Readers sometimes ask how I came to go by the name Zhawq, so I wrote the following as an introduction.
I go by the name Zhawq when I present myself openly as a diagnosed psychopath. But it wasn’t I who came up with this nick, it was an acquaintance of mine who used to call me Shark, as a friendly pointer to how he and others (used to?) see me.
He created a video game character and gave it the name Zhawq because every other version of the name Shark had been taken. One day I decided to create a website on the Internet where I would tell the public about psychopathy and how this subject is viewed from the perspective of the psychopaths themselves – or more precisely, from the perspective of one psychopath: Me. – And it came about this way:
I had recently been released from prison on grounds of the special probational condition that I remain subject to a psychopathy research program in which I was enrolled when it was launched 8 years earlier. One of the biggest changes that has happened in society since I went to prison – now almost 13 years ago – is with the Internet, and I immediately found the prospects fascinating.
As I acquainted myself with the more basic technical workings of the web I soon found out about another change: The change surrounding the general information and awareness about what is frequently called Antisocial Personality Disorder, Sociopathy, or Psychopathy. The Internet is a virtual goldmine in this respect, though it is also a dust bin. Either way, there are so many books and so many websites out there which discuss psychopathy, but they share one thing: They always discuss and describe psychopathy and psychopaths from the perspective of the scholars, the clinicians and those that we call the victims. Very few are represented by the psychopaths ourselves.
It was time to change that. So I told my acquaintances that I had decided to set up a website with the purpose of creating yet another resource for information about psychopathy, one which would be different because it would be presented, written and run by a psychopath, me.
However, I couldn’t afford to use my real name, I had to find something else to call myself. Somebody suggested I call myself Shark, but I felt it might identify me eventually. And then it was that a friend of mine, who was playing a video game using a character he had named Zhawq, said: “Dr. Hare compare psychopaths with Mr. Spock from the TV series Star Trek, it’s not unlike the name of my character, Zhawq, why not use that?”.
And that was pretty much it. I thought about a few alternatives, I never really warmed to the name Zhawq, but once I’d used it in a few fora it somehow stuck with me, and now I’m known as Zhawq.
I created a website and called it Psychopathic Writings. It’s a public blog where I post articles on a regular basis, all about psychopathy and psychopaths from varying angles. You are very welcome to pay me a visit, I will be your friendly host.
