HOW NORMAL IS THE WORLD WE LIVE IN? JON RONSON S JOURNEY THROUGH SOME UNEXPECTED AREAS OF MODERN PSYCHIATRY

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1 HUMAN AFFAIRS 24, , 2014 DOI: /s HOW NORMAL IS THE WORLD WE LIVE IN? JON RONSON S JOURNEY THROUGH SOME UNEXPECTED AREAS OF MODERN PSYCHIATRY PETRA KLASTOVÁ PAPPOVÁ Jon Ronson, the author of The Psychopath Test A journey through the madness industry (Ronson, 2012), is a British journalist, previously known for his books Them: Adventures with extremists (2011) and The men who stare at goats (2009). The Psychopath Test begins with the author of the book being called upon by two researchers to investigate a mysterious handmade book, Being or Nothingness, that several well-known academics living in different countries have received anonymously. The book led to intellectual examination and created a kind of privileged community of the academics who received it. Jon Ronson flies to Gothenburg in Sweden to track down the author of the mysterious book and finds out that he might be a Swedish psychiatrist, quite a strange personality. A further chance encounter with a researcher studying psychopathy leads Ronson to Bob Hare (2014), a Canadian psychologist who has formulated a checklist for diagnosing psychopathy (from which Jon Ronson s book takes its title). Jon Ronson attends Bob Hare s workshop in order to become acquainted with the use of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist- Revised (PCL-R). The PCL-R is a standard international method for assessing psychopathy. It is a dimensional construct defined by a specific constellation of traits and behaviors including grandiosity, egocentricity, deceptiveness, shallow emotions, lack of empathy or remorse, irresponsibility, impulsivity, sensation-seeking, and a socially deviant (not necessarily criminal) lifestyle in which the feelings and rights of others are ignored or violated. Individuals with a very high concentration of these features (perhaps 1% of the general population) are referred to as psychopaths. They are capable of inflicting a disproportionate amount of physical, emotional and financial damage on people around them. The public tend to view psychopaths primarily as perpetrators of violent crimes, such as murder, sexual assault or robbery. Many, of course, do commit serious crimes, for which they are caught and sentenced. Yet, the majority of psychopaths are not in prison but living among others, where 584 Institute for Research in Social Communication, Slovak Academy of Sciences

2 virtually everyone is victimized in one way or another, typically without understanding the how or why of it (Hare, 2012, not paginated). Sometimes dissocial or antisocial behavior, when combined with high intelligence and eventually also a good starting position in life, can be seen as an extremely efficient behavior and can go unmasked for a long time in the society, its destructive potential remaining hidden (Längle, 2006). A high percentage of true psychopaths do not behave criminally and can be found everywhere they have access to power they may be top managers, lawyers, security officers, even doctors or teachers (Koukolík & Drtilová, 2006). Robert Hare s PCL-R includes 20 items that are rated by a mental health professional on a does not apply applies somewhat fully applies scale. These 20 items include: Glibness / superficial charm Grandiose sense of self-worth Need for stimulation / Proneness to boredom Pathological lying Cunning / manipulating Lack of remorse or guilt Shallow affect Callous / lack of empathy Parasitic lifestyle Poor behavioral controls Promiscuous sexual behavior Early behavior problems Lack of realistic long-term goals Impulsivity Irresponsibility Failure to accept responsibility for own actions Many short-term marital relationships Juvenile delinquency Revocation of conditional release Criminal versatility The current edition of the PCL-R officially lists three factors (1a, 1b, 2a) which summarize the 20 assessed areas via factor analysis (Cooke et al., 2007). Some factors are correlated with narcissistic personality disorder (Huchzermeier, 2007). The so-called core personality traits of psychopathy (selfish, callous and remorseless use of others) may even be beneficial for the personality of a psychopath, that means in terms of non-deviant social functioning. Other PCL-R factors (chronically unstable, antisocial and socially deviant lifestyle) are strongly correlated to antisocial personality disorder and borderline personality disorder and are associated with reactive anger, criminality, and impulsive violence (Skeem et al., 2003). The PCL-R is widely used to assess individuals in high security psychiatric units, prisons and other settings, and also as a risk assessment tool that attempts to predict who will offend or reoffend. This may be of help in deciding who should be detained or released, or who should undergo what kind of treatment. It is also used for its original purpose to carry out basic psychology studies of psychopathy. 585

