The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (34 page)

Read The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry Online

Authors: Jon Ronson

Tags: #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #Psychopathology, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Popular Culture.; Bisacsh, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Psychopaths, #General, #Mental Illness, #Biography & Autobiography, #Social Psychology, #History.; Bisacsh, #History

BOOK: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
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(My son Joel had been doing a bit of that lately, too, by the way: creating an avatar that looked like a monstrous caricature of me. I also felt that it was not a genuine joke but an expression of his dislike and disrespect for me. Actually, that’s not true. I thought it was a joke.)
25th August 2009
Volley ball today. Later interacting with fellow patients and staff appropriately.
 
Then there were the conclusions.
Opinion
The issue is entirely dangerousness. He is not unintelligent. He has remained clean all along. If he goes out and commits a further offence he will get IPP [indeterminate sentence for public protection] with a very long tariff—there is no doubt about that whatsoever and he must be told that, which I forgot to do.
I would recommend absolute discharge. I think the evidence is that his mental disorder is neither of a nature or degree which makes it appropriate for him to be treated in a psychiatric hospital any longer. I do not think he needs to be detained in the interest of his health, safety, or for the protection of others. I do not consider he is dangerous.
 
“The thing is, Jon,” said Tony, as I looked up from the papers, “what you’ve got to realize, is everyone is a bit psychopathic. You are. I am.” He paused. “Well, obviously
I
am,” he said.
“What will you do now?” I asked.
“Maybe move to Belgium,” he said. “There’s this woman I fancy. But she’s married. I’ll have to get her divorced.”
“Well, you know what they say about psychopaths,” I said.
“We’re
manipulative
!” said Tony.
 
 
The nurse who earlier had cryptically told me of his strong opinions about Tony came over.
“So?” I said.
“It’s the right decision,” he said. “Everyone thinks he should be out. He’s a good guy. His crime was horrible, and it was right that he was locked away for a long time, but he lost years of his life to Broadmoor and he shouldn’t have.”
“Does everyone feel that way?” I asked. “Even Professor Maden?”
I looked over at him. I thought he might seem disappointed, or even worried, but in fact he looked delighted. I wandered over.
“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.”
I looked over at Tony. I thought for a second that he was crying. But he wasn’t. He was just standing there.
“Even if you don’t accept those criticisms of Bob Hare’s work,” Professor Maden continued, “it’s obvious, if you look at his checklist, you can get a high score by being impulsive and irresponsible or by coldly planning to do something. So very different people end up with the same score.” He paused. “One needs to be careful about Tony’s endearing qualities though—many people with very damaged personalities have charisma, or some other quality that draws people in.”
“What do you think will happen to him?” I asked.
“His destiny is in his own hands.” He shrugged.
 
 
Tony’s destiny, as it turned out, was not in his own hands. He was indeed released from Broadmoor, but when he called me a few months later, he was, he said, “out of the frying pan and into the fire. They’ve sent me to Bethlem, Jon, formally known as Bedlam, and they don’t seem to be very keen to let me out.”
Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.
“When I say out of the frying pan and into the fire, I mean it,” Tony continued. “The other night someone actually tried to set the ward on fire.”
“How do you spend your days?” I asked him.
“I sit here doing fucking nothing,” he replied. “Getting fat on takeaways.”
“What are your new neighbors like?” I asked. “They can’t be as intimidating as the Stockwell Strangler and the Tiptoe Through the Tulips Rapist, right?”
“They’re
way
worse. There’s some real head cases here.”
“Like who?”
“Tony Ferrera. Look him up. You’ll find him a real piece of work. He was living in a crack house and he was out walking one day when he saw some woman. He raped her, stabbed her, set her on fire. He’s here. There’s Mark Gingell. Double rapist and whatnot . . .”
“Are any of them all right to hang out with?”
“No.”
“Are you scared?”
“Absolutely. If you’re not scared of these people there would really be something wrong with you.”
“Oh, speaking of which,” I said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you about my day with Toto Constant. He used to run a Haitian death squad. Now he’s in jail for mortgage fraud. When I met him, he kept saying he really wanted people to like him. He was very sensitive to people’s feelings about him. I thought, ‘That’s not very psychopathic.’ ”
“Right,” said Tony. “That just sounds sad.”
“So finally I said to him, ‘Isn’t that a weakness, wanting people to like you that much?’ And he said, ‘No, it isn’t! If you can get people to like you, you can manipulate them to do whatever you want them to.’”
“Jesus!” Tony said. “That’s a proper psychopath.”
He paused. “I didn’t even THINK of that!” he said. “My hand to God, that didn’t even cross my
mind
.”
In early January 2011, not long after he sent me an Xmas text (“Friends are the fruit cake of life—some nutty, some soaked in alcohol, some sweet”) Tony was released from Bethlem.
 
 
I think the madness business is filled with people like Tony, reduced to their maddest edges. Some, like Tony, are locked up in DSPD units for scoring too high on Bob’s checklist. Others are on TV at nine p.m., their dull, ordinary, non-mad attributes skillfully edited out, benchmarks of how we shouldn’t be. There are obviously a lot of very ill people out there. But there are also people in the middle, getting overlabeled, becoming nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it.
 
