The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson

  “When I say out of the frying pan and into the fire, I mean it,” Tony continued. “The other night someone actually tried to set the ward on fire.”

  “How do you spend your days?” I asked him.

  “I sit here doing fucking nothing,” he replied. “Getting fat on takeaways.”

  “What are your new neighbors like?” I asked. “They can’t be as intimidating as the Stockwell Strangler and the Tiptoe Through the Tulips Rapist, right?”

  “They’re way worse. There’s some real head cases here.”

  “Like who?”

  “Tony Ferrera. Look him up. You’ll find him a real piece of work. He was living in a crack house and he was out walking one day when he saw some woman. He raped her, stabbed her, set her on fire. He’s here. There’s Mark Gingell. Double rapist and whatnot . . .”

  “Are any of them all right to hang out with?”

  “No.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Absolutely. If you’re not scared of these people there would really be something wrong with you.”

  “Oh, speaking of which,” I said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you about my day with Toto Constant. He used to run a Haitian death squad. Now he’s in jail for mortgage fraud. When I met him, he kept saying he really wanted people to like him. He was very sensitive to people’s feelings about him. I thought, ‘That’s not very psychopathic.’ ”

  “Right,” said Tony. “That just sounds sad.”

  “So finally I said to him, ‘Isn’t that a weakness, wanting people to like you that much?’ And he said, ‘No, it isn’t! If you can get people to like you, you can manipulate them to do whatever you want them to.’”

  “Jesus!” Tony said. “That’s a proper psychopath.”

  He paused. “I didn’t even THINK of that!” he said. “My hand to God, that didn’t even cross my mind.”

  In early January 2011, not long after he sent me an Xmas text (“Friends are the fruit cake of life—some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet”) Tony was released from Bethlem.

  I think the madness business is filled with people like Tony, reduced to their maddest edges. Some, like Tony, are locked up in DSPD units for scoring too high on Bob’s checklist. Others are on TV at nine p.m., their dull, ordinary, non-mad attributes skillfully edited out, benchmarks of how we shouldn’t be. There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it.

  Bob Hare was passing through Heathrow, and so we met one last time.

  “The guy I’ve been visiting at Broadmoor,” I said, stirring my coffee. “Tony. He has just been released.”

  “Oh dear,” said Bob.

  I looked at him.

  “Well, he’s gone to Bethlem,” I said. “But I’m sure he’ll be out on the streets soon.” I paused. “His clinician was critical of you,” I said. “He said you talked about psychopaths almost as if they were a different species.”

  “All the research indicates they’re not a different species,” said Bob. “There’s no evidence that they form a different species. So he’s misinformed on the literature. He should be up to date on the literature. It’s dimensional. He must know that. It’s dimensional.”

  “Obviously it’s dimensional,” I said. “Your checklist scores anything from zero to forty. But he was referring to the general way you talk about psychopaths. . . .”

  “Oh yeah,” said Bob, coldly. “I know.”

  “That’s what he meant,” I said.

  “It’s a convenience,” said Bob. “If we talk of someone with high blood pressure we talk of them as hypertensives. It’s a term. This guy doesn’t understand this particular concept. Saying ‘psychopathic’ is like saying ‘hypertensive.’ I could say, ‘Someone who scores at or above a certain point on the PCL-R Checklist.’ That’s tiresome. So I refer to them as psychopaths. And this is what I mean by psychopathy: I mean a score in the upper range of the PCL-R. I’m not sure how high it has to be. For research thirty is convenient, but it’s not absolute.”

  Bob looked evenly at me. “I’m in the clear on this,” he said. There was a silence. “My gut feeling, though, deep down, is that maybe they are different,” he added. “But we haven’t established that yet.”

  “I think my Broadmoor guy is a semi-psychopath,” I said.

  Bob shrugged. He didn’t know Tony.

  “So should we define him by his psychopathy or by his sanity?” I said.

  “Well, the people who say that kind of thing,” Bob said, “and I don’t use this in a pejorative way, are very left-wing, left-leaning academics. Who don’t like labels. Who don’t like talking about differences between people.” He paused. “People say I define psychopathy in pejorative terms. How else can I do it? Talk about the good things? I could say he’s a good talker. He’s a good kisser. He dances very well. He has good table manners. But at the same time, he screws around and kills people. So what am I going to emphasize?”

  Bob laughed, and I laughed, too.

  “Ask a victim to look at the positive things and she’ll say, ‘I can’t. My eyes are swollen,’” Bob said.

