Speaker 1: on his intuition. And but we still put people to
32:32
Speaker 1: death based on this junk science. Evans, we totally need
32:35
Speaker 1: to do one on that. I wonder if the what
32:37
Speaker 1: they say is like look for the thing that looks
32:40
Speaker 1: the most melty and that's where I started start, there's
32:44
Speaker 1: your problem? Interesting, Yeah, we'll do one on that I've
32:47
Speaker 1: been wanting to for a while. Yeah, okay, all right, okay, deal, okay, Jerry, Okay,
32:52
Speaker 1: Jerry didn't care. If you want to know more about pyromania,
32:56
Speaker 1: you can type that word in the search bar how
32:58
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com them and it will bring up
33:01
Speaker 1: a pretty great article by Freud and Rich the Doctor.
33:04
Speaker 1: And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail,
33:06
Speaker 1: no listener mail today on this one, because we just
33:08
Speaker 1: want to take a moment to say thank you, a
33:11
Speaker 1: moment of silence, okay, uh, to say legitimate, sincere thank
33:19
Speaker 1: you for ten years of podcasting. None of us thought
33:23
Speaker 1: this would take on the life that it's had. I
33:27
Speaker 1: feel safe to say I agree with you, man, and
33:29
Speaker 1: I looked at the old podcast rankings today and we're
33:32
Speaker 1: right there at number six. What Yeah, just hanging too
33:36
Speaker 1: bad for a ten year old brand, hanging tough like
33:40
Speaker 1: the New Kids? Was it? The new Kids? Josh and
33:45
Speaker 1: Chuck and Jerry. Uh So we said it a lot.
33:47
Speaker 1: We would not. There would be no us without you, guys,
33:50
Speaker 1: and that is as true as true gets. So we
33:52
Speaker 1: still count on you to spread the word, to prostlytize,
33:56
Speaker 1: and to tell your friends to listen. Maybe put a
33:58
Speaker 1: sandwich board on and ring about all up and down
34:00
Speaker 1: the sidewalk. Couldn't hurt. Yeah, thank you everybody for getting
34:04
Speaker 1: us to this point today. Like you were saying, Chuck,
34:07
Speaker 1: we definitely would not be here without you guys, So
34:10
Speaker 1: thank you for listening all these times. Amen, Amen, I
34:14
Speaker 1: got nothing else. Well, if you want to get in
34:16
Speaker 1: touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at
34:17
Speaker 1: joshum Clark and s Y s K podcast on Twitter.
34:22
Speaker 1: Chucks a movie crush on Twitter too. By the way,
34:24
Speaker 1: Chuck's also all over Facebook at Facebook dot com, slash
34:27
Speaker 1: Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and slash Stuff you Should Know.
34:31
Speaker 1: You can send us all an email to Stuff podcast,
34:33
Speaker 1: to how Stuff Works dot com, and as always, join
34:37
Speaker 1: us at our home on the web, Stuff you Should
34:39
Speaker 1: Know dot com for more on this and thousands of
34:46
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