The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson

  “P/E on Nxt FY: 27.5X” was the cruelest line in the paper, Jack had said. I found it incomprehensible. When I see phrases like that my brain collapses in on itself. But, this being the secret formula to the brutality, the equation that led to the death of Shubuta, I asked some financial experts to translate it.

  “So,” e-mailed Paul J. Zak, of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in Claremont, California, “the PE is the average price of the stock divided by next year’s forecasted earnings. The increase in the PE means that the stock price was expected to rise faster than the increase in earnings. This means the investment house expected that the Draconian cuts would produce higher earnings for years to come, and next year’s stock price would reflect that higher earnings for years in the future.”

  “For a company making low-priced appliances,” e-mailed John A. Byrne of BusinessWeek, “it’s a very high PE. The analyst is assuming that if Dunlap can squeeze out overhead and expenses, the earnings will shoot up and investors who get in early will make a killing.”

  “Bottom line,” e-mailed Paul J. Zak. “One investment house thought that most investors would cheer mass layoffs at Sunbeam. This is a remorseless view of people losing jobs. The only upside of this is that whomever followed this advice was seriously pissed at the investment house a year later when the stock tanked.”

  As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

  7.

  THE RIGHT SORT OF MADNESS

  It was a week after I returned from Florida. I was sitting in a bar in North London with a friend—the documentary maker Adam Curtis—and I was animatedly telling him about Al Dunlap’s crazy sculpture collection of predatory animals and his giant oil paintings of himself and so on.

  “How’s Elaine dealing with your new hobbyhorse?” Adam asked me.

  Elaine is my wife. “Oh, she likes it,” I said. “Usually, as you know, she finds my various obsessions quite annoying, but not this time. In fact, I’ve taught her how to administer the Bob Hare Checklist and she’s already identified lots of people we know as psychopaths. Oh, I think A. A. Gill’s baboon-killing article displays . . .” I paused and said, darkly, “. . . psychopathic characteristics.”

  I named one or two of our mutual friends as people we also now thought were psychopaths. Adam looked despairing.

  “How long did it take you to get to Al Dunlap’s house?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “Ten hours on the plane,” I said. “Plus a round-trip by car to Shubuta, Mississippi, which took about another fifteen or sixteen hours.”

  “So you traveled thousands of miles just to chronicle the crazy aspects of Al Dunlap’s personality,” said Adam.

  There was a short silence.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I peered at Adam. “Yes, I did,” I said, defiantly.

  “You’re like a medieval monk,” Adam said, “stitching together a tapestry of people’s craziness. You take a little bit of craziness from up there and a little bit of craziness from over there and then you stitch it all together.”

  There was another short silence.

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  Why was Adam criticizing my journalistic style, questioning my entire project?

  “Adam is such a contrarian,” I thought. “Such a polemicist. If he starts picking apart my thesis after I’ve been working on this big story for so long now, I’m not going to listen because he’s a known contrarian. Yes. If Adam picks apart my thesis, I won’t listen.”

  (Item 16: Failure to Accept Responsibility for Own Actions—He usually has some excuse for his behavior, including rationalization and putting the blame on others.)

  “We all do it,” Adam was continuing. “All journalists. We create stories out of fragments. We travel all over the world, propelled onwards by something, we sit in people’s houses, our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems. And the gems invariably turn out to be the madness—the extreme, outermost aspects of that person’s personality—the irrational anger, the anxiety, the paranoia, the narcissism, the things that would be defined within DSM as mental disorders. We’ve dedicated our lives to it. We know what we do is odd but nobody talks about it. Forget psychopathic CEOs. My question is, what does all this say about our sanity?”

  I looked at Adam and I scowled. Deep down, although I was massively reluctant to admit it, I knew he was right. For the past year or so I had traveled to Gothenburg and Broadmoor and upstate New York and Florida and Mississippi, driven by my compulsion to root out craziness. I thought back on my time with Al Dunlap, about the vague disappointment I had felt whenever he said things to me that were reasonable. There had been a moment before our lunch, for instance, when I’d asked him about items 12 and 18—Early Behavior Problems and Juvenile Delinquency.

  “Lots of successful people rebelled against their teachers or parents!” I had prompted. “There’s nothing wrong with that!”

  But he’d replied, “No. I was a focused, serious kid. I was very determined. I was a good kid. In school I was always trying to achieve. I was always working hard. That saps your energy. You don’t have enough time to troublemake.”

  “You never got into trouble with the authorities?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “And remember, I got accepted into West Point. Listen. The psychopath thing is rubbish. You cannot be successful unless you have certain”—he pointed at his head—“controls. It won’t happen. How do you get through school? How do you get through your first and second job when you’re formulating yourself?”

  It was a terribly persuasive point and I had felt disappointed when he said it. Also, he denied being a liar (“If I think you’re a schmuck, I’ll tell you you’re a schmuck”), or having a parasitic lifestyle (“I’ll go get my own meal”), and even though he was against “nonsense emotions,” he did feel “the right emotions.” Furthermore, his $10 million donation to Florida State University might have been narcissistic, but it was also a nice gesture. And he really did have a loyal wife of forty-one years. There really were no rumors of affairs. This would score him a zero on items 17 and 11, Many Short-Term Marital Relationships and Promiscuous Sexual Behavior.

