Patric Gagne, Ph.D., is a writer, former therapist, and advocate for people suffering from sociopathic, psychopathic, and anti-social personality disorders. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Sociopath: A Memoir, which shares her struggle to understand her own sociopathy and shed light on this often-maligned and misunderstood mental disorder. So often sociopathy has been distorted by misconceptions, extreme portrayals in film and media, and conflation with psychopathy. Gagne’s perspective aims to build empathy for the challenges faced by sociopaths, who comprise roughly 5% of the population, and often experience it on a spectrum. At the same time, Sociopath is a surprising and inspiring love story.

The San Francisco Chronicle calls the book, “A cross between a podcast by relationship expert Esther Perel and a salacious tell-all.” The New York Times Magazine raved, “Holy moly, readers will be interested in this!” and Cosmopolitan calls the book, “completely fascinating.” Booklist says, “[readers] will never see the word sociopath the same way again.”

Patric earned her BA at UCLA and then enrolled at the Westwood, CA, campus of California Graduate Institute (CGI), a graduate school specializing in psychology, marital and family therapy, and psychoanalysis. She earned a Master of Arts degree in Psychology from CGI and then defended her dissertation — “Followers of Fagin: Secondary Sociopathy and Its Relationship to Anxiety” — and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Clinical Psychology by California Graduate Institute of The Chicago School of Professional Psychology¹.

She lives with her husband, David, their two children, and a cantankerous black cat named Easter.

¹ The Chicago School of Professional Psychology announced in 2008 that they were merging with CGI, at which point students already on the doctoral track were informed that their degrees would be awarded by (and fall under) The Chicago School’s accreditation, which at that time offered a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.