This is a longish item but worth
it for the insight it supplies on the problem of the psychopath who really is
normally sufficiently adjusted to at least function in society. You are going to come across them and they
will hurt you. That is their nature.
The best advice I can give anyone
is when you meet a new person and plan to establish a relationship with that
person, ask who his or her friends are.
Then establish the duration and closeness of those friendships. It is the nature of a psychopath to destroy
friendships, one way or another. Anyone
established in a community has friends he or she spends time with and maintains
those relationships for years. It is
pretty hard to fake that.
Nothing is foolproof, but that is
a pretty good warning.
Way more important is the
clinical observation made in regard to shock response, since discontinued. It goes a long way top proving the physical
nature of the ailment and likely shows the real road to curing it. The fact is that the response is completely
different, not slightly different, for the abnormal patient. It really is a physical flaw in the brain.
How to spot a psychopath
From Broadmoor to boardroom, they're everywhere, says Jon Ronson, in an
exclusive extract from his new book
The Psychopath Test
by Jon Ronson
'Becoming a psychopath-spotter had turned me power-crazed and a
bit psychopathic,' Ronson (pictured) says. Photograph: David Yeo for the
Guardian
It was visiting hour at Broadmoor psychiatric
hospital and patients began drifting in to sit with their loved
ones at tables and chairs that had been fixed to the ground. They were
mostly overweight, wearing loose, comfortable T-shirts and elasticated
sweatpants. There probably wasn't much to do in Broadmoor but eat. I wondered
if any of them were famous. Broadmoor was where they sent Ian Brady, the
Moors murderer, and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire
Ripper.
A man in his late 20s walked towards me. His arm was outstretched.
He wasn't wearing sweatpants. He was wearing a pinstripe jacket and trousers.
He looked like a young businessman trying to make his way in the world, someone
who wanted to show everyone that he was very, very sane. We shook hands.
"I'm Tony," he said. He sat down.
"So I hear you faked your way in here," I said.
"That's exactly right," Tony said.
He had the voice of a normal, nice, eager-to-help young man.
"I'd committed GBH," he said. "After they arrested me, I
sat in my cell and I thought, 'I'm looking at five to seven years.' So I asked
the other prisoners what to do. They said, 'Easy! Tell them you're mad! They'll
put you in a county hospital. You'll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses will
bring you pizzas.'"
"How long ago was this?" I asked.
"Twelve years ago," Tony said.
Tony said faking madness was the easy part, especially when you're 17
and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don't need to know how
authentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarise the character Dennis Hopper played
in the movie Blue
Velvet. That's what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist he liked
sending people love letters straight from his heart, and a love letter was a
bullet from a gun, and if you received a love letter from him, you'd go
straight to hell.
Plagiarising a well-known movie was a gamble, he said, but it paid off.
Lots more psychiatrists began visiting his cell. He broadened his repertoire to
include bits from Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange and
David Cronenberg's Crash.
Tony told the psychiatrists he liked to crash cars into walls for sexual
pleasure and also that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into
their eyes as they died would make him feel normal.
"Where did you get that one from?" I asked.
"A biography of Ted Bundy,"
Tony replied. "I found it in the prison library."
I nodded and thought it probably wasn't a great idea for
prison libraries to stock books about Ted Bundy.
"But they didn't send me to some cushy hospital," Tony
continued. "They sent me to bloody Broadmoor!"
Tony said the day he arrived at the dangerous and severe personality
disorder (DSPD) unit, he took one look at the place and realised he'd made a
spectacularly bad decision. He asked to speak urgently to psychiatrists.
"I'm not mentally ill," he told them. It is an awful lot harder, Tony
told me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're
crazy.
"When you decided to wear pinstripe to meet me," I said,
"did you realise the look could go either way?"
"Yes," said Tony, "but I thought I'd take my chances.
Plus most of the patients here are disgusting slobs who don't wash or change
their clothes for weeks on end and I like to dress well."
I looked around the Wellness Centre at the patients, scoffing chocolate
bars with their parents who, in contrast to their children, had made
a great effort to dress well.
