The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson

There is not one institutional psychiatrist alive who, by ordinary criminal law, could not be arraigned and convicted of extortion, mayhem and murder”—that

if you’re beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you’re feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.

This is great to know.

Who was Tony? Was he Toto Constant, who had struck me as the archetype Bob Hare psychopath, charming and dangerous, conforming to the checklist with an uncanny, eerie precision? Was he Al Dunlap, who had, I felt in retrospect, been a bit shoehorned by me into the checklist, even if he had himself laid claim to many of the items, seeing them as manifestations of the American Dream, the entrepreneurial spirit? Was he David Shayler, his insanity palpable but harmless to other people, reduced to a plaything for the benefit of the madness industry? Or was he Rebecca Riley or Colin Stagg, wrongly judged insane because they just weren’t what the people around them wanted them to be? They were just too difficult, just not normal enough.

Food for thought.