The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (5 page)

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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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“Petter Nordlund?” I thought.
Was Petter Nordlund the sole perpetrator? It seemed unlikely that such a successful man—a distinguished psychiatrist and a protein chemist, whatever that was, and an advisor to a biotech company specializing in therapeutic peptide discovery and development, whatever that was, was actually, in Hofstadter’s words, extremely obsessive and unbalanced.
But at seven that evening I was face-to-face with him, and it became quickly obvious that he was, indeed, the culprit. He was tall, in his fifties, with an attractive face, the air of an academic. He wore a tweed jacket. He stood in his doorway with his wife, Lily, at his side. Immediately, I liked him. He had a big, kind, cryptic smile on his face, and he was wringing his hands like a man possessed. I frequently wrung my hands in much the same way. I couldn’t help thinking that—in terms of getting much too obsessed about stupid things that didn’t matter—Petter and I were probably peas in a pod.
“I’m surprised you’re here,” Petter said.
“I hope it isn’t too unpleasant a surprise,” I said.
There was a short silence.
“If you study
Being or Nothingness
,” Petter said, “you will realize that you will never find out the author.”
“I think I know the author,” I said. “I think it’s you.”
“That’s easy to . . .” Petter trailed off. “That’s an easy guess,” he said.
“Is it a correct guess?” I asked.
“Of course not,” said Petter.
Petter (and Petter Nordlund is not his real name, nor is Lily her real name) bounced up and down on his feet a little. He was adopting the demeanor of a man who had received an unexpected visit from a neighbor just as something was boiling over on the stove. But I could tell his air of friendly distraction was a mask and underneath he was feeling quite overwhelmed by my arrival.
“Petter,” I said. “Let me at least ask you this. Why were those particular people chosen to receive the book?”
At this, Petter let out a small gasp. His face lit up. It was as if I had just asked him the most wonderful question that could be asked.
“Well . . . !” he said.
“How would you know who got the book?” Lily quickly interrupted, a sharpness in her voice. “You only translated it.”
And, with that, the moment passed. Petter’s face once again took on the mask of polite distraction.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I really am sorry, but I’m going to have to end. . . . My intention was just to say hi and go back. I have said more than I should. . . . You talk to my wife now.”
Petter backed away then, smiling, back into the shadows of his house, and Lily and I looked at each other.
“I’m going to Norway now,” she said. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye,” I said.
I flew back to London.
 
 
There was an e-mail waiting for me from Petter: “You seem like a nice man. The first step of the project will be over soon and it will be up to others to take it to the next level. Whether you will play a part I don’t know—but you will know. . . .”
“I would be glad to play a part if you give me some guidance as to how I might do so,” I wrote back.
“Well you see, that is the tricky part, knowing what to do,” he replied. “We call it life! Trust me, when your time comes you will know.”
Several weeks passed. My time didn’t come, or if it did come, I didn’t notice. Finally I telephoned Deborah and told her that I had solved the mystery.
 
 
I sat outside the Starbucks in the Brunswick Centre, Russell Square, Central London, and watched as Deborah turned the corner and walked fast toward me. She sat down and smiled.
“So?” she said.
“Well . . .” I said.
I recounted to her my exchanges with Levi Shand and Douglas Hofstadter, my meetings with Petter and Lily, and my subsequent e-mail correspondence. When I finished, she looked at me and said, “Is that
it
?”
“Yes!” I said. “It all happened because the author was—according to Hofstadter—a crackpot. Everyone was looking for the missing piece of the puzzle, and the missing piece turned out to be
that
.”
“Oh,” she said.
She looked disappointed.
“But it
isn’t
disappointing,” I said. “Can’t you see? It’s incredibly interesting. Aren’t you struck by how much
action
occurred simply because something went wrong with one man’s brain? It’s as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter’s brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere.”
The thought of this suddenly excited me hugely: Petter Nordlund’s craziness had had a huge influence on the world. It caused intellectual examination, economic activity, and formed a kind of community. Disparate academics, scattered across continents, had become intrigued and paranoid and narcissistic because of it. They’d met on blogs and message boards and had debated for hours, forming conspiracy theories about shadowy Christian organizations, etc. One of them had felt motivated to rendezvous with me in a Costa Coffee. I’d flown to Sweden in an attempt to solve the mystery. And so on.
I thought about my own overanxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality? I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.
Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?
I told Deborah all of this. She frowned.
“That
Being or Nothingness
thing,” she said. “Are you
sure
it was all because of one crazy Swedish man?”
2.
 