"I know people are looking out for 'nonverbal clues' to my mental
state," Tony continued. "Psychiatrists love 'nonverbal clues'. They
love to analyse body movements. But that's really hard for the person who
is trying to act sane. How do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your
legs in a sane way?"
I suddenly felt self-conscious. Was I crossing my legs like a
journalist?
"So for a while you thought that being normal and polite would be
your ticket out of here?" I said.
"Right," he replied. "I volunteered to weed the hospital
garden. But they saw how well behaved I was and decided it meant I could
behave well only in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I
was mad."
I glanced suspiciously at Tony. I instinctively didn't believe him
about this. It seemed too catch-22, too darkly-absurd-by-numbers. But later
Tony sent me his files and, sure enough, it was right there. "Tony is
cheerful and friendly," one report stated. "His detention in
hospital is preventing deterioration of his condition."
After Tony read that, he said, he started a kind of war of non
co-operation. This involved staying in his room a lot. On the outside, Tony
said, not wanting to spend time with your criminally insane neighbours would be
a perfectly understandable position. But on the inside it demonstrates you're
withdrawn and have a grandiose sense of your own importance. In Broadmoor, not
wanting to hang out with insane killers is a sign of madness.
"The patient's behaviour is getting worse in Broadmoor," a
report written during Tony's non co-operation period stated. "He does
not engage [with other patients]."
Tony was funny and quite charming for most of my two hours with him,
but towards the end he got sadder. "I arrived here when I was 17," he
said. "I'm 29 now. I've grown up wandering the wards of Broadmoor. I've
got the Stockwell strangler on one side of me and the Tiptoe Through
The Tulips rapist on the other. These are supposed to be the best years of your
life. I've seen suicides. I saw a man take another man's eye out."
Tony said just being there can be enough to turn someone crazy. Then
one of the guards called out a word – "Time" – and with barely a
goodbye, Tony shot from the table and across the room. All the patients
did the same. It was a display of tremendous, extreme, acute good behaviour.
I didn't know what to think. Unlike the sad-eyed, medicated patients
all around us, Tony had seemed perfectly ordinary and sane. But what did I
know?
The next day I wrote to Professor Anthony Maden, the head clinician at
Tony's unit at Broadmoor – "I'm contacting you in the hope that you
may be able to shed some light on how true Tony's story might be."
A few days later a letter arrived from Tony. "This place is awful
at night-time, Jon," he wrote. "Words cannot express the
atmosphere."
Tony had included in the package copies of his files. So I got to read
the exact words he used to convince psychiatrists back in 1998 that he was
mentally ill. He'd really gone to town. He said the CIA was following him, that
he enjoyed taking things that belonged to other people because he liked the
idea of making them suffer, and that hurting people was better than sex.
I felt the ground shift under my feet. Suddenly I was a little on
the side of the psychiatrists. Tony must have come over as extremely creepy.
There was also a description of the crime he committed in 1997. The
victim was a homeless alcoholic called Graham who apparently made "an
inappropriate comment" about the 10-year-old daughter of one of Tony's
friends; something to do with the length of her dress. Tony told him to shut
up. Graham threw a punch. Tony retaliated by kicking him. Graham fell over. And
that would have been it – Tony later said – had Graham stayed silent. But
Graham said, "Is that all you've got?"
Tony "flipped". He kicked Graham seven or eight times in the
stomach and groin, returning later to kick him again. I remembered that list of
movies Tony said he plagiarised to demonstrate he was mentally ill. A Clockwork
Orange
My phone rang. I recognised the number. It was Tony. I didn't answer.
A week passed and then the email I had been waiting for arrived from Professor
Maden.
"Tony," it read, "did get here by faking mental illness
because he thought it would be preferable to prison."
"Oh!" I thought, pleasantly surprised. "Good! That's
great!"
But then I read Maden's next line: "Most psychiatrists who have
assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally
ill, but suffers from psychopathy."
I looked at the email. "Tony's a psychopath?" I thought.
I didn't know very much about psychopaths back then, but I did know
this: it sounded worse.
Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, Maden explained,
is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you'd expect
of a psychopath.
A psychologist friend, Essi Viding, agreed. "Classic
psychopath!" she said when I described Tony's pinstripe suit.
