The Psychopath Test
by Jon Ronson Macmillan
Digital Audio (audiobook)
In the mid-1960s, a psychiatrist devised radical therapies to cure psychopaths, including having them strip naked, sit in a circle and engage in 'crotch eyeballing'. Another treated a woman who smeared herself in her own faeces by giving her paint: she became an artist. Author Jon Ronson's fondness for weirdness was evident in The Men Who Stare at Goats, about a US military programme that sought to train men to walk through walls. In The Psychopath Test, which he narrates in a disconcerting bedtime-story manner, he visits nutters in jails in Britain, the US and Canada to see what lies behind their madness. Sometimes, he finds self-interest: Tony, a 29-year-old who has been in jail since he was 17 for committing 'grievous bodily harm', feigned madness to reduce his sentence but ended up convincing everyone he was a psychopath. Those wondering if they fall into this category can examine the Hare PCL-R Checklist which cites and 'pathological lying' and 'parasitic lifestyle' as criteria. By this test, many more people would surely be 'guilty'.
Extras: none