Meghan O’Flynn has spent the past decade writing thrilling crime novels notorious for their character development and shocking twists. But did you know that every book is sharply honed through her years as an equally notorious head-shrinker? (It’s a pet name.) The criminal (and non-criminal) mind is a fascinating and frightening place. Let’s get shrinky with it.
Many in the therapy biz have emotional reactions to the people they treat. When left in a room with a sociopath, physical responses such as fight or flight are common (I've definitely been there). Being with anxious people may make us tense based on the evolutionarily...
There are a number of traits that define psychopathy, and a wide continuum on which those traits can be expressed. In general, psychopaths are known for a lack of empathy, charm/charisma and serial killing, not exactly a stellar stereotype (just ask Poppy Pratt's...
Depression may be adaptive in some regards, and there may even be an evolutionary basis for the attractiveness of moodiness (more on that in "The Sexiness of Sadness.") But this doesn’t mean that we accept these traits as a society. Instead, what Philip Fischer labels...
Detective Petrosky would surely argue that the notion of justice means locking up the people who do harm--protecting the innocent. It's a notion that is hard to argue with. But most prisoners are worse off biologically and emotionally when they emerge from...
A beautiful woman is standing on an overpass, ready to leap to her death. A strange man approaches her and says “If you’re going to kill yourself, would you like to have sex first? It might be a fun way to go out.” “No! That’s disgusting!” she screams. The man turns...
“She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was, but it was the face that people pulled just before he killed them.” (The Psychopath Test) This is the idea we have in our head of...
I sometimes have people ask me, “Hey, Meghan, how did you come up with that weird trauma response in Recall? Can people really lose parts of their memory but not others?” Uhhhh…YES. They definitely can. Sometimes the brain even fills in missing information with things...
I love writing a good narcissist, and not just because they’re fun to kill (on PAPER, guys, geez). But narcissism is a word that gets thrown around a lot, often to describe those with high self-worth. That ain't it. As anyone who has been in a relationship with an...
In the Ash Park series, Detective Petrosky sometimes comes across domestic violence situations (and responds none too kindly, as you might imagine). He's like my alter ego, doing the things I wish I could in life. I spent years running domestic violence groups with...
First things first: UNDERSTANDING DOES NOT EQUAL ABSOLUTION. I am not in any way making excuses for rapists, nor do I believe that men should be punished less severely based on their histories. In my fiction novels, Detective Petrosky loves fantasizing about cutting...
