Mídia, true crime e a romantização da psicopatia: uma revisão integrativa

Abstract

The rise of the true crime genre in the contemporary entertainment industry has sparked growing public fascination, often resulting in the spectacularization and distortion of clinical constructs. This study aimed to investigate the relations between scientific evidence and media representations of psychopathy within the true crime genre, identifying how this interaction shapes the social construction of the phenomenon and fosters romanticizing mechanisms An integrative literature review was conducted across SciELO, PePSIC, PubMed, and the CAPES Journals Portal databases, selecting 12 articles published between 2022 and 2025 that met the PRISMA protocol guidelines. The findings revealed a significant mismatch between clinical reality and the social imagination fueled by the media. While neurobiological and psychopathological evidence demonstrated that psychopathy is a multidimensional construct characterized by specific deficits in the emocional processing (reduced affective empathy) and functional manifestations in the general population, entertainment narratives tend to glamorize the disorder, wrongfully associating it with genius, intellectual sophistication, or compulsory homicidal violence. Additionally, it was identified that media spectacularization operates in conjunction with social control ideologies, converting structural issues of violence into individual pathologies. It is concluded that mass consumption of true crime deforms public perception of the disorder and generates moral desensitization processes, highlighting the necessity for critical analyses that preserve ethical-clinical rigor and combat social stigmatization.