Strange answers to the psychopath test - Jon Ronson

[Music] [Applause] This story starts. I was at a, uh, friend's house, and she had on her shelf a copy of the DSM manual, which is the manual of mental disorders. It lists every known mental disorder. It used to be, back in the 50s, a slim pamphlet, and then it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it's 886 pages long, and it lists currently 374 mental disorders.

So I was, uh, leafing through it, wondering if, um, I had any mental disorders, and it turns out I've got 12. I've got generalized anxiety disorder, which is a given. I've got nightmare disorder, which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure, and all my dreams involve people chasing me down the street going, "You're a failure." I've got parent-child relational problems, which I blame my parents for. I'm kidding, I'm not kidding, I'm kidding. And I've got mingering, and I think it's actually quite rare to have both mingering and generalized anxiety disorder because mingering tends to make me feel very anxious.

Anyway, I was looking through this book, wondering if I was much crazier than I thought I was, or maybe it's not a good idea to diagnose yourself with a mental disorder if you're not a trained professional, or maybe the Psychiatry profession has a kind of strange desire to label what's essentially normal human behavior as a mental disorder. I didn't know which of these things was true, but I thought it was kind of interesting, and I thought maybe I should meet a critic of Psychiatry to get their view, which is how I ended up having lunch with the Scientologists.

It was a man called Brian who runs a crack team of Scientologists who were determined to destroy Psychiatry wherever it lies. They're called the CCHR, and I said to him, "Can you prove to me that Psychiatry is a pseudo science that can't be trusted?" And he said, "Yes, we can prove it to you." And I said, "How?" And he said, "We can introduce you to Tony." And I said, "Who's Tony?" And he said, "Tony is in Broadmore." Now, Broadmore is Broadmore Hospital. It used to be known as the, uh, Broadmore Asylum for the criminally insane. It's where they send the serial killers and the people who can't help themselves.

I said to Bri, "What did Tony do?" And he said, "Hardly anything. He beat someone up or something, and he decided to fake madness to get out of a prison sentence, but he faked it too well, and now he's stuck in Broadmore, and nobody will believe he's sane. Do you want us to try and get you into Broadmore to meet Tony?" So I said, "Yes, please."

So I got the train to Broadmore. I began to yawn uncontrollably around Kempton Park, which apparently is what dogs also do when anxious; they yawn uncontrollably. We got to Broadmore, and I got taken through gate after gate after gate after gate into the Wellness Center, which is where you get to meet the patients. It looks like a giant Hampton; it's all peach and pine and calming colors, and the only, uh, bold colors are the reds of the panic buttons.

The patients started drifting in, and they were quite overweight and wearing sweatpants and quite docile looking. Brian, the Scientologist, whispered to me, "They're medicated," which to the Scientologist is like the worst evil in the world, but I'm thinking it's probably a good idea. Then Brian said, "Here's Tony," and a man was walking in. He wasn't overweight; he was in very good physical shape, and he wasn't wearing sweatpants; he was wearing a pinstriped suit, and he had his arm outstretched like someone out of The Apprentice. He looked like a man who wanted to wear an outfit that would convince me that he was very sane.

He sat down, and I said, "So is it true that you faked your way in here?" and he said, "Yep, yep, absolutely. I beat someone up when I was 17, and I was in prison awaiting trial, and my cellmate said to me, you know what you have to do? Fake madness. Tell them you're mad; you'll get sent to some cushy hospital. Nurses will bring you pizzas; you'll have your own PlayStation." So I said, "Well, how did you do it?" He said, "Well, I asked to see the, um, prison psychiatrist, and I'd just seen a film called Crash, and people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. So I said to the psychiatrist, 'I get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls.' And I said, 'What else?' He said, 'Oh, yeah, I told the psychiatrist that I wanted to watch women as they died because it would make me feel more normal.' And I said, 'Where'd you get that from?' He said, 'Oh, from a biography of Ted Bundy that they had in the prison library.'

