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Title

<i>The Psychopath Test</i> by <i>Jon Ronson</i> (2011) (read in 2016)

Description

<abstract>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</abstract> Jon Ronson is a journalist with an eccentric beat. He seems to cover what takes his fancy and his fancy often turns to the oddest---though at least somewhat successful---members of society. In this one, he delves into the business of psychology and the nature of psychopaths. He interviews various people who could be considered psychopaths, wonders whether he himself is one, takes a course with Bob Hare---world-famous as the inventor of the original psychopath checklist---to find out how to track and evaluate more professionally, then discovers that the power has gone to his head and perhaps psychopaths aren't another species entirely---or near-to---and there is a bandwidth of human behavior, some of which falls within norms and other that doesn't. There are also big players involved in making sure that people think they're sick. Society wants to benefit from the best minds, but also doesn't want to be changed too much by them. It is often difficult to tell the difference between a purported psychopath and a very intellectually engaged person. Ronson realizes that the checklist approach often just takes the human element out of evaluation and ends up making bad things happen to otherwise normal people---or at least people who aren't a danger to anyone. At the end, he addresses the medical/psychiatric/pharmaceutical industry as a whole, seeing it for the capitalist engine of self-realization that it is. The engine gets people to participate because they're concerned about their mental well-being, but the engine is only concerned about selling unneeded medicines and making a profit. <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Page 250">Any psychiatrist could pick up the manual they were creating—DSM-III—and if the patient’s overt symptoms tallied with the checklist, they’d get the diagnosis. And that’s how practically every disorder you’ve ever heard of or have been diagnosed with came to be invented, inside that chaotic conference room, under the auspices of Robert Spitzer, who was taking his inspiration from checklist pioneers like Bob Hare. “Give me some examples,” I asked him. “Oh . . .” He waved his arm in the air to say there were just so many. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Borderline Personality Disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder . . .” Then there was Autism, Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia, Panic Disorder . . . every one a brand-new disorder with its own checklist of symptoms.</bq> <bq caption="Page 251">“Were there any proposals for mental disorders you rejected?” I asked Spitzer. He thought for a moment. “Yes,” he finally said. “I do remember one. Atypical Child Syndrome.” There was a short silence. “Atypical Child Syndrome?” I said. “The problem was when we tried to find out how to characterize it. I said, ‘What are the symptoms?’ The man proposing it replied, ‘That’s hard to say because the children are very atypical.’ ” He paused. “And we were going to include Masochistic Personality Disorder, but there were a bunch of feminists who were violently opposed.” “Why?” “They thought it was labeling the victim.” “What happened to it?” “We changed the name to Self-Defeating Personality Disorder and put it into the appendix.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 253">But DSM-III, Spitzer’s DSM, was coming in at 494 pages. He turned the checklists into interview questionnaires and sent researchers out into America to ask hundreds of thousands of people at random how they felt. It turned out that almost all of them felt terrible. And according to the new checklists, more than 50 percent of them were suffering from a mental disorder. DSM-III was a sensation. Along with its revised edition, it sold more than a million copies. Sales to civilians hugely outweighed sales to professionals. Many more copies were sold than psychiatrists existed. All over the western world people began using the checklists to diagnose themselves. For many of them it was a godsend. Something was categorically wrong with them and finally their suffering had a name. It was truly a revolution in psychiatry, and a gold rush for drug companies, who suddenly had hundreds of new disorders they could invent medications for, millions of new patients they could treat. “The pharmaceuticals were delighted with DSM,” Spitzer told me, and this in turn delighted him: “I love to hear examples of parents who say, ‘It was impossible to live with him until we gave him medication and then it was night and day.’ That’s good news for a DSM person.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 255">a surfeit of checklists, coupled with unscrupulous drug reps, is, Gary said, a dreadful combination.</bq> <bq caption="Page 276">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.</bq> <bq caption="Page 279">“Ever since I went on a Bob Hare course, I’ve believed that psychopaths are monsters,” I said. “They’re just psychopaths, it’s what defines them, it’s what they are.” I paused. “But isn’t Tony kind of a semi-psychopath? A gray area? Doesn’t his story prove that people in the middle shouldn’t necessarily be defined by their maddest edges?” “I think that’s right,” he replied. “Personally I don’t like the way Bob Hare talks about psychopaths almost as if they are a different species.” Tony was standing alone now, staring at the wall. “He does have a very high level of some psychopathic traits,” he said. “He never takes responsibility, everything is somebody else’s fault, but not of others. He’s not a serious, predatory offender. So he can be a bully in the right circumstances but he doesn’t set out to do serious harm for its own sake. I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label. Tony has many endearing qualities when you look beyond the label.”</bq>