THE MAN WHO FAKED MADNESS
 
T
he
DSM-IV-TR
is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99. It sits on the shelves of psychiatry offices all over the world and lists every known mental disorder. There are currently 374 known mental disorders. I bought the book soon after I’d returned from my coffee with Deborah and leafed through it, searching for disorders that might compel the sufferer to try to achieve a position of power and influence over others. Surprisingly, this being such a vast book packed with so many disorders, including esoteric ones like Frotteurism (“rubbing against a non-consenting person in a public transportation vehicle while usually fantasizing an exclusive, caring relationship with the victim, most acts of frottage occur when the person is aged 12–15, after which there is a gradual decline in frequency”), there was nothing at all in there about psychopaths. Maybe there had been some backstage schism in the psychopath-defining world? The closest I could find was Narcissistic Personality Disorder, sufferers of which have “a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement,” are “preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success,” are “exploitative,” “lack empathy,” and require “excessive admiration,” and Antisocial Personality Disorder, which compels sufferers to be “frequently deceitful and manipulative in order to gain personal profit or pleasure (e.g., to obtain money, sex or power).”
“I could really be on to something,” I thought. “It really could be that many of our political and business leaders suffer from Antisocial or Narcissistic Personality Disorder and they do the harmful, exploitative things they do because of some mad striving for unlimited success and excessive admiration. Their mental disorders might be what rule our lives. This could be a really big story for me if I can think of a way to somehow prove it.”
I closed the manual.
“I wonder if
I’ve
got any of the 374 mental disorders,” I thought.
I opened the manual again.
And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.
 
 
General Anxiety Disorder was a given. But I hadn’t realized what a collage of mental disorders my whole life has been, from my inability to grasp sums (Arithmetic Learning Disorder) and the resultant tense homework situations with my mother (Parent-Child Relational Problem) right up to the present day, to that
very day
, in fact, which I had spent much of getting jittery with the coffee (Caffeine Induced Disorder) and avoiding work (Malingering). I suspect it was probably unusual to suffer from both General Anxiety Disorder
and
Malingering, unproductiveness tending to make me feel anxious, but there it was. I had both. Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being “pursued or declared a failure.”
All
my nightmares involve someone chasing me down the street while yelling, “You’re a failure!”
I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read the
DSM-IV
when you’re not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.
I knew from seeing stricken loved ones that many of the disorders listed—depression and schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder and so on—are genuine and overwhelming and devastating. But as L. J. Davis, reviewing the
DSM
in
Harper’s
, once wrote: “It may very well be that the frotteurist is a helpless victim in the clutches of his obsession, but it’s equally possible that he’s simply a bored creep looking for a cheap thrill.”
I had no idea what to make of it. I decided that if I was to go on a journey to try to spot mental disorders in high places, I needed a second opinion about the authenticity of the labels.
And so I asked around. Was there any organization out there dedicated to documenting the occasions psychiatrists had become overzealous in their labeling and definitely got it wrong? And that’s how I ended up having lunch three days later with Brian Daniels.
 
 
Brian is a Scientologist. He works for the British office of an international network of Scientologists called the CCHR (Citizens Commission on Human Rights), a crack team determined to prove to the world that psychiatrists are wicked and must be stopped. There are Scientologists like Brian in CCHR offices all over the world spending every day of their lives ferreting out stories aimed at undermining the psychiatry profession and getting individual psychiatrists shamed or struck off. Brian was incredibly biased, of course—Tom Cruise once said in a taped speech to Scientologists, “
We
are the authorities on the mind!”—but I wanted to hear about the times psychiatry had really got it wrong and nobody knew these stories better than he did.
I had found the idea of meeting with a leading Scientologist quite intimidating. I’d heard about their reputation for tirelessly pursuing people they considered the Church’s opponents. Would I accidentally say the wrong thing over lunch and find myself tirelessly pursued? But, as it turned out, Brian and I got on well. We shared a mistrust of psychiatry. Admittedly Brian’s was deep and abiding and I’d only had mine for a few days—largely the result of my disappointing self-diagnosis from the
DSM-IV
—but it gave us something to talk about over lunch.
Brian recounted to me his recent successes, his highest-profile one having occurred just a few weeks earlier when his office had managed to topple the hugely successful daytime UK TV psychiatrist Dr. Raj Persaud.
Dr. Raj had for a long time been a much-loved household name even though he had sometimes been criticized for stating the obvious in his newspaper columns. As the writer Francis Wheen recounted in
The Guardian
in 1996:
After Hugh Grant was arrested [for soliciting the prostitute Divine Brown in Los Angeles in 1995] Raj Persaud was asked by the Daily Mail to analyze Liz Hurley’s comments about the affair. He argued: “The fact that she is ‘still bewildered’ indicates that her shattered understanding of Hugh has yet to be rebuilt . . . Her statement that she is not in a ‘fit state to make any decisions about the future’ is ominous. It suggests that . . . the future is still an open book.”
A year ago, when the new-born baby Abbie Humphries was snatched from a hospital, the Daily Mail wondered what sort of woman could do such a thing. Luckily, Dr Persaud was on hand to explain that the kidnapper may have had some sort of “need for a baby.”
 
And so on. In late 2007, Dr. Persaud was at Brian’s instigation investigated by the General Medical Council for plagiarism. He had written an article attacking Scientology’s war on psychiatry, three hundred words of which appeared to be copied verbatim from an earlier attack on the Church by Stephen Kent, a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta in Canada. It seemed a pretty reckless act, knowing how eagle-eyed the Scientologists were reputed to be. Other incidents of plagiarism subsequently came to light and he was found guilty and suspended from practicing psychiatry for three months.

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