This is a longish item but worthit for the insight it supplies on the problem of the psychopath who really isnormally sufficiently adjusted to at least function in society. You are going to come across them and theywill hurt you. That is their nature.
The best advice I can give anyoneis when you meet a new person and plan to establish a relationship with thatperson, ask who his or her friends are. Then establish the duration and closeness of those friendships. It is the nature of a psychopath to destroyfriendships, one way or another. Anyoneestablished in a community has friends he or she spends time with and maintainsthose relationships for years. It ispretty hard to fake that.
Nothing is foolproof, but that isa pretty good warning.
Way more important is theclinical observation made in regard to shock response, since discontinued. It goes a long way top proving the physicalnature of the ailment and likely shows the real road to curing it. The fact is that the response is completelydifferent, 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 anexclusive extract from his new book
The Psychopath Test
by Jon Ronson
'Becoming a psychopath-spotter had turned me power-crazed and abit psychopathic,' Ronson (pictured) says. Photograph: David Yeo for theGuardian
It was visiting hour at Broadmoor psychiatrichospital and patients began drifting in to sit with their lovedones at tables and chairs that had been fixed to the ground. They weremostly overweight, wearing loose, comfortable T-shirts and elasticatedsweatpants. There probably wasn't much to do in Broadmoor but eat. I wonderedif any of them were famous. Broadmoor was where they sent Ian Brady, theMoors 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, someonewho 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, Isat in my cell and I thought, 'I'm looking at five to seven years.' So I askedthe other prisoners what to do. They said, 'Easy! Tell them you're mad! They'llput you in a county hospital. You'll have Sky TV and a PlayStation. Nurses willbring 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 17and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don't need to know howauthentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarise the character Dennis Hopper playedin the movie BlueVelvet. That's what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist he likedsending people love letters straight from his heart, and a love letter was abullet from a gun, and if you received a love letter from him, you'd gostraight 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 toinclude bits from Hellraiser, A Clockwork Orange andDavid Cronenberg's Crash.Tony told the psychiatrists he liked to crash cars into walls for sexualpleasure and also that he wanted to kill women because he thought looking intotheir 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 forprison libraries to stock books about Ted Bundy.
"But they didn't send me to some cushy hospital," Tonycontinued. "They sent me to bloody Broadmoor!"
Tony said the day he arrived at the dangerous and severe personalitydisorder (DSPD) unit, he took one look at the place and realised he'd made aspectacularly bad decision. He asked to speak urgently to psychiatrists."I'm not mentally ill," he told them. It is an awful lot harder, Tonytold me, to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you'recrazy.
"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 changetheir clothes for weeks on end and I like to dress well."
I looked around the Wellness Centre at the patients, scoffing chocolatebars with their parents who, in contrast to their children, had madea great effort to dress well.
"I know people are looking out for 'nonverbal clues' to my mentalstate," Tony continued. "Psychiatrists love 'nonverbal clues'. Theylove to analyse body movements. But that's really hard for the person whois trying to act sane. How do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross yourlegs in a sane way?"
I suddenly felt self-conscious. Was I crossing my legs like ajournalist?
"So for a while you thought that being normal and polite would beyour ticket out of here?" I said.
"Right," he replied. "I volunteered to weed the hospitalgarden. But they saw how well behaved I was and decided it meant I couldbehave well only in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved Iwas mad."
I glanced suspiciously at Tony. I instinctively didn't believe himabout this. It seemed too catch-22, too darkly-absurd-by-numbers. But laterTony sent me his files and, sure enough, it was right there. "Tony ischeerful and friendly," one report stated. "His detention inhospital is preventing deterioration of his condition."
After Tony read that, he said, he started a kind of war of nonco-operation. This involved staying in his room a lot. On the outside, Tonysaid, not wanting to spend time with your criminally insane neighbours would bea perfectly understandable position. But on the inside it demonstrates you'rewithdrawn and have a grandiose sense of your own importance. In Broadmoor, notwanting to hang out with insane killers is a sign of madness.
