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by
Jon Ronson
Read between
May 25 - May 27, 2023
It was the kind of book—like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or A Brief History of Time—that everybody wanted on their shelves but few were clever enough to really understand.
I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read the DSM-IV when you’re not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.
Broadmoor is Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. It was once known as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. It was where they sent Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer, who killed three children and two teenagers in the 1960s; and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who killed thirteen women in the 1970s, crept up behind them and hit them over the head with a hammer; and Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler, who murdered seven elderly people in 1986; and Robert Napper, who killed Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in July 1992—stabbed her forty-nine times in front of her toddler son. Broadmoor is
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Mary Barnes eventually became a celebrated and widely exhibited artist. Her paintings were greatly admired in the 1960s and 1970s for illustrating the mad, colorful, painful, exuberant, complicated inner life of a schizophrenic. “And it got rid of the smell of shit,” Adrian said.
“The problem,” Gary said, “was that the schizophrenics had incredibly vivid dreams—dream after dream after dream—but the psychopaths would be lucky if they even had a dream.” “Why do schizophrenics dream more than psychopaths?” I asked. “I don’t know.” Gary laughed. “I do remember the schizophrenics usually dreamed in color—the more intense a dream, the more likely it’s going to be in color—but the psychopaths, if they managed to have a dream at all, dreamed in black-and-white.”
My guess was that Science magazine behaved coolly toward Bob because they believed him to be yet another maverick psychopath researcher running rampant in a Canadian mental institution in the late 1960s. Those places were the Wild West of psychopath study back then, with lots of big ideas and practically no regulation. It was inevitable that civil rights groups would eventually force a reining in of the experiments. And sure enough, disastrously for Bob, electric shocks were outlawed in the early 1970s.
“How long did it take you to get to Al Dunlap’s house?” he asked me. I shrugged. “Ten hours on the plane,” I said. “Plus a round-trip by car to Shubuta, Mississippi, which took about another fifteen or sixteen hours.” “So you traveled thousands of miles just to chronicle the crazy aspects of Al Dunlap’s personality,” said Adam. There was a short silence. “Yes,” I said. I peered at Adam. “Yes, I did,” I said, defiantly. “You’re like a medieval monk,” Adam said, “stitching together a tapestry of people’s craziness. You take a little bit of craziness from up there and a little bit of craziness
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Many in the audience were successful local businesspeople, pillars of the community. I had the feeling that the freedom to argue with their wives and pump their horns in anger were freedoms they truly held dear.
“There’s a societal push for conformity in all ways,” he said. “There’s less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. ‘Previously I was laughed at, I was picked on, no one liked me, but now I can talk to fellow bipolar sufferers on the Internet and no longer feel alone.’”
Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.
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.