Tony rang again. I took a breath and picked up the phone.
"Jon?" he said. He sounded small and far away and echoey.
"Yes, hello, Tony," I said, in a no-nonsense way.
"I haven't heard from you in a while," he said.
"Professor Maden says you're a psychopath," I said.
Tony exhaled, impatiently. "I'm not a psychopath," he said.
"How do you know?" I asked.
"They say psychopaths can't feel remorse," said Tony. "I
feel lots of remorse. But when I tell them I feel remorse, they say psychopaths
pretend to be remorseful when they're not. Trying to prove you're not a
psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you're not mentally ill."
"How did they diagnose you?" I asked.
"They give you a psychopath test," said Tony. "The
Robert Hare Checklist. They assess you for 20 personality traits.
Superficial charm. Proneness to boredom. Lack of empathy. Lack of remorse.
Grandiose sense of self-worth. That sort of thing. For each one they score you
a 0, 1 or 2. If your total score is 30 or more out of 40, you're a psychopath.
That's it. You're doomed. You're labelled a psychopath for life. They say
you can't change. You can't be treated. You're a danger to society. And then
you're stuck somewhere like this."
It was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who first
suggested, early in the 19th century, that there was a madness that didn't
involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it "manie sans
délire" – insanity without delusions. He said sufferers appeared normal on
the surface, but they lacked impulse controls and were prone to outbursts of
violence. It wasn't until 1891, when the German doctor JLA Koch published
his bookDie Psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten, that it got its name:
psychopathy.
The consensus from the beginning was that only 1% of humans had it, but
the chaos they caused was so far-reaching, it could actually remould society.
And so the urgent question became, how could psychopaths be cured?
In the late 1960s, a young Canadian psychiatrist believed he had the
answer. His name was Elliott Barker and he had visited radical therapeutic
communities around the world, including nude psychotherapy sessions occurring
under the tutelage of an American psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim.
Clients, mostly California free-thinkers and movie stars, would sit naked in a
circle and dive headlong into a 24-hour emotional and mystical rollercoaster
during which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess their
innermost fears. Barker worked at a unit for psychopaths inside the Oak Ridge hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario
And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government
to obtain a large batch of LSD, hand-picked a group of psychopaths, led them
into what he named the "total encounter capsule", a small room
painted bright green, and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to
be a radical milestone: the world's first ever marathon nude LSD-fuelled
psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.
Barker's sessions lasted for epic 11-day stretches. There were no
distractions – no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a
perpetual discussion (at least 100 hours every week) of their feelings. Much
like Bindrim's sessions, the psychopaths were encouraged to go to their rawest
emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies
of forbidden sexual longing for each other, even if they were, in the words of
an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, "in a state of arousal while
doing so".
My guess is that this would have been a more enjoyable experience
within the context of a Palm Springs
Barker watched it all from behind a one-way mirror and his early
reports were gloomy. The atmosphere inside the capsule was tense. Psychopaths
would stare angrily at each other. Days would go by when nobody would exchange
a word. But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected began
to happen.
The transformation was captured in an incredibly moving film. These
tough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to care
for one another inside the capsule.
We see Barker in his office, and the look of delight on his face is
quite heartbreaking. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even telling
their parole boards not to consider them for release until after they've
completed their therapy. The authorities are astonished.
Back home in London
Then I learned that two researchers had in the early 90s undertaken a
detailed study of the long-term recidivism rates of psychopaths who'd been
through Barker's programme and let out into society. In regular circumstances,
60% of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to reoffend.
What percentage of their psychopaths had? As it turned out: 80%.
The capsule had made the psychopaths worse.
"They had psychopaths naked and talking about
their feelings!" Bob Hare laughed, shaking his head at the idealism
of it all. It was an August evening and we were drinking in a hotel bar in
rural Pembrokeshire, west Wales
In the mid-60s, Hare was working as a prison psychologist in Vancouver
The difference in the responses stunned Hare. The non-psychopathic
volunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born from
terrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painful
electric shock were just the penance they deserved. They were, Hare noted,
scared.
"And the psychopaths?" I asked.
"They didn't break a sweat," said Hare. "Nothing."
The tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that
should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of
fear to the central nervous system, wasn't functioning as it should. It was an
enormous breakthrough for Hare, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths
were different from regular brains.
He was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time, the
psychopaths knew exactly how much pain they'd be in, and still: nothing. Hare
learned something that others wouldn't for years: psychopaths were likely
to reoffend. "They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock, even
when the pain had occurred just moments before," Hare said. "So
what's the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms
of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them."
He did another experiment, the startle reflex test, in which
psychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, such
as crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and when they least expected
it Hare would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. The
non-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remain
comparatively serene.
Hare knew that we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we're on
the edge of our seats anyway. But if we're engrossed by something, a crossword
puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this
Hare deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces
they aren't horrified. They're absorbed.
Thrilled by his findings, Hare sent them to Science magazine.
"The editor returned them unpublished," he said. "He
wrote, 'Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your paper
very odd. Those EEGs couldn't have come from real people.'"
Then, disastrously for Hare, electric shocks were outlawed in the early
70s. He was forced to change tack. How could psychopaths be rooted out in a
more hands-off way? In 1975 he organised a conference on the subject, so
experts could pool their observations on the minutiae of psychopaths'
behaviour, the verbal and non-verbal tics. Were there patterns? Did they
involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase? Their conclusions became the basis
for his now-famous 20-point Hare PCL-R . Which was this:
Item 1 Glibness/superficial charm
Item 2 Grandiose sense of self-worth
Item 3 Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
Item 4 Pathological lying
Item 5 Cunning/manipulative
Item 6 Lack of remorse or guilt
Item 7 Shallow affect
Item 8 Callous/lack of empathy
Item 9 Parasitic lifestyle
Item 10 Poor behavioural controls
Item 11 Promiscuous sexual behaviour
Item 12 Early behaviour problems
Item 13 Lack of realistic long-term goals
Item 14 Impulsivity
Item 15 Irresponsibility
Item 16 Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
Item 17 Many short-term marital relationships
Item 18 Juvenile delinquency
Item 19 Revocation of conditional release
Item 20 Criminal versatility
Hare said if he were to score himself either 0, 1 or 2 on each item of
his checklist, he'd probably get a four or a five out of the possible 40. Tony
in Broadmoor had told me that on the three occasions they scored him, he got
around a 29 or a 30.
Over the three-day course in Wales
My mind drifted to what I could do with my new powers. If I'm being
honest, it didn't cross my mind to become some kind of great crime fighter,
philanthropically dedicated to making society a safer place. Instead, I made a
mental list of all the people who over the years had crossed me and wondered
which of them I might be able to expose as having psychopathic character
traits. Top of the list was AA Gill, who had
always been very rude about my television documentaries and had written a
restaurant column in which he admitted
to killing a baboon on safari.
"Item 8 Callous/lack of empathy," I thought, and smiled
to myself.
After the conference, though, Hare seemed introspective. He said,
almost to himself, "I shouldn't have done my research just in
prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well."
"But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad as
serial-killer psychopaths," I said.
"Serial killers ruin families," shrugged Hare.
"Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They
ruin societies."
It wasn't only Hare who believed that a disproportionate number of
psychopaths can be found in high places. Over the following months, I spoke to
scores of psychologists who all said the same. Everyone in the field seemed to
regard psychopaths in this same way: inhuman, relentlessly wicked forces,
whirlwinds of malevolence, forever harming society but impossible to
identify unless you're trained in the subtle art of spotting them, as
I now was.
I met an American CEO, Al Dunlap, formerly of the Sunbeam Corporation,
who redefined a great many of the psychopath traits to me as
"business positives": Grandiose sense of self-worth?
"You've got to believe in yourself." (As he told me this, he
was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself.) Cunning/manipulative?
"That's leadership."
But I became incredibly disappointed whenever Dunlap said things to me
that were reasonable. There had been – he swore – no early behavioural problems
or juvenile delinquency: "I was a focused, serious kid. In
school I was always trying to achieve." And he had a loyal wife of 41
years. There were no rumours of affairs. This would score him a zero on items
17 and 11: many short-term marital relationships, and promiscuous sexual
behaviour.
