The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson

“Can’t you see? It’s incredibly interesting. Aren’t you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man’s brain? It’s as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter’s brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere.”

It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy. “I thought the best way to seem normal,” he said, “would be to talk to people normally about normal things like football and what’s on TV. That’s the obvious thing to do, right? I subscribe to New Scientist. I like reading about scientific breakthroughs. One time they had an article about how the U.S. Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives. So I said to a nurse, ‘Did you know that the U.S. Army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives?’ Later, when I read my medical notes, I saw they’d written, Thinks bees can sniff out explosives.”

It wasn’t easy to understand why the CIA would want to back a murderous, antidemocratic death squad.

Oh, Jon, you naive little lamb. Backing death squads is everyday work for the spooks.

“Grandiose sense of self-worth?” I asked. This would have been a hard one for him to deny, standing as he was below a giant oil painting of himself.

“I think it’s rather a sad story, David,” said Belinda. “According to Messiah culture, or prophet culture, you’re making several mistakes. Firstly, you’re not taking time out to really meditate on your mission. You’re coming public far too soon. Secondly, you’re not gathering a following around you. Thirdly, you’re announcing it yourself when really it should be for other people to say, ‘He is the One,’ and start to bow down to you or whatever. But you’re coming out and throwing it at everybody. My point is, you’re not behaving in a very Messiah-like way.” David shot back that seeing as how he was the Messiah, any way he behaved should be considered a Messiah-like way.

Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we’re becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren’t as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren’t as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we’re not as mad as they are.

“It’s very easy to set off a false epidemic in psychiatry,” he said. “And we inadvertently contributed to three that are ongoing now.” “Which are they?” I asked. “Autism, attention deficit, and childhood bipolar,” he said. “How did you do it?” I asked. “With autism it was mostly adding Asperger’s, which was a much milder form,” he said. “The rates of diagnosis of autistic disorder in children went from less than one in two thousand to more than one in one hundred. Many kids who would have been called eccentric, different, were suddenly labeled autistic.”

I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born into a stable, rich family.

I think the madness business is filled with people like Tony, reduced to their maddest edges. Some, like Tony, are locked up in DSPD units for scoring too high on Bob’s checklist. Others are on TV at nine p.m., their dull, ordinary, non-mad attributes skillfully edited out, benchmarks of how we shouldn’t be. There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it.