  Sure, Bob said, overlabeling occurs. But it’s being perpetrated by the drug companies. “Just wait and see what happens when they develop a drug for psychopathy. The threshold’s going to go down, to twenty-five, twenty . . .”

  “I think being a psychopath-spotter turned me a bit power mad,” I said. “I think I went a bit power mad after doing your course.”

  “Knowledge is power,” Bob said.

  Then he shot me a pointed look. “Why haven’t I gone power mad, I wonder?” he said.

  A few weeks later a package arrived. It was postmarked Gothenburg, Sweden. In the top corner someone had written: Today twenty-one years have passed since The Event—now it is up to us!

  I stared at it. Then I ripped it open.

  Inside was a copy of Being or Nothingness. I turned it over in my hands, admiring its odd, clean beauty, the hole cut out of page 13, the cryptic words and patterns and drawings, the twenty-one blank pages.

  Becoming a recipient of Being or Nothingness was a great surprise but not an entirely unexpected one. Petter had e-mailed me a few days earlier to tell me I’d soon receive something in the mail, and there would be a message for me in it, and I might not understand the message immediately, but it was an important one, and I should persevere, and perhaps even consult with my peers.

  “It took me eighteen years to figure out how to execute stage 1,” he wrote, “so be patient, eventually you will figure out how to proceed. After tomorrow, I will not be able to communicate with you anymore. It is unfortunate, but that is the way it has to be.”

  “If I e-mail you after tomorrow, you won’t respond?” I wrote back.

  “You can e-mail but I can’t answer,” he replied. “It is just the way it has to be.”

  And so I had a one-day window to fire as many questions at him as I could. I began by asking him why every other page in the book was blank.

  “I’m surprised that no one has commented on this before but this is of course no coincidence,” he replied. “21 pages with text and 21 blank = 42 pages (being or nothingness). I thought it would be quite obvious.”

  “All that intricate manual work—carefully cutting out the letters on page 13, and so on—did you do it alone or did you have help?”

  “I do all the cut outs, the sticker attachment, insert of ‘the letter to professor Hofstadter’ myself,” he replied. “A rather tedious task.”

  “What about the recipients?” I e-mailed. “Why were they chosen? What was the pattern?”

  He didn’t reply right away. I stared at the in-box. Then it came: “There has to be a little mystery left,” he wrote.

  And with that, he seemed to withdraw again, as if startled by his accidental candor.

  “There is nothing more I can tell you,” he w
rote. “When you receive the message, just follow your heart. As for direction, it will come to you, allow events to unfold. Now you are the chosen one, not me! You are a good person and I am sure that you will do the right thing whatever that is.”

  The TV was on in the background. There was a show on about how Lindsay Lohan was “losing it Britney style.”

  Now you are the chosen one, not me! You are a good person and I am sure that you will do the right thing whatever that is.

  Without stopping to think, I wrote him a mea culpa e-mail, telling him that when I first met him, when I’d doorstepped him back in Gothenburg, I had dismissed him as just eccentric and obsessive. I had reduced him in that manner. But now I could see that it was his eccentricities and his obsessions that had led him to produce and distribute Being or Nothingness in the most intriguing ways. There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

  He e-mailed me back: “I can get a little obsessive—that I must admit. . . .”

  And then, as he’d promised he would, he shut off all e-mail contact.

  Now I turned the book over in my hands, and something fell out. It was an envelope, with my name written on it, and a tiny sticker of a dolphin.

  Feeling unexpectedly excited, I ripped it open.

  It was a card: a painting of a butterfly and a blue iris. I opened the card. And handwritten inside was the message, which comprised just two words:

  NOTES/SOURCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY/

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Being my first readers can, I think, be quite a stressful experience, as I have a tendency to hand over the manuscript and then just stand there exuding a silent mix of defiance and despair. My wife, Elaine; William Fiennes; Emma Kennedy; and Derek Johns and Christine Glover at AP Watt therefore deserve my biggest thanks.

  There were four or five pages in the chapter “Night of the Living Dead” that were boring and I needed someone to tell me. Ben Goldacre was happy, maybe a little excessively happy, to do so. Adam Curtis and Rebecca Watson were brilliantly clever sounding boards, as were my editors Geoff Kloske at Riverhead and Paul Baggaley at Picador, and Camilla Elworthy and Kris Doyle.

  I’m very grateful to Lucy Greenwell for helping to research and set up my Gothenburg trip.

  I recorded an early version of “The Man Who Faked Madness” for the Chicago Public Radio show This American Life. Thanks as always to Sarah Koenig, Ira Glass, and Julie Snyder.