Becoming a psychopath-spotter had turned me power-crazed and a bit
psychopathic. I was starting to see the checklist as an intoxicating weapon
that was capable of inflicting terrible damage if placed in the wrong hands. And
I was beginning to suspect that my hands might be the wrong hands.
I met up with Hare again. "It's quite a power you bestow upon
people," I said. "What if you've created armies of people who spot
psychopaths where there are none, witchfinder generals of the
psychopath-spotting world?"
There was a silence.
"I do worry about the checklist being misused," Hare said.
"Who misuses it?" I asked.
"Over here, you have your DSPD programme," he said.
"That's where my friend Tony is," I said. "The DSPD
unit at Broadmoor."
Two years had passed since I'd first met Tony in Broadmoor. I hadn't
heard from him in months, and then out of the blue he called.
"Jon!" he said. He sounded excited. "There's going to be
a tribunal. I want you to come. As my guest."
"Ah," I said, trying to sound pleased for him. Tony was
forever pushing for tribunals, year after year, for the 14 years he had
been inside Broadmoor's DSPD unit. His optimism was tireless. But the outcome
was always the same. They'd come to nothing.
Journalists hardly ever made it to a DSPD unit and I was curious to see
inside. According to Maden, the chief clinician at Tony's unit, it wouldn't
exist without Hare's psychopath check-list. Tony was there because he had
scored high on it, as had all 300 DSPD patients. The official line was
that these were places to treat psychopaths with a view to one day sending
them back out into the world. But the widespread theory was the whole thing was
in fact a scheme to keep psychopaths locked up for life.
The unit was a clean, bland, modern, calmingly pine-coloured fortress.
Nurses and security guards came over to ask me who I was. I said
I was a friend of Tony's.
"Oh, Tony," one nurse said. "I know Tony."
"What do you think of Tony?" I asked him.
"I do have strong thoughts about Tony," he said, "but it
would not be appropriate for me to tell you what they are."
"Are your thoughts about Tony strongly positive or strongly
negative?" I asked.
He looked at me as if to say, "I am not telling you."
And then it was time. We entered the tribunal room.
The hearing lasted all of five minutes, one of which involved the
magistrates telling me that if I reported the details of what happened
inside the room, I would be imprisoned. So I won't. But the upshot –
Tony was to be free.
He looked as if he'd been hit by a bus. In the corridor his barrister
congratulated him. The process would take three months – either to
find him a bed for a transitional period in a medium-secure unit, or
to get him straight out on to the street – but there was no doubt.
He smiled, hobbled over to me, and handed me a sheaf of papers.
They were independent reports, written for the tribunal by various
psychiatrists who'd been invited to assess him. They told me things
I didn't know about Tony: how his mother had been an alcoholic and
used regularly to beat him up and kick him out of the house; how most of
her boyfriends were drug addicts and criminals; how he was expelled from school
for threatening his dinner lady with a knife; how he was sent to special schools
but ran away because he missed his mother.
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in
Broadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being born
into a stable, rich family.
I spotted Professor Maden. I thought he might seem disappointed, 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 grey 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,"
Maden said. "He never takes responsibility, everything is somebody
else's fault. But he's not a serious, predatory offender. He can be a bully in
the right circumstances, but 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."
"The thing is, Jon," Tony said as I looked up from the
papers, "what you've got to realise 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
"Well, you know what they say about psychopaths," I said.
"We're manipulative!" said Tony .
• This is an edited extract from The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson,
published by Picador on 3 June.
Jon Ronson wears (main picture, left to right): T-shirt, by
amesbrosshop.com. Dead Man Suit, by agiandsam.com; T-shirt, by Mantaray, from
debenhams.com; Shoes, by hebymango.com. Suit, by huntsman.com; Tie, by aspinaloflondon.com;
Cufflinks, culietta.com; Shoes, by Jeff Banks at debenhams.com. Linen suit and
floral shirt, both by Jeff Banks at debenhams.com; Cravat, by
aspinaloflondon.com; Shoes, by tandfslackshoemakers.com. Styling: Tara Sugar.
Hair and make-up: Laurey Simmons.
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