I spent most of my week debating what to write about this week: a book I'd just finished or an episode of a TV show that I really like. I've decided to go with the book, since I told a friend on Twitter that I'd review it, and there are a lot of things that I've been trying to work out since listening to it. Yes, listen--I listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts during the day. Noise keeps me focused, and if it's something educational or entertaining instead of just music, I consider my day well-spent.
I first heard about The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry on one of the podcasts I regularly listen to, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. The author, Jon Ronson, was on as a guest and talked a little about it: namely, one part of the book that compared a theory held by some of the psychiatrists he had spoken to while researching (that a lot of higher-ups have personality traits consistent with psychopathy and that is why the world sucks) to a theory held by another previous interviewee who the SGU like to roll their eyes at every once in a while (that a lot of higher-ups are secretly lizards and that is why the world sucks.) It intrigued me enough that I used my spare Audible credit to download it and spent the next day and a half devouring it.
While most of the books that I read are fiction, and the vast majority of those are in the sci-fi/fantasy/horror genre, I do love nonfiction about history, science, sociology, that sort of thing. I'd classify my interest in that as more "nerdy" than "geeky"--and to me, there is a difference. One of my dormmates in college once said that to them, nerd had more of a connotation of an academic interest in a subject, and geek had a connotation of a more pop culture interest. I've redefined it further for myself: when I nerd out over something, I'm being academic and nitpicky about it, whether it's biology or X-men. When I geek out over something, I'm just generally loving on it.
Semantics aside, this was the kind of book that I liked: one in which the author admits their own bias, where the history of a subject is explored, and where several different viewpoints are shown, both positive and negative. The reader is, at the end, allowed to draw their own conclusions about the information that is presented. And it really is entertainingly written--the best way to feed me knowledge has always been with a little bit of humor on the side. As with a lot of things that you never really think of, there's so much absurdity to be found that no jokey humor is needed. And the humor was needed. You know how in some horror movies, they have to lighten up a really awful, tense moment with a joke to get the audience giggling nervously before plunging you back into it? It's kind of like that.
It did seem to start off slowly, though that could have been me playing Pokemon while listening and wondering when the book would move into comparing world leaders to Hannibal Lecter. I'll admit that I didn't quite get that the book was going into psychopathy as a whole and not just that one particular tangent until a bit of the way in, and that could have taken away from my enjoyment of the beginning as well. This is why it's never a good thing to go into something with preconceptions. In any case, the author is drawn into researching psychopathy as an accident while looking into something completely different. A strange book called Being or Nothingness kicks off the narrative, sent to various people including psychiatrists, every other page blank, some words cut out, and despite various theories of what it could be, nobody could make heads or tails of it.
While looking into this, Ronson meets up with Scientologists, who famously think that all psychiatry is a scam. In order to prove their point, one gets Ronson into Broadmoor Hospital, a psychiatric hospital where a patient the book calls Tony claims to have faked his way in after being arrested. And years later, he can't get back out. Tony, by Ronson's account, seems to be the kind of person that you'd expect to meet on a street and not one that you'd expect to find locked up in a psychiatric hospital.
At this point, I'd like to jump out of the review and say I know a lot of people who aren't what the mental baseline for normal is considered to be. I'm not the mental baseline of normal: I'm anxious to the point of fearing to go into unfamiliar places, have obsessive-compulsive behaviors that worsen considerably with stress, and have been struggling with trichotillomania since I was eleven or twelve. Mental conditions, for the vast majority of people, are invisible because they're an issue of brain chemistry and therefore manifest internally. Saying "this person can't be crazy because they don't look cartoon-crazy" is incorrect and offensive to a lot of people.
But, to quote Wednesday Addams on the subject of homicidal maniacs, "They look just like everybody else." When Ronson talks to doctors at Broadmoor about why someone who was obviously just quoting lines from movies is still in there, they let him in on the reason: a "sane" person wouldn't do that. They might joke about it, but there is a line of conscience that the vast majority of people won't cross. They think that Tony is a psychopath: a person with no empathy.
And it's at this point that the book took off for me. The history of the modern diagnosis of psychopathy was dug up, mostly having to do with a doctor in Canada who tried to teach empathy to some inmates and just made a better psychopath. This failure led, however, to Robert Hare, creator of the eponymous psychopath test, a checklist aimed at screening inmates in prisons and psychiatric hospitals. Ronson took his class and took the checklist on a tour.
This is where the book goes through its biggest ups and downs. The descriptions of the interviewees' foibles are frequently amusing, and it's all well-written. And on the other hand, the descriptions of what happened to the victims of Emmanuel Constant's death squads, the squalor of a ghost town after Al Dunlap's shutting down a plant, a 7/7 bombing victim's blogs describing what she went through and then the anger she felt after being targeted by conspiracy theorists like David Shayler who accused her of making her experiences up, or a remorseful BBC worker talking about how she exploited the mentally ill for reality TV by asking what medications people were on before deciding if they were the "right kind of crazy" for entertainment... it was emotionally exhausting. Hearing about people who might not be actual psychopaths, but who seemed to have empathic blind spots was interesting, confusing, enraging, and made me a little scared about myself. I know there's times I steamroll over people without caring that it might hurt them and I think that we all do to greater or lesser extents, even if it's just to win an argument. Wondering how much of an extreme this has to go to before it actually has a label applied to it and the person is deemed to need help makes me go a little cold inside.
There's also a discussion about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. We're currently on the fifth revision, by the way, which is good--there's a lot of things in earlier editions that shouldn't be there. And there are things in there now that have been added that are still contentious. The book goes into some of those, which does deviate some from the main storyline of the book, except that it shows that not all professionals everywhere agree with each other. It's also around this point where something that had been bugging me throughout the narrative was finally resolved. After taking Hare's class and finding out about the checklist, Ronson refers to "my new psychopath finding abilities" or other variations fairly frequently. It's obvious that he's going to be brought down to reality: a single class doesn't make anyone an expert in anything, particularly with something as tricky as human biology and behavior. Seeing how so many professionals couldn't come to an exact agreement on several other diagnoses and how the DSM served much the same purpose as Hare's checklist helped him come down to earth.
In the end, the impression that I got was that there was no grand conclusion to be reached. The information as gathered by Ronson had been presented, along with his impressions along the way; the rest is up to the reader.
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