The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson

Readers of Jon Ronson’s books, such as Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats, will not be disappointed with The Psychopath Test. Ronson goes on many a fascinating adventure, interviewing real life psychopaths, CEOs and Broadmoor inmates, finally reaching the conclusion that madness may well be in the eye of the beholder.

British journalist Jon Ronson has made a name for himself by seeking out eccentric nut cases and turning these people and their obsessions into entertaining and insightful books. The reason for Ronson’s success is that he mixes light humour with disturbing subject matter. Ronson’s books almost read like novels. They are filled with funny dialogue, fascinating characters, entertaining episodes and a general air of intellectual suspense that make them compulsive page turners.

Ronson always keeps an open mind on what he’s investigating, and is candid in revealing the many twists and turns in his own thinking. Refreshingly, Ronson is happy to admit that he’s a fallible thinker, prone to making mistakes. Even when he’s making somewhat peremptory judgements based on emotion or prejudice, there’s an honesty that makes Ronson likeable, an author you’re likely to trust almost as a friend.

The Psychopath Test, as the subtitle says, is a ‘journey through the madness industry’. Ronson meets all sorts of people in the psychiatry trade, and the patients that the industry diagnoses and in some cases incarcerates indefinitely. The most notable interviewee is Bob Hare, who invented the psychopath checklist, or test. Ronson becomes quite obsessed with the checklist.

The notion of being able to diagnose possible psychopaths gives him a sense of power. Suddenly friends and critics alike begin to register as possible psychopaths according to the test. Ronson admits to ‘going a little mad with power’ to make a point about how the practice of psychiatry might do more harm than good, creating platoons of practitioners whose mere opinions have the power to medicate and incarcerate. (We learn of one child, diagnosed with bi-polar, who is over medicated and dies as a result. Diagnosing children with bi-polar remains controversial.)

Picking up Hare’s theory that many leaders in politics and business are high on the psychopath checklist, Ronson sets out somewhat half heartedly to prove the theory correct. Most alarmingly, he goes off to visit Al Dunlop, notorious CEO and corporate downsizer who ruthlessly threw many out of their jobs and gloated about it. It’s impossible not to tense up and worry for Ronson’s safety as he suggests to Dunlop, while interviewing the man in his own house, that he may possibly be a psychopath. Dunlop doesn’t take too kindly to this of course, but Ronson manages to get himself out of strife.

The central mystery of The Psychopath Test is a young man named ‘Tony’ who had been incarcerated at Broadmoor’s Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder unit for twelve years. Tony faked a mental illness at the time of his conviction, thinking he would be put into a cushy hospital rather than having to sweat out a prison sentence (he’d committed a violent crime at the age of seventeen.) Once in Broadmoor, however, he couldn’t get out: his clinician had determined he was a psychopath.

The central theme, then, of The Psychopath Test, is the definition of madness, who get to define who as mad, and the power that it accrues. Tony’s violent crime would have got him a seven year sentence, but his faking a mental illness, and inability to prove he wasn’t mad or a psychopath, kept him incarcerated for twelve years. No matter what he did in Broadmoor, no matter how normal he tried to behave, everything was written down and recorded as proof of his mental instability. It’s all alarmingly Kafkaesque, as Ronson shows how it’s almost impossible to prove you are sane. If you fall into the wrong hands, it seems nothing you do may be considered normal.

This inability to consider everyday behaviour normal may be the reason that the DSM, the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic handbook, has expanded so much since it was first published (it currently lists 374 mental disorders). DSM-I was a 65 page booklet, but the current version, DSM-IV-TR, runs to 886 pages. In a fascinating interview with David Spitzer, the editor of the third version of the DSM (Spitzer almost quadrupled the size of DSM-III to 494 pages from 134 pages), Ronson asks about the possibility that he may have mislabelled some ordinary behaviours as mental disorders. Ronson waits for three minutes for Spitzer to answer, until he finally says, ‘I don’t know’.

‘Do you ever think about that?’ I asked him.
‘I guess the answer is I don’t really,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should. But I don’t like the idea of speculating how many of the DSM-III categories are describing normal behaviour.’
‘Why don’t you like speculating on that?’ I asked
‘Because then I’d be speculating on how much of it is a mistake,’ he said.
There was another long pause.
‘Some of it may be,’ he said.

The take-away from The Psychopath Test is that most likely we’re all a little mad, and that the mental health industry may have a little too much power. Interestingly, the pharmaceutical industry loves new mental disorders being discovered, as it gives them a chance to sell more drugs.

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson. Published by Picador. ISBN: 978-0-330-45136-9