3 The title of the book, The Psychopath Test, describes part of the content, the PCL-R, its use and that there are people who could be diagnosed as psychopaths using this tool. These people can be found in predictable but also in the most unexpected places. The concept of psychopathy is not new in the psychological literature and the PCL-R itself is a well-known and widely used method. What is new is the view of the author and his journey through this hidden world of psychopaths as well as through the madness industry as he calls it. Being a journalist, Jon Ronson s narrative is accurate, interesting and surprising. He has an ability to observe and inform without judging or making premature conclusions in contrast to other non-scientific publications about psychopathy. Ronson s book is not only about psychopaths, but describes various shades of nonstandard behavior in the madness industry psychiatry and psychology, most of them through stories of the various characters the author meets on his journey. The characters in Ronson s book are both fascinating and extraordinary in their special ways. Besides the Swedish psychiatrist who goes under the name of Petter Nordlund in Ronson s book, and Robert Hare, who has devoted his professional career to studying psychopathy, there are Elliott Barker and Gary Maier both latterly of the Oak Ridge Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ontario who do not see psychopathy as incurable and tried to heal psychopaths in a series of LSD-fuelled encounter sessions in the 1960s. There s Tony, a diagnosed psychopathic patient at the Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Great Britain introduced to Ronson by a scientologist who works for a scientology anti-psychiatry pressure group. This gives Jon Ronson an opportunity to summarise the straightforward but strange career of Scientology s founder, L. Ron Hubbard. Ronson s quest for psychopaths takes him to New York to visit Emanuel Toto Constant, the founder of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), a Haitian death squad that terrorized supporters of exiled Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In 2001 Toto Constant was sentenced in absentia by a Haitian court to life in prison for his crimes against humanity and in 2008, he was convicted of mortgage fraud and sentenced to many years in prison in the USA. Jon Ronson meets him in the maximum security prison in New York, the Coxsackie Correctional Institution. Later Jon Ronson meets Al Dunlap, an ex-ceo of the Sunbeam Company. Sunbeam was once a profitable plant producing well-liked toasters until it was laid waste and shut down by Al Dunlap, leaving hundreds of people unemployed, while Dunlap earned tens of thousands of dollars as pay for his services and a massive severance pay for being charged with fraud. And so the narrative continues to expand, documenting Ronson s journey in which he meets other figures. One of them is David Shayler, a former M15 spy, who was admired by thousands of people for sacrificing his liberty in a stance against illegal secret government activities. Shayler later joined the 9/11 Truth Movement, a movement which holds the belief that the official explanation for the September 11, 2001 attacks is fraudulent. Later he became a self-proclaimed Messiah and by the time Jon Ronson met him (again, when writing The Psychopath Test), he was living as a male transvestite. Another interesting character is a clinical psychologist and criminal profiler who speaks about one of his biggest mistakes. In his documentary book, Jon Ronson wants us to understand how imperfectly psychiatrists and psychologists have mapped the uncertain area of sanity, showing that sometimes there are no big differences between those labeled by a psychiatric diagnosis 586

4 and those who create the labels. While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) might be a useful tool for many professionals, it may indeed be a dangerous tool, sometimes leading to such unfortunate procedures as medicating children for bipolar disorder or the runaway diagnosis of attention deficit disorder. As Ronson himself writes (Ronson, 2012, p. 281), there are obviously a lot of very ill people out there, but there are also people in the middle, getting over-labeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it. Jon Ronson s book starts as a funny story, but as the story proceeds, the reader is forced to take the subject at hand more seriously and to think about it more deeply. Madness and also true psychopaths come in all shapes and sizes, but in an interview with a former guestbooker for television programs dealing with family drama, Ronson discovers that it takes media attention to validate or reject their aberrant behavior. The psychopath test by Jon Ronson was criticized by Dr. Robert Hare and by the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy (SSSP). Dr. Hare states in his Commentary on Ronson s The Psychopath Test (Hare, 2012), that he had hoped that Ronson s book would serve to increase public awareness and interest in the nature of psychopathy and its devastating effects on large segments of society... but his hopes were not realized. Academics from the SSSP think that Ronson s book trivializes a serious personality disorder and its measurement, which is not helpful to those who have the disorder or to their unfortunate victims (Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy, 2014, not paginated). As a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, I find The psychopath test a very interesting book intelligent, funny but also full of kindness to the various nuances of human behavior that are informally described as madness. The content of the book is not new itself, but the view of the author is truly unique. Jon Ronson has found a deep ability to attentively observe these shades of human behavior and to describe them accurately. Whereas crimes against humanity, serious violent crimes, overall ruthlessness and the remorseless use of others by certain individuals can sometimes victimize whole societies, the line between what is perceived as healthy and therefore normal and what is perceived as mad and who is to decide this, can sometimes be very blurry. References Cooke, D. J., Michie, Ch., & Skeem, J. (2007). Understanding the structure of the psychopathy checklist - Revised: An exploration of methodological confusion. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 190, Hare, R. D. (2012). A Commentary on Ronson s The psychopath test: A journey through the madness industry. pril%2017% pdf, Hare, R. (2014). Without conscience. Robert Hare s web site devoted to the study of Psychopathy. www. hare.org, Huchzermeier, C., Geiger, F., Bruss, E., Godt, N., Köhler, D., Hinrichs, G., & Aldenhoff, J. B. (2007). The relationship between DSM-IV cluster B personality disorders and psychopathy according to Hare s criteria: clarification and resolution of previous contradictions. Behavioral Science and the Law, 25 (6), Koukolík, F., & Drtilová, J. (2006). Vzpoura deprivantů: Nestvůry, nástroje, obrana [A Revolt of the depraved: Monsters, tools, defence]. Praha: Galén. 587

5 Längle, A. (2006). Das betrogene Selbst: Vom sozialem Verlorensein zur dis-sozialen Lösung [The betrayed self: From being lost in the society to a dis-social solution]. Existenzanalyse, 23, 2, Ronson, J. (2012). The psychopath test (3 rd Edition). London: Picador. Skeem, J. L., Poythress, N., Edens, J. F., Lilienfeld, S. O., & Calle, E. M. (2003). Psychopathic personality or personalities? Exploring potential variants of psychopathy and their implications for risk assessment. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 8 (5), Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy (2014). General Ronson commentary. psychopathysociety.org/en/home/10-news/news.html, Rue des Métaux 16, 1040 Bruxelles Belgium Belehradská 10, Bratislava, Slovakia petra.klastova@gmail.com 588

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