Thomas Sheridan worked on Wall Street as a communications and design consultant from 1990 to 1998. The Dubliner was struck by “the lack of compassion and human decency within that environment”.

As a result, he became interested in the issue of institutional and social “psychopathology”. Since then, he has made a study of psychopaths in the boardroom and in the living room. He writes, broadcasts and lectures internationally on the subject, and has written several books on the interlinked themes of psychopathology, doomsdays cults and social engineering, including the popular Puzzling People: The Labyrinth Of The Psychopath.

While Sheridan prefers to stay under the radar at home, he agreed to speak to Hot Press because we’re an alternative magazine – and because of our ongoing investigation into water fluoridation. “When I was working on Wall Street,” recalls Sheridan, “I became aware of how scary some people in the upper levels of management were, and how connected they were to governments around the world. Then I came across the concept of socialised psychopathology – the theory that psychopaths weren’t all axe-murderers, but individuals that lacked any kind of remorse, any kind of compassion. They were predatorial, and would see other human beings in the same way they’d see an object. There seems to be an issue with their frontal cortex: the part of their brains that process empathy, compassion and relationship to other human beings is switched off.”