 
Bob Hare was passing through Heathrow, and so we met one last time.
“The guy I’ve been visiting at Broadmoor,” I said, stirring my coffee. “Tony. He has just been released.”
“Oh dear,” said Bob.
I looked at him.
“Well, he’s gone to Bethlem,” I said. “But I’m sure he’ll be out on the streets soon.” I paused. “His clinician was critical of you,” I said. “He said you talked about psychopaths almost as if they were a different species.”
“All the research indicates they’re not a different species,” said Bob. “There’s no evidence that they form a different species. So he’s misinformed on the literature. He should be up to date on the literature. It’s dimensional. He must know that. It’s dimensional.”
“Obviously it’s dimensional,” I said. “Your checklist scores anything from zero to forty. But he was referring to the
general
way you talk about psychopaths. . . .”
“Oh yeah,” said Bob, coldly. “I know.”
“That’s what he meant,” I said.
“It’s a
convenience
,” said Bob. “If we talk of someone with high blood pressure we talk of them as hypertensives. It’s a
term
. This guy doesn’t understand this particular concept. Saying ‘psychopathic’ is like saying ‘hypertensive.’ I could say, ‘Someone who scores at or above a certain point on the PCL-R Checklist.’ That’s tiresome. So I refer to them as psychopaths. And this is what I mean by psychopathy: I mean a score in the upper range of the PCL-R. I’m not sure how high it has to be. For research thirty is convenient, but it’s not absolute.”
Bob looked evenly at me. “I’m in the clear on this,” he said. There was a silence. “My gut feeling, though, deep down, is that maybe they are different,” he added. “But we haven’t established that yet.”
“I think my Broadmoor guy is a semi-psychopath,” I said.
Bob shrugged. He didn’t know Tony.
“So should we define him by his psychopathy or by his sanity?” I said.
“Well, the people who say that kind of thing,” Bob said, “and I don’t use this in a pejorative way, are very left-wing, left-leaning academics. Who don’t like labels. Who don’t like talking about differences between people.” He paused. “People say I define psychopathy in pejorative terms. How else can I do it? Talk about the
good
things? I could say he’s a good talker. He’s a good kisser. He dances very well. He has good table manners. But at the same time, he screws around and kills people. So what am I going to
emphasize
?”
Bob laughed, and I laughed, too.
“Ask a victim to look at the positive things and she’ll say, ‘I can’t. My eyes are swollen,’” Bob said.
Sure, Bob said, overlabeling occurs. But it’s being perpetrated by the drug companies. “Just wait and see what happens when they develop a drug for psychopathy. The threshold’s going to go down, to twenty-five, twenty . . .”
“I think being a psychopath-spotter turned me a bit power mad,” I said. “I think I went a bit power mad after doing your course.”
“Knowledge is power,” Bob said.
Then he shot me a pointed look. “Why haven’t
I
gone power mad, I wonder?” he said.
 
 
A few weeks later a package arrived. It was postmarked
Gothenburg, Sweden
. In the top corner someone had written:
Today twenty-one years have passed since The Event—now it is up to us!
I stared at it. Then I ripped it open.
Inside was a copy of
Being or Nothingness
. I turned it over in my hands, admiring its odd, clean beauty, the hole cut out of page 13, the cryptic words and patterns and drawings, the twenty-one blank pages.
Becoming a recipient of
Being or Nothingness
was a great surprise but not an entirely unexpected one. Petter had e-mailed me a few days earlier to tell me I’d soon receive something in the mail, and there would be a message for me in it, and I might not understand the message immediately, but it was an important one, and I should persevere, and perhaps even consult with my peers.
“It took me eighteen years to figure out how to execute stage 1,” he wrote, “so be patient, eventually you will figure out how to proceed. After tomorrow, I will not be able to communicate with you anymore. It is unfortunate, but that is the way it has to be.”
“If I e-mail you after tomorrow, you won’t respond?” I wrote back.
“You can e-mail but I can’t answer,” he replied. “It is just the way it has to be.”
And so I had a one-day window to fire as many questions at him as I could. I began by asking him why every other page in the book was blank.
“I’m surprised that no one has commented on this before but this is of course no coincidence,” he replied. “21 pages with text and 21 blank = 42 pages (being or nothingness). I thought it would be quite obvious.”
“All that intricate manual work—carefully cutting out the letters on page 13, and so on—did you do it alone or did you have help?”
“I do all the cut outs, the sticker attachment, insert of ‘the letter to professor Hofstadter’ myself,” he replied. “A rather tedious task.”
“What about the recipients?” I e-mailed. “Why were they chosen? What was the pattern?”
He didn’t reply right away. I stared at the in-box. Then it came: “There has to be a little mystery left,” he wrote.
And with that, he seemed to withdraw again, as if startled by his accidental candor.
“There is nothing more I can tell you,” he wrote. “When you receive the message, just follow your heart. As for direction, it will come to you, allow events to unfold. Now you are the chosen one, not me! You are a good person and I am sure that you will do the right thing whatever that is.”
The TV was on in the background. There was a show on about how Lindsay Lohan was “losing it Britney style.”

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