  My research into Harry Bailey and Deep Sleep Treatment came from Medical Murder: Disturbing Cases of Doctors Who Kill, by Robert M. Kaplan (Allen and Unwin, 2009).

  Information about L. Ron Hubbard’s life and death came from Scientology videos and from the 1997 Channel 4 documentary Secret Lives: L. Ron Hubbard, produced and directed by Jill Robinson and 3BM films.

  I enjoyed piecing together the Elliott Barker/Oak Ridge story. Research into Dr. Barker’s odyssey took me to R. D. Laing: A Life, by Adrian Laing (Sutton, 1994–2006); “Baring the Soul: Paul Bindrim, Abraham Maslow and ‘Nude Psychotherapy,’ ” by Ian Nicholson (Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 43, no. 4, 2007); and Please Touch, by Jane Howard (McGraw-Hill, 1970).

  I learned about the Oak Ridge experiment from reading “An Evaluation of a Maximum Security Therapeutic Community for Psychopaths and Other Mentally Disordered Offenders,” by Marnie E. Rice, Grant T. Harris, and Catherine A. Cormier (Law and Human Behavior, vol. 16, no. 4, 1992); “Reflections on the Oak Ridge Experiment with Mentally Disordered Offenders, 1965–1968,” by Richard Weisman (International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, vol. 18, 1995); “The Total Encounter Capsule,” by Elliott T. Barker, M.D., and Alan J. McLaughlin (Canadian Psychiatric Association Journal, vol. 22, no. 7, 1977); and Total Encounters: The Life and Times of the Mental Health Centre at Penetanguishene, by Robert F. Nielsen (McMaster University Press, 2000). Thanks to Catherine Cormier and Pat Reid from Oak Ridge, and to Joel Rochon.

  I pieced together the Bob Hare chapter in part through my interviews with him, but also from reading his books Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (Guilford Press, 1999) and Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (HarperBusiness, 2007), which he coauthored with Paul Babiak.

  The Nicole Kidman story Bob Hare tells comes from the article “Psychopaths Among Us,” by Robert Hercz, 2001. My information on the Jack Abbott/Norman Mailer story came from “The Strange Case of the Writer and the Criminal,” by Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times Book Review, September 20, 1981) and In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott with an Introduction by Norman Mailer (Vintage, 1991).

  Background into the crimes of Emmanuel “Toto” Constant came from “Giving ‘The Devil’ His Due,” by David Grann (The Atlantic, June 2001).

  Thanks to Ben Blair and Alan Hayling for their help with the chapter “Night of the Living Dead,” and to John Byrne for his book Chainsaw: The Notorious Career of Al Dunlap in the Era of Profit-at-Any-Price (HarperBusiness, 1999) along with his research into Al Dunlap in the magazines BusinessWeek and Fast Company.

  My quest to understand the relationship between Al Dunlap’s restructuring ruthlessness and Sunbeam’s massive share price hike took me to Michael Shermer, Joel Dimmock, Paul Zak, and Ali Arik.

  Thanks to Laura Parfitt and Simon Jacobs, producers on my BBC Radio 4 series Jon Ronson On . . . for help with the David Shayler story, and Merope Mills and Liese Spencer at Guardian Weekend for help with Paul Britton. The Colin Stagg/Paul Britton fiasco has been written about most interestingly in the books The Rachel Files, by Keith Pedder (John Blake, 2002); The Jigsaw Man, by Paul Britton (Corgi Books, 1998); and Who Really Killed Rachel? by Colin Stagg and David Kessler (Greenzone, 1999).

  Research into DSM-IV and the chapter “The Avoidable Death of Rebecca Riley” took me to four brilliant sources: “The Dictionary of Disorder: How One Man Revolutionized Psychiatry,” by Alix Spiegel (The New Yorker, January 3, 2005); The Trap, by Adam Curtis (BBC Television); “The Encyclopedia of Insanity: A Psychiatric Handbook Lists a Madness for Everyone,” by L. J. Davis (Harper’s, February 1997); and “Pediatric Bipolar Disorder: An Object of Study in the Creation of an Illness,” by David Healy and Joanna Le Noury (The International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine, vol. 19, 2007).

  Thanks to Alistair Stevenson for giving me a beautiful line that summed up my feelings about those ideologues whose love of polemics and distrust of psychiatry blind them to the very real suffering of people with unusual mental health symptoms.

  ALSO BY JON RONSON

  Them: Adventures with Extremists

  The Men Who Stare at Goats