It is an awful lot harder... to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy. [p. 43]
A series of comically improbable events lead Ronson, via DSM-IV (the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, from which pretty much anybody can pick a Mental Disorder that fits them), to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a 20-item questionnaire for diagnosing psychopathy. Investigating the 'industry' of psychiatry and its treatment, he encounters Bob Hare (of the eponymous Checklist); a prisoner at Broadmoor who claims he pretended to be a psychopath to evade a custodial sentence, and now can't convince his doctors that he's sane; a conspiracy theorist who tries to convince survivors of the 7/7 attacks in London that there were no bombs; a corporate executive who specialises in mass redundancies; a doctor who prescribed massive doses of LSD for inmates of a psychiatric ward ... Some of these men (I think all his subjects are male) can definitely be classified as psychopaths, while others may be simply eccentric. And while Ronson interviews his subjects, and muses on his own anxiety (he says at one point that anxiety is effectively the opposite of psychopathy), he's also interrogating the whole idea of 'madness' -- mental disorder, mental illness and the extremes of human nature -- and whether deviation from some imagined 'normal' is something that needs to be treated as a disorder. On the one hand, some people diagnosed as psychopaths are extremely dangerous to other humans, emotionally or physically or socially: on the other hand, the vast increase in prescriptions of psychiatric drugs seems a disproportionate response to behaviours that would generally be regarded as more or less normal. ('Normal.')
This was an entertaining read (Ronson is an extremely funny writer) but unnerving in places. It's a truism that the rich and privileged will get away with behaviour that would land a poorer person, one without connections, in prison or in a secure unit. Unfortunately, it's all too easy to apply labels like 'psychopath' to the movers and shakers of the world -- politicians, business tycoons, media personalities. Their achievements symbolise success, and their confidence and self-assurance are seen as goals to strive for. And meanwhile, the rest of us struggle towards 'normality', with no very clear idea of what it might look like, while the 'madness industry' regularly expands its definitions of disorder to maximise profit and power.
Fulfils the 'Humo[u]r' category of the 2022 Nonfiction Reading Challenge.
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