I’ve now read three books by Jon Ronson – the first two being So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and The Men Who Stare at Goats – but the first one I heard of was The Psychopath Test (2011). I seem to remember my brother reading it, or perhaps my friend Mel – either way, it appealed enough to start me hunting for other Ronson books, even if it took me a few more years to finally read this particular one.
Ronson has made a name for himself as someone who explores the quirky and unusual, often meeting and interviewing strange people in his unflappable, mild-mannered (and yet, simultaneously, rather anxious) way. Whether conspiracy theorists, Internet hate figures, or CIA operatives, he treats them with a Louis Theroux-esque genial bafflement. Even while he’s immersing himself in dangerous territory, he comes across rather like a calm observer – even, somehow, when he’s telling us how uncalm an observer he is.
But there can’t be many more dangerous people to meet than those who have been declared psychopaths and imprisoned in maximum security prisons. That’s where Ronson is – initially to interview somebody who alleges he faked his psychopathy to get a lighter prison sentence for GBH, and now can’t convince anybody that he isn’t mentally ill.
(Actually, this comes after a meandering and ultimately rather pointless anecdote about people being mysteriously sent strange little books – I suppose it’s intended to hook our attention, but I found those elements rather over-long and a bit of a distraction from the main theme.)
The Psychopath Test uses the prison encounter as our introduction to the titular test – developed by Robert Hare, it is essentially a checklist to determine whether or not somebody is a psychopath. There is naturally some discomfort in the world that something so drastic could be decided by this sort of test – ending, like a BuzzFeed quiz, with a ‘yes – psychopath’ or ‘no – normal’. Ronson explores the impact of the test, as well as analysing many of the people who have been criminally psychopathic.
And this is where I began to skip pages… I hadn’t really joined the dots, to realise what sort of descriptions would be included. I went in because I’m interested by the psychological aspects – though, unsurprisingly, Ronson also tells us what noted psychopaths have done. And reading about gruesome murders and sexual assaults isn’t really my jam… so, yes, I did end up darting through some of the pages.
More interesting to me were the sections this led to – about psychopaths in everyday life. Because many are not criminals – but simply can’t understand the concept of empathy. And Ronson speaks to those who have deduced that the percentage of psychopaths in the world (around 1%) becomes much larger when considering people in power – especially business leaders. It makes one think… not least because there’s one particular businessman who is rather prominent at the moment, and has never been known to show any noticeable sort of empathy.
More broadly, Ronson looks at the ways in which mental health diagnoses were determined – a frighteningly arbitrary council, seemingly – and how overdiagnosed things like childhood bipolar disorder have become. Not least because, accordingly to the experts Ronson speaks to, there’s no such thing as childhood bipolar disorder. These parts are where the subtitle – ‘a journey through the madness industry’ – becomes much more relevant, and I’d have valued more of a focus on this strand.
So, yes, there are many interesting sections in The Psychopath Test. The reason that it ended up being my least favourite of Ronson’s books isn’t simply because I’m so squeamish – it also felt like it cohered less than the other two I’ve read. His approach felt a little more scattergun, or less carefully edited together. The framing device for the book was (as I’ve said) not a winner for me, and the pacing of his journalistic elaborations doesn’t seem quite right.
The best of the three I’ve read is definitely So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which is also Ronson’s most recent book – suggesting that he’s getting better as he keeps writing.,
I haven’t had that much reading time today, and so today’s book is the shortest so far – under 70 pages. Which is unusual for Jon Ronson, who tends to write quite chunky things – filled with the surreal and extraordinary things he has witnessed or investigated. I’ve enjoyed several of his other books, and was particularly impressed by one that wasn’t particularly about the surreal so much as the unpleasantly common, in So, You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.