  Of course even the highest-scoring psychopath would score zero on some of the items on Bob’s checklist. What jolted me was my own strange craving as a journalist and also as a now-qualified psychopath-spotter to see Al Dunlap in absolute terms.

  I mulled over what Adam had said to me: “We all do it. We wait for the gems. And the gems invariably turn out to be the madness.” We had both assumed that journalists do this instinctively. We have an inherent understanding of what makes a good interview moment and the last thing on our minds is whether it is a manifestation of a cataloged mental disorder.

  But I suddenly wondered, what if some of us journalists go about it in the opposite way? What if some of us have grasped that sufferers of certain mental disorders make the most electrifying interviewees and have devised clever, covert, Bob Hare–like methods of identifying them?

  And so in the days that followed I asked around. I asked editors and guest bookers and TV producers.

  And that’s how I came to hear about a woman named Charlotte Scott.

  Charlotte lives in a lovely, quite idyllic, old, low-beamed cottage in Kent. Her ten-week-old baby snored gently in the corner of the room. She was on maternity leave, but even so, she said, her TV-PRODUCING days were behind her. She was out now and she’d never go back.

  She was at one time, she said, an idealist. She’d wanted to get into crusading journalism but somehow ended up working as an assistant
producer on a British shopping channel, Bid-Up TV—“My glittering career,” she sighed—and eventually made a leap up to mainstream TV as a guest booker for Jerry Springer, then Trisha, and then Jeremy Kyle—three television programs where members of extended families mired in drama and tragedy yell at one another before a studio audience. She thought her old friends who poked fun at her career path were snobs. This was journalism for the people. And anyway, important social issues were raised on the shows every day: Drugs. Incest. Adultery. Cross-dressing. That sort of thing. She began hanging out more with her fellow guest bookers than her old university friends.

  “What did your job entail?” I asked her.

  “We had a hotline,” Charlotte explained. “Families in crisis who want to be on TV called the hotline. My job was to call them back, repeatedly, over a matter of weeks, even if they’d changed their minds and decided not to do the show. There had to be a show. You had to keep going.”

  Lots of jobs involve relentlessly calling people back. It is soul destroying—“Honestly, it was awful,” Charlotte said, “I mean, I’d been to university”—but not unusual.

  At first all the tragedy she had to listen to over the phone would grind her down. But you need to be hard and focused to be a good researcher so she devised ways to detach herself from her potential interviewees’ misery.

  “We started to laugh at these people,” she explained. “All day long. It was the only way we could cope. Then in the evening we would go to a bar and scream with laughter some more.”

  “What kind of jokes did you make about them?” I asked her.

  “If they had a speech impediment, that would be brilliant,” she said. “We put them on loudspeaker and gathered round and laughed and laughed.”

  And sure enough, Charlotte soon began to “feel removed from the person on the other end of the phone.”

  Plenty of people dehumanize others—find ways to eradicate empathy and remorse from their day jobs—so they can perform their jobs better. That’s presumably why medical students tend to throw human cadavers at each other for a joke, and so on.

  The thing that made Charlotte truly unusual was the brainwave she came up with one day. It had dawned on her from early on in her career that, yes, the shows’ best guests were the ones who were mad in certain ways. And one day she realized that there was a brilliantly straightforward way of seeking them out. Her method was far more rudimentary than the Bob Hare Checklist, but just as effective for her requirements. It was this: “I’d ask them what medication they were on. They’d give me a list. Then I’d go to a medical website to see what [the medications] were for. And I’d assess if they were too mad to come onto the show or just mad enough.”

  “Just mad enough?” I asked.

  “Just mad enough,” said Charlotte.

  “What constituted too mad?” I asked.

  “Schizophrenia,” said Charlotte. “Schizophrenia was a no-no. So were psychotic episodes. If they’re on lithium for psychosis, we probably wouldn’t have had them on. We wouldn’t want them to come on and then go off and kill themselves.” Charlotte paused. “Although if the story was awesome—and by awesome I mean a far-reaching mega family argument that’s going to make a really charged show—they would have to be pretty mad to be stopped.”

  “So what constituted ‘just mad enough’?” I asked.

  “Prozac,” said Charlotte. “Prozac’s the perfect drug. They’re upset. I say, ‘Why are you upset?’ ‘I’m upset because my husband’s cheating on me, so I went to the doctor and he gave me Prozac.’ Perfect! I know she’s not THAT depressed, but she’s depressed enough to go to a doctor and so she’s probably angry and upset.”

  “Did you get disappointed on the occasions you found they were on no drug at all?” I asked Charlotte. “If they were on no drug at all, did that mean they probably weren’t mad enough to be entertaining?”

  “Exactly,” said Charlotte. “It was better if they were on something like Prozac. If they were on no drug at all, that probably meant they weren’t mad enough.”

