I just spent the weekend with a bunch of psychos!

 The Psychopath Test – Jon Ronson

I’ve always been interested in psychology, especially abnormal psychology. Anyone who’s read Peril or The Baptist will understand. When I spotted that my local bookshop’s Minority Interest for last month was The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, I had to grab it. You can’t know too much about psychopaths in my line of work.

 Ronson is also the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats (a book that led to a very strange film with George Clooney) so I was expecting quirky humour, journalistic investigation and some genuine insights. That’s exactly what I got, with a few intriguing case studies thrown in. The 286 pages flew by.

Now that I’ve finished this book I’m left slightly perplexed. Not by the book but by the subject matter. Ronson doesn’t claim to be a clinician, he’s a journalist. He examined several attitudes towards psychology in general and psychopaths in particular.

The approach of categorising mental illness into specific codes was explored and the hazards discussed. Autism, ADD and infant bi-polar disorder were identified as diagnosis growth areas that were probably stimulated by the coding, with attendant questions about the roles of pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Ronson studied and adopted the Hare PCL-R checklist as a methodology to assess several subjects (including murderers and business leaders) for categorisation as psychopaths and, following him in his discoveries, I found myself using the same approach. He himself was at first exhilarated and then somewhat dismayed at his own jumping to conclusions based upon a few days’ training. As a wannabe amateur psychologist, I was very glad that I had read the entire book in a short space of time, narrowly avoiding the making of armchair psychiatric diagnoses of my own.

At the same time he discussed the Scientologist approach that all psychology is gobbledegook. That was a real eye-opener.

All of this was informed by interviews and meetings, sometimes a series of them, with the key players. It wasn’t a desk analysis. Ronson flew around the world to meet with pivotal individuals, past and present.

The big question is whether society is led by psychopaths. We would wish that it were led by altruists but the suggestion is that key influencers in society might otherwise be categorised as dangerous were they not in a position of power and influence. Look at a few of the twenty points of Hare’s checklist: superficial charm, grandiose self-worth, pathological lying, manipulative, lack of guilt. These, if not all the points on the list, seem a fairly typical recipe for any leader that has taken major corporations through major restructuring or brought a nation into a war zone. What if society is driven by psychopathic behaviour? Ronson’s book only scratches at the surface of that question but I suspect he is describing the human condition.


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