"The patient's behaviour is getting worse in Broadmoor," areport written during Tony's non co-operation period stated. "He doesnot 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," hesaid. "I'm 29 now. I've grown up wandering the wards of Broadmoor. I'vegot the Stockwell strangler on one side of me and the Tiptoe ThroughThe Tulips rapist on the other. These are supposed to be the best years of yourlife. 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. Thenone of the guards called out a word – "Time" – and with barely agoodbye, Tony shot from the table and across the room. All the patientsdid the same. It was a display of tremendous, extreme, acute good behaviour.
I didn't know what to think. Unlike the sad-eyed, medicated patientsall around us, Tony had seemed perfectly ordinary and sane. But what did Iknow?
The next day I wrote to Professor Anthony Maden, the head clinician atTony's unit at Broadmoor – "I'm contacting you in the hope that youmay 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 awfulat night-time, Jon," he wrote. "Words cannot express theatmosphere."
Tony had included in the package copies of his files. So I got to readthe exact words he used to convince psychiatrists back in 1998 that he wasmentally ill. He'd really gone to town. He said the CIA was following him, thathe enjoyed taking things that belonged to other people because he liked theidea 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 onthe side of the psychiatrists. Tony must have come over as extremely creepy.
There was also a description of the crime he committed in 1997. Thevictim was a homeless alcoholic called Graham who apparently made "aninappropriate comment" about the 10-year-old daughter of one of Tony'sfriends; something to do with the length of her dress. Tony told him to shutup. Graham threw a punch. Tony retaliated by kicking him. Graham fell over. Andthat would have been it – Tony later said – had Graham stayed silent. ButGraham said, "Is that all you've got?"
Tony "flipped". He kicked Graham seven or eight times in thestomach and groin, returning later to kick him again. I remembered that list ofmovies Tony said he plagiarised to demonstrate he was mentally ill. A ClockworkOrange
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 ProfessorMaden.
"Tony," it read, "did get here by faking mental illnessbecause he thought it would be preferable to prison."
"Oh!" I thought, pleasantly surprised. "Good! That'sgreat!"
But then I read Maden's next line: "Most psychiatrists who haveassessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentallyill, 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 knowthis: 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 expectof a psychopath.
A psychologist friend, Essi Viding, agreed. "Classicpsychopath!" 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. "Ifeel lots of remorse. But when I tell them I feel remorse, they say psychopathspretend to be remorseful when they're not. Trying to prove you're not apsychopath 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. "TheRobert 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 youa 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 sayyou can't change. You can't be treated. You're a danger to society. And thenyou're stuck somewhere like this."
It was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who firstsuggested, early in the 19th century, that there was a madness that didn'tinvolve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it "manie sansd̩lire" Рinsanity without delusions. He said sufferers appeared normal onthe surface, but they lacked impulse controls and were prone to outbursts ofviolence. It wasn't until 1891, when the German doctor JLA Koch publishedhis bookDie Psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten, that it got its name:psychopathy.
The consensus from the beginning was that only 1% of humans had it, butthe 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 theanswer. His name was Elliott Barker and he had visited radical therapeuticcommunities around the world, including nude psychotherapy sessions occurringunder the tutelage of an American psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim.Clients, mostly California free-thinkers and movie stars, would sit naked in acircle and dive headlong into a 24-hour emotional and mystical rollercoasterduring which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess theirinnermost 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 governmentto obtain a large batch of LSD, hand-picked a group of psychopaths, led theminto what he named the "total encounter capsule", a small roompainted bright green, and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly tobe a radical milestone: the world's first ever marathon nude LSD-fuelledpsychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.
Barker's sessions lasted for epic 11-day stretches. There were nodistractions – no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only aperpetual discussion (at least 100 hours every week) of their feelings. Muchlike Bindrim's sessions, the psychopaths were encouraged to go to their rawestemotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasiesof forbidden sexual longing for each other, even if they were, in the words ofan internal Oak Ridge report of the time, "in a state of arousal whiledoing so".
My guess is that this would have been a more enjoyable experiencewithin the context of a Palm Springs
Barker watched it all from behind a one-way mirror and his earlyreports were gloomy. The atmosphere inside the capsule was tense. Psychopathswould stare angrily at each other. Days would go by when nobody would exchangea word. But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected beganto happen.
The transformation was captured in an incredibly moving film. Thesetough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to carefor one another inside the capsule.