Anyway, he faked madness too well, he said, and it didn't send him to some cushy hospital; they sent him to Broadmore, and the minute he got there, he said he took one look at the place, asked to see the psychiatrist, said there's been a terrible misunderstanding. I'm not mentally ill. I said, "How long have you been here for?" He said, "Well, if I just done my time in prison for the original crime, I'd have got 5 years. I've been in Broadmore for 12 years."

Tony said that it's a lot harder to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy. He said, "I thought the best way to seem normal would be to talk to people normally about normal things like football and what's on TV. I subscribed to New Scientist, and recently they had an article about the US Army training bumblebees to sniff out explosives, so I said to a nurse, 'Did you know that the US Army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives?' When I read my medical notes, I saw they'd written, 'Believes bees can sniff out explosives.' He said, 'You know they're always looking out for nonverbal clues to my mental state, but how do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way? It's just impossible.'

And when Tony said that to me, I thought to myself, am I sitting like a journalist? Am I crossing my legs like a journalist? He said, "You know, I've got the, uh, Stockwell Strangler on one side of me, and I've got the Tiptoe Through the Tulips rapist on the other side of me, so I tend to stay in my room a lot. CU I find them quite frightening, and they take that as a sign of madness. They say it proves that I'm aloof and grandiose. So only in Broadmore would not wanting to hang out with serial killers be a sign of madness.

Anyway, he seemed completely normal to me, but what did I know? And when I got home, I emailed his clinician, Anthony Maiden. I said, "What's the story?" and he said, "Yep, we accept that Tony faked madness to get out of a prison sentence because his hallucinations that had seemed quite cliché to begin with just vanished the minute he got to Broadmore. However, we have assessed him, and we've determined that what he is is a psychopath. In fact, faking madness is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath. It's on the checklist: cunning, manipulative. So faking your brain going wrong is evidence that your brain has gone wrong."

I spoke to other experts, and they said the pinstriped suit - classic psychopath speaks to items one and two on the checklist: glibness, superficial charm, a grandiose sense of self-worth. I said, "Well, I said want to hang out with the, uh, the other patients." Classic psychopath. It speaks to grandiosity and also lack of empathy. So all the things that seemed most normal about Tony were evidence, according to his clinician, that he was mad in this new way: he was a psychopath. His clinician said to me, "If you want to know more about psychopaths, you can go on a psychopath spotting course run by Robert Hare, who invented the psychopath checklist." So I did. I went on a psychopath spotting course, and I am [Music] now certified and I have to say extremely adept. It's like an AAT spotter.

So here's the statistics: one in 100 regular people is a psychopath, so there's 1,500 people in this room; 15 of you are psychopaths. Although that figure rises to 4% of CEOs and business leaders, so, uh, I think there's a very good chance there's about 30 or 40 psychopaths in this room. It could be carnage by the end of the [Music]. He said the reason why is because capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior, the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning, manipulative. In fact, capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy. It's like a form of psychopathy that's come down to affect us all.

The, ha, said to me, "You know what? Forget about some guy at Broadmore who may or may not have faked madness. Who cares? That's not a big story. The big story," he said, "is corporate psychopathy. You want to go and interview yourself some corporate psychopaths." So I gave it a try. I wrote to the, um, Enron people. I said, "Can I come and interview you in prison to find out if you're psychopaths?" Um, they didn't reply. So I changed tack. I emailed James A. Al Dunlap, uh, the asset stripper from the 1990s. He would come into failing businesses and close down 30% of the workforce, just turn American towns into ghost towns.

I emailed him and said, "I believe you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you special, um, interested in the predatory spirit and fearless. Can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly?" And he said, "Come on over." So I went to Al Dunlap's grand Florida mansion that was filled with sculptures of predatory animals. There were lions and tigers. He was taking me through the garden; there were falcons and eagles. He was saying to me, "Over there, you've got sharks," and more. He was saying this in a less effeminate way. "You've got more sharks than you've got tigers," was like Narnia.

And then we went into his kitchen. Now, Al Dunlap would be bought in to save failing companies; he'd close down 30% of the workforce, and he'd quite often fire people with a joke. Like, for instance, one famous story about him: somebody came up to him and said, "I've just bought myself a new car," and he said, "Well, you may have a new car, but I'll tell you what, you don't have a [Music] job."

