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giving a fourteen-year-old a negative psychiatric label that will stay with her all of her life?
    In the case of Angelina Jolie, the official diagnosis was considerably more serious. Sitting in her Beverly Hills High School file to this day is a troubling description, delivered by a psychotherapist who had been treating her for some time: “Angelina Voight is unrestrained, inclined to antisocial psychopathy.” In other words, while still in her teens, Angelina was labeled a psychopath.
    Jolie has tried to downplay her mental health issues as well as her mandatory thrice-weekly sessions with the school therapist. “They enrolled in there everybody whose parents were divorced,” she recalls. “Our psychotherapist used to say that it was our [parental] ‘units’ who were guilty of everything. It seemed to her that we, poor children, would never be able to adapt to life.”
    But according to one of Angelina’s former classmates, who now works in the television industry, her explanation doesn’t ring true. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says. “This was Beverly Hills High. Most of the kids in the school came from so-called broken homes. Everybody’s parents were divorced, mine included. If they made us all see a school therapist, it would have been like an assembly line a mile long. I have no idea what Angie did to be sent to therapy. I don’t even think I knew at the time that she was going, though it was a given that lots of kids saw some sort of therapist privately. I never did personally, except for some family therapy when I was younger, but it was kind of in vogue in those days.”
    In a 2000 interview, Angelina appears to contradict the explanation that she gave earlier about being forced to attend therapy. She also emphatically denied that her problems had anything to do with her parents’ divorce. “I was in school, and you could get extra credit for going to a therapist,” Jolie told Marie Claire magazine. “It was just a part of life studies, psychology. So I went. And I realized how dangerous these people could be. This person kept talking about my feelings for my father. I’d say, “No, I’m not angry. I understand. I think my parents are both wonderful individuals.” And she just couldn’t believe it wasn’t a problem for me. I can remember coming in one day and saying I had a dream. I totally lied. I said I dreamt that I stabbed my father with a fork, and she said, ‘Aha, I see.” And I thought, ‘You fucking asshole.” My therapy is my films; my therapist is everybody who goes to see a movie and tells me whether I’m completely off.”.”
    Short of locating the therapist that came up with the original diagnosis, it’s difficult to determine what it was based on.
    According to experts, it is highly unusual for a fourteen-year-old to be diagnosed with an antisocial psychopathic disorder, since most of the literature suggests reserving such a diagnosis until at least the age of eighteen. In his 2006 book, The Psychopathy of Everyday Life , Dr. Martin Kantor makes a clear distinction between the kind of disorder that Angelina was diagnosed with and the kind of severe psychopathic behavior of serial killers and other extreme examples. “One of the biggest problems in understanding psychopathy,” he writes, “is the literature’s tendency to lump serious but rare psychopaths like John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy with the less serious but common psychopaths, the many in our midst who suffer from a milder and less obtrusive form … [clinical psychologist and author] Martha Stout calls these less serious, more common psychopaths ‘the sociopaths next door.’”
    Most experts agree that one of the defining characteristics of psychopathy is a lack of empathy. Given Angelina Jolie’s present day status as a philanthropist and humanitarian, it is hard to believe that she was ever given this diagnosis in the first place. Could it have been the rash assessment of a lazy therapist? Or did