An Understanding: Sociopaths

Can sociopaths experience mental illness?

Yes, they absolutely can. Sociopaths aren't limited to just having a personality disorder, but can develop other significant mental illnesses. Let's go through some of the most common ones:

Depression
This is extremely tricky to say the least, mainly because all sociopaths are their own individual, therefore determining whether one can develop it or not would be to generalise. However, for this case, I will avoid speaking for all sociopaths, just those who have already dealt/are dealing with. So, depression. Extremely common in those with neurotypical minds. To be able to understand depression in sociopathy, we have to understand depression as a whole.

What is depression?
The google definition of depression is: feelings of severe despondency and dejection.

Symptoms of depression can include:
- Too much weight loss, or weight gain
- Having difficulty to be able to focus on owns work
- Isolating oneself from peers and communication
- Having a setback from life in generality.
- Noticeable change in sleeping pattern
- Noticeable change in eating pattern

Since we have an idea of what depression can cause, let's move onto depression in sociopaths. We have to understand something though. Depression manifests in people differently. It's a chemical reaction, therefore just because one person with depression does something in particular, does not have to mean that the other person with depression have to mimic every other person with the illness. It is manifested differently, therefore results will inevitably be different.

Sociopaths, like I said, are all different individuals. Whether they can get depressed or not depends on what emotions they can feel, because all sociopaths have different emotions that they can indeed feel. Different sociopaths respond to certain situations differently. Usually, it's a lot more of anger than anything else. Sometimes sociopaths don't feel emotions, but the reasoning for that is not because they don't have emotions all together, but because they refuse to put that emotional investment in people, or situations (Compton, 2016).

So, to answer the question legitimately, can sociopaths be depressed? Yes, they can. Depression releases a chemical in your brain that affects your emotions that then proceeds for you to react on those affected emotions with actions that are dangerous, such as the list stated above. People tend to interpret sociopaths wrong, and claim that they do not feel emotions at all, which is incorrect. They simply lack in expressing those submerged emotions and refuse to pull it out any time soon. Their brain simply won't allow it, because the entire reason the particular sociopath refuses to feel those emotions is because of years of depression, mental/physical trauma, and in some cases, head injuries. Such events causes them to switch off their emotions out completely.

Anxiety
Well, before we talk about anxiety in sociopaths, we should establish what anxiety is and what the symptoms are.

What is anxiety
The google definition of anxiety is "a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome."

Symptoms of anxiety can include:
- Palpitations
- Sweating
- Chest pains or tightness
- Nausea problems
- Panic
- Dry mouth
- A shortness of breath

Yes, sociopaths feel anxiety. What we need to know about anxiety is that it comes in many different shapes and forms. Some sociopaths feel anxiety in a way of excitement or extreme happiness. Impatience and restlessness are also forms of anxiety that most sociopaths, I would say, feel.
I would get into more specific disorders that can occur, however I would rather make it clear that disorders of all sorts can be manifested into people with personality disorders, because personality disorders don't limit people with said disorder to be able to be inhabited.