One place to look that is excellent and seems to have been forgotten among the more recent discussions on this topic is books by Stanton Samenow on the Criminal Mind and the Criminal Personality. These are a bit dated in terminology as they came out of work done starting in the 1970s. But after reading volume I of the Criminal Mind series, I see it is clearly about psychopaths (part of antisocial personality disorder), and overlaps also with some other Cluster B PD behaviors. He also wrote a book about how to recognize this in children (even young children) and to head it off at the pass, if possible. Honestly, given new brain research findings, I am not sure it is. But if you are truly worried about a Jodi Arias type situation, this is the best resource I've found. Maybe you could find a way to get pro bono or volunteer help, or perhaps low-cost programs.

On your point, "if you see something, say something." Yes, but. Our family has actually come up against dangerous situations multiple times. In most cases, we have said something and something was done about it. Often these situations are then taken out of our view, so we don't know if anything effective was done. But there are also situations in which it may not be safe to say something. I've had a couple of those too. I did not say anything, but I do monitor whether it may become necessary. The risks included physical risk to our whole family, retaliation, and possibly being harrassed by police who would not know the real story, or disbelieved if they did hear it. So, we did not do anything right away, choosing to monitor the situation. Ps can be dangerous, and especially if they are giving warning that they may be dangerous. I think we all have to decide what we can and can not do.

On the big ideas request:

Yes, I have many big ideas. They include:

Better/mandatory testing in certain situations (legal, criminal, parole, divorce, DV, etc): Right now, the best and most comprehensive tests for Cluster B personality disorders, or even for all personality disorders, are often either not used or not allowed (not validated for this use). If they are, it may be expensive. Not enough therapists are truly educated about what these PD types do to those around them, or how to recognize them when they see them. Or how to differentiate between traumatized victims temporarily behaving a certain way (reactive, defending themselves and their children) and personality-disordered abusers (instrumental instigators). Often, it is not even clear who is the victim and who is the abuser/perpetrator, so we need ways to more objectively sort this out. That would also address allegations of false abuse, which we really need to do, to avoid felony charges to the wrong person or giving children to abusers for custody (which apparently according to statistics happens a startling majority of the time), and question the wisdom of 50% 50% custody on those cases. We need to improve on all of this, make it more available, make testing and evaluation (must involve 3rd party verification and objective evidence) mandatory in certain situations. We could also administer more standard personality tests, not only the well-known biggies, but also SWAPS 200 which tests for all PDs, in schools, perhaps on entry to high school. That would allow at least 2 years to try to do some therapy, and possibly 3 years before the student leaves the school. Parole hearings should include such testing and evaluation before deciding whether to release a prisoner before his or her sentence expires.

Advocacy: Train advocates on personality disorders and their effects to help with legal situations. Ideally, there would be a cadre of trained legal advocates, including those for family court and DV court, that could help for low cost or free. Such a thing could be done, for example, by raising an endowment that provides an annual budget to pay for training and time of advocates in major cities around the country. I believe that in the long run, money would be saved because needless disputes would be shortened or avoided, and further crimes might be minimized. But as the government and parties would mostly do the saving, probably they would not fund it. We'd need wealthy concerned donors, who have perhaps experienced these things in their lives.

More research into brain imaging, hormone/neurotransmitter testing, genetics, and epigenetics to see what exactly is going on and whether anything can reverse it. Recently a study was done where psychiatrists evaluated patients and recommended what they would do. Then, the patients were brain imaged. The results suggested different problems and different courses of treatment in 80% of the cases. This type of research may make all this arguing about DSM categories obsolete. I would love to see, for example, whether there is overlap or not in brain function, hormone/neurotransmitter status, gentics, and epigenetics between NPD and psychopathy. I'm willing to bet that these are closer than psychopathy vs non-psychopathy ASPD. How do the other PDs fit, especially Cluster B PDs?

I'm not sure if this is what you meant when you asked for ideas or not, but I've been thinking we need a movement or educated small group of experts to try to produce some of these things. We also need much better, better-informed, and more widely available help and support groups for people abused and traumatized by people with personality disorders, especially if they have complex PTSD.

If anyone is looking who would like to see these things happen, let me know. Thanks!

Escapefor1: I am truly impressed with your suggestions. I would really like to see a lot more of this brain imaging done right now. Please leave a link where you had found some of this info, I want to understand it better.

Sister in Hell,

I'll try to dig up some of these links in the next few days. Really these are conclusions from much research I've done over time. There is a lot of brain structure research on psychopaths, not much of any on NPD, some on borderline, etc. The study that found that psychiatric diagnoses and treatment should be changed 80% of the time due to brain imaging was one study. I'll see if I can find that link.

It also makes sense that psychopathy has different brain structure and/or function because some brain injuries can induce or mimic it, especially very hard hits to the forehead (sports injuries, fighting, car accidents).