"Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry" (Riverhead: 2011) By Jon Ronson.
The other day I went to a meeting of the Classic Book Group at a bookstore here in Portland. It was on two of Lewis Carroll's books. The meeting seemed to be just like the tea party that Alice encountered in "Alice In Wonderland". Even the Mad Hatter was there along with the Red Queen and the Dormouse. I wrote this meeting up in another blog, ZebraReader's Getting Healthier.
The reason I brought it up is that Jon Ronson's book is like falling down a rabbit hole but in this case the mental health industry and entered a world of the psychopath. Make no mistake, Ronson is Alice as he tries to make sense of what a psychopath is and the reaction of the mental health land to this very odd classification of the human being. The more he tried to understand the psychopath the more he did not understand it although he met so many people who thought they did understand. They didn't and although a few had a strong inkling. So many made some serious mistakes with very tragic results.
I first heard about this book in an interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I was fascinated with the author and the exchange between him and Jon Stewart who read the book. I wanted to read the book and I found it in the small library across the street from my apartment. I checked it out on a Thursday and did not put it down until yesterday, three days later. It is a fascinating, twisting and illogical journey about the most oddest and dangerous of the people in human population. They are not all in our prisons either. Some of them are world leaders and on Wall Street.
I heard the fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, on the new BBC series respond to a police officer when she called him a psychopath that he was not a psychopathy but a highly functioning sociopath. He told her: "Know your terms." This book really does not make much of a distinction between sociopath and psychopath except to say that a psychopath is born that way while a sociopath is created by his or her environment. There are no other difference. There has been suspicions on my part that some people that I have known were psychopaths. I have not changed my mind but now I have more facts in these beliefs. There is a test that many professionals use that is explained in the book. It is very interesting list or characteristics.
The book is absorbing because you follow the author's discoveries and thought processes as he tries to understand what is involved in trying to pinpoint who is a psychopath and who is not. The author becomes more compassionate when he sees that many people are not capable of the feelings many of us are and that the psychopath copy our reactions so they can fit in the society. When they see a picture of a person with severe facial injuries they are repulsed and upset as the normal person is. They are unmoved and even excited. As I said, there are many signs one can tell who is a psychopath and who is not.
Ronson felt like a detective as he sought to understand this situation. They are often the force for our mysteries and drive many of us to seek answers to the problems they pose. They are more of a part in our lives and culture than we realize. Of course, most of us know them as the worst of the criminals, the serial killers and rapists.
Ronson is most known for writing the book that the movie, "The Men who Stare at Goats" is based on. He is full of anxiety and even worried that he was a psychopath at an early point of his investigation. He was told in no uncertain terms that if you have to ask that question, you are no psychopath. I really learned a lot about many things about the mental health field and not just psychopaths. We as human beings don't know all that much about mental illness and the different aspects of human behavior especially the psychopath.