  And that was Charlotte’s secret trick. She said she didn’t stop to consider why some sorts of madness were better than others: “I just knew on an innate level who would make good television. We all did. Big Brother. The X Factor. American Idol. Wife Swap . . . Wife Swap is particularly bad because you’re monkeying with people’s families, with their children. You’ve got some loop-the-loop stranger yelling at someone’s children. The producers spend three weeks with them, pick the bits that are mad enough, ignore the bits that aren’t mad enough, and then leave.”

  Reality TV is littered with the corpses of people who turned out to be the wrong sort of mad. Take the especially sad tale of a Texas woman named Kellie McGee. Her sister Deleese was to be a contestant on ABC’s Extreme Makeover. Deleese was not an attractive woman: she had crooked teeth, a slightly deformed jaw, etc. Still, she had a tactful and considerate family, people like her sister Kellie, who always told her she was pretty. But she knew in her heart she wasn’t and so she applied for Extreme Makeover, dreaming of what the show promised—a “Cinderella-like” makeover to “transform the life and destiny” of a different “ugly duckling” each week. Deleese was, to her delight, chosen, and the family was flown to L.A. for the surgical procedure and the taping.

  A section of the show always involves the ugly duckling’s family telling the camera, pre–Cinderella transformation, just how ugly she is. The point of it is that when she finally emerges Cinderella-like from the makeover, her journey will be more epic and emotional. We’ll see the stunned and joyful looks in the eyes of the family members who had been embarrassed by the ugliness but are awed by the beauty. Everyone goes home empowered.

  With Deleese’s family, though, there was a problem. They’d grown so used to diplomatically protecting her feelings, the insults didn’t come easy. They had to be coached by the program makers. Eventually, they admitted, yes, Deleese was ugly: “I never believed my son would marry such an ugly woman,” Deleese’s mother-in-law agreed to say. Kellie, too, was coached to reveal how embarrassed she’d felt growing up with such an ugly sister. The boys all laughed at her and ridiculed her. And so on.

  Deleese was in the next room, listening to it all on a monitor, looking increasingly shocked. Still, it would be fine: she’d get her Cinderella-like makeover. She would be beautiful.

  A few hours later—just before Deleese was due to go under the surgeon’s knife—a producer came in to tell her she had been axed. The production manager had done the math and realized her recovery time wouldn’t fit with the program’s budgeted schedule.

  Deleese burst into tears. “How can I go home as ugly as I left?” she cried. “I was supposed to come home pretty!”

  The producer shrugged apologetically.

  The family all flew back to Texas, and everything spiraled. Too many things that should have remained unsaid had now been said. Deleese sank into a depression.

  “My family, who had never said anything before, said things that made me realize, ‘Yes, I was right and everyone did think I looked like a freak,’ ” she later explained in her lawsuit against ABC. Finally Kellie, who suffered from bipolar disorder, felt so guilty about her part in the mess that she took an overdose of pills and alcohol and died.

  You might think that Charlotte, over in England, with her ostensibly foolproof secret medication-listing trick, would be immune to inadvertently booking guests who were the wrong sort of mad. But you would be mistaken.

  “We once had a show called ‘My Boyfriend Is Too Vain,’ ” she said. “I pushed the vain boyfriend for the details of his vanity. Push push push. He drinks bodybuilder shakes all the time. He does the whole Charles Atlas. We put him on. Everyone laughs at him. Couple of days later he calls me up and while he’s on the phone to me, he slices open his wrists. He has severe body dysmorphic disorder, of course. I had to stay on the phone with him while we waited for the ambulance to arrive.” Charlotte shuddered. “It was awful,” she sa
id.

  As I left Charlotte’s house that afternoon and drove back to London, I thought, “Well, at least I haven’t done anything as bad as the things Charlotte has done.”

  8.

  THE MADNESS OF DAVID SHAYLER

  One morning in early July 2005, Rachel North, who works in advertising, got on the Piccadilly line tube in Finsbury Park, North London. It was, she later told me, the most rammed carriage she had ever been on.

  “More and more people were pushing on,” she said, “and I was standing there thinking, ‘This is ridiculous,’ and then the train trundled off, and it went for about forty-five seconds, and then there was”—Rachel paused—“an explosion. I was about seven or eight feet away from it. I felt this huge power smashing me to the floor. And everything went dark. You could hear the brakes screaming and clattering. It was like being on an out-of-control fairground ride but in the dark. And it was hot. You couldn’t breathe. The air was thick with smoke. And I was suddenly very wet. I was on the floor and there were people lying on top of me. And then the screaming started.”

  Three years earlier, in 2002, Rachel had been violently attacked by a stranger in her home. She wrote an article about it for Marie Claire magazine. That’s what she was doing the moment the bomb exploded: standing on a packed tube train reading the just-published Marie Claire article about the violent attack. As she lay on the ground, she thought, “Not again.”

  They evacuated the train. Rachel was one of the last people off.

  “As I climbed out into the tunnel, I did a quick sweep behind me and I did see some of what had happened, and yes, that has remained with me, because I still worry whether I should have stayed and helped, but it was so dark. I saw bent metal. There were people on the floor. There was . . . I won’t say what I saw.”