Review: 'The Psychopath Test'
Published 12:08 pm, Saturday, June 11, 2011
THE PSYCHOPATH TEST
BY JON RONSON
In “The Psychopath Test,” Jon Ronson, the admittedly neurotic British journalist who penned “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” ponders what is ordinary and what is insane in a gonzo-style analysis of mental illness.
Ronson, who admits to suffering from “a massive surfeit of anxiety,” unearths odd maladies too numerous to mention. OK, just one: prosopagnosia, suffered by a sheep farmer in Wales “who could recognize all of his sheep as individuals, but couldn’t recognize human faces, not even his wife’s, not even himself in a mirror.”
Ronson’s investigation leads him to Tony, a man confined to a mental institution because, by his own account, he faked being a psychopath to avoid jail time for an assault charge. Tony is stuck, with little hope of release. In a line that captures some of the thematic elements of the book, Tony says, “It is an awful lot harder . . . to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy.”
Is Tony, in fact, a psychopath? Ronson leaves it to the reader to decide.
The author also visits Emmanuel Constant, imprisoned founder of a death squad that terrorized Haitian citizens in the early ’90s. His atrocities are beyond belief, and the reader will have little difficulty pegging Constant as a psychopath.
But Ronson also interviews Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap, the former CEO of Sunbeam, who took joy in mass layoffs and arbitrary firings that destroyed people’s lives. Other facts regarding Dunlap’s behavior both in business and in his personal life will make you question whether the man has a soul.
During an interview in Dunlap’s palatial Florida mansion, Ronson surreptitiously administers the Hare Checklist, comprised of 20 questions used to diagnose psychopathy. The clear (and creepy) result is that Dunlap exhibits many of the character traits that would identify him as a psychopath.
Oddly, while Dunlap seems to be in agreement with Ronson’s findings, he sees them not as a sign of psychopathology but as “business positives.” Scary stuff that leads one to wonder about the minds and motives of some of our politicians and corporate leaders.
Bob Hare, the psychiatrist who developed the Hare Checklist, laments that “less of his research on psychopathology should have been done in prisons and more of it inside the Stock Exchange.” When Ronson posits that surely stock market psychopaths cannot be as evil as serial killers, Hare fires back, “Serial killers ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”
Ronson’s quirky analysis continues as he takes on the DSM-IV, psychiatrists, Scientologists, LSD, the CIA and a former MI5 spy named David Shayler, who first surfaced as a rabid 9-11 conspiracy theorist, later claimed he was the Messiah and wound up a garden-variety transvestite.
Ronson, who is both fiercely intelligent and self-deprecating, successfully combines humor with an unsettling subject, and the result is a compelling read.
Mark Stoeltje is the executive director of Our House, a nonprofit center serving adults with severe mental illness.