So in his kitchen, he was standing there with his wife Judy and his bodyguard, Sha, and I said, "You know how I said in my email that you must have a special brain anomaly that makes you special?" And he said, "Yeah, it's an amazing theory. It's like Star Trek; you're going where no man has gone before." And I said, "Well, some psychologists might say that this makes [Music] you..." and he said, "What?" And I said, "A psychopath."

And I said, "I've got a list of psychopathic traits in my pocket; can I go through them with you?" He looked intrigued despite himself, and he said, "Okay, go on."

And I said, "Okay, um, grandiose sense of self-worth," which I have to say would have been hard for him to deny because he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself. He said, "Well, you've got to believe in you."

And I said, "Manipulative." He said, "That's leadership."

And I said, "Shallow affect and inability to experience a range of emotions." He said, "Who wants to be weighed down by some nonsense emotions?"

So he was going down the psychopath checklist, basically turning it into Who Moved My [Music] Cheese. But I did notice something happening to me the day I was with Al Dunlap: whenever he said anything to me that was kind of normal, like he said no to juvenile delinquency, he said he got accepted into West Point, and, you know, they don't let delinquents in West Point, he said no to many short marital relationships. He's only ever been married twice; admittedly, his first wife cited in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and said he always wondered what human flesh tasted like. But people say stupid things to each other in bad marriages, in the heat of an argument. And his second marriage has lasted 41 years.

So whenever he said anything to me that just seemed kind of non-psychopathic, I thought to myself, well, I'm not going to put that in my book. And then I realized that becoming a psychopath spotter had kind of turned me a little bit psychopathic. So I was desperate to shove him in a box marked psychopath. I was desperate to define him by his maddest edges, and I realized, my God, this is what I've been doing for 20 years. It's what all journalists do. We travel across the world with our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems, and the gems are always the outermost aspects of our interviewees' personality, and we stitch them together like medieval monks, and we leave the normal stuff on the floor.

And you know this is a country that overdiagnoses certain mental disorders hugely. Childhood bipolar—children as young as four are being labeled bipolar because they have temper tantrums which score them high on the bipolar checklist. When I got back to London, Tony phoned me. He said, "Why haven't you been returning my calls?" I said, "Well, they said that you're a psychopath." And he said, "I'm not a psychopath. He said, you know what? One of the items on the checklist is lack of remorse, but another item on the checklist is cunning, manipulative. So when you say you feel remorse for your crime, they say typical of the psychopath to cunningly say he feels remorse, but he doesn't. It's like witchcraft; they turn everything upside down."

He said, "I've got a tribunal coming up; will you come to it?" So I said, "Okay." So I went to his tribunal, and after 40 years in Broadmore, they let him go. They decided that he shouldn't be held indefinitely because he scores high on a checklist that might mean that he has a greater-than-average chance of recidivism, so they let him go. And outside in the corridor, he said to me, "You know what, John? Everyone's a bit psychopathic." He said, "You are." I am. Well, obviously, I am. I said, "What are you going to do now?" He said, "I'm going to go to Belgium 'cause there's a woman there that I fancy, but she's married, so I'm going to have to get her to split up from her husband."

Anyway, that was, um, two years ago, and that's where my book ended. For the last 20 months, everything was fine; nothing bad happened. He was living with a girl outside London. He was, according to Brian the Scientologist, making up for lost time, which I know sounds ominous but isn't necessarily ominous. Unfortunately, after 20 months, he did go back to jail for a month. He, um, got into a fracas in a bar, he called it, and ended up going to jail for a month, which I know is bad, but at least a month implies that it's whatever the fracas was wasn't too bad.

And then he phoned me, and you know what? I think it's right that Tony is out because you shouldn't define people by their maddest edges. And what Tony is, is a semi-psychopath. He's a gray area in a world that doesn't like gray areas, but the gray areas are where you find the complexity, and it's where you find the humanity, and that's where you find the truth.

And Tony said to me, "John, can I buy you a drink in a bar? I just want to thank you for everything you've done for me." And I didn't go. What would you have done? Thank you. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]