We see Barker in his office, and the look of delight on his face isquite heartbreaking. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even tellingtheir parole boards not to consider them for release until after they'vecompleted their therapy. The authorities are astonished.
Back home in London
Then I learned that two researchers had in the early 90s undertaken adetailed study of the long-term recidivism rates of psychopaths who'd beenthrough 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 abouttheir feelings!" Bob Hare laughed, shaking his head at the idealismof it all. It was an August evening and we were drinking in a hotel bar inrural 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-psychopathicvolunteers (theirs were crimes of passion, usually, or crimes born fromterrible poverty or abuse) steeled themselves ruefully, as if a painfulelectric 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 thatshould have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals offear to the central nervous system, wasn't functioning as it should. It was anenormous breakthrough for Hare, his first clue that the brains of psychopathswere different from regular brains.
He was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time, thepsychopaths knew exactly how much pain they'd be in, and still: nothing. Harelearned something that others wouldn't for years: psychopaths were likelyto reoffend. "They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock, evenwhen the pain had occurred just moments before," Hare said. "Sowhat's the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the termsof their parole? The threat has no meaning for them."
He did another experiment, the startle reflex test, in whichpsychopaths and non-psychopaths were invited to look at grotesque images, suchas crime-scene photographs of blown-apart faces, and when they least expectedit Hare would let off an incredibly loud noise in their ear. Thenon-psychopaths would leap with astonishment. The psychopaths would remaincomparatively serene.
Hare knew that we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we're onthe edge of our seats anyway. But if we're engrossed by something, a crosswordpuzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From thisHare deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart facesthey aren't horrified. They're absorbed.
Thrilled by his findings, Hare sent them to Science magazine.
"The editor returned them unpublished," he said. "Hewrote, 'Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your papervery odd. Those EEGs couldn't have come from real people.'"
Then, disastrously for Hare, electric shocks were outlawed in the early70s. He was forced to change tack. How could psychopaths be rooted out in amore hands-off way? In 1975 he organised a conference on the subject, soexperts could pool their observations on the minutiae of psychopaths'behaviour, the verbal and non-verbal tics. Were there patterns? Did theyinvoluntarily use giveaway turns of phrase? Their conclusions became the basisfor 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 ofhis checklist, he'd probably get a four or a five out of the possible 40. Tonyin Broadmoor had told me that on the three occasions they scored him, he gotaround 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 beinghonest, 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 amental list of all the people who over the years had crossed me and wonderedwhich of them I might be able to expose as having psychopathic charactertraits. Top of the list was AA Gill, who hadalways been very rude about my television documentaries and had written arestaurant column in which he admittedto killing a baboon on safari.
"Item 8 Callous/lack of empathy," I thought, and smiledto myself.
After the conference, though, Hare seemed introspective. He said,almost to himself, "I shouldn't have done my research just inprisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well."
"But surely stock-market psychopaths can't be as bad asserial-killer psychopaths," I said.
"Serial killers ruin families," shrugged Hare."Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. Theyruin societies."
It wasn't only Hare who believed that a disproportionate number ofpsychopaths can be found in high places. Over the following months, I spoke toscores of psychologists who all said the same. Everyone in the field seemed toregard psychopaths in this same way: inhuman, relentlessly wicked forces,whirlwinds of malevolence, forever harming society but impossible toidentify unless you're trained in the subtle art of spotting them, asI 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, hewas standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself.) Cunning/manipulative?"That's leadership."
But I became incredibly disappointed whenever Dunlap said things to methat were reasonable. There had been – he swore – no early behavioural problemsor juvenile delinquency: "I was a focused, serious kid. Inschool I was always trying to achieve." And he had a loyal wife of 41years. There were no rumours of affairs. This would score him a zero on items17 and 11: many short-term marital relationships, and promiscuous sexualbehaviour.
Becoming a psychopath-spotter had turned me power-crazed and a bitpsychopathic. I was starting to see the checklist as an intoxicating weaponthat was capable of inflicting terrible damage if placed in the wrong hands. AndI 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 uponpeople," I said. "What if you've created armies of people who spotpsychopaths where there are none, witchfinder generals of thepsychopath-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 DSPDunit at Broadmoor."
Two years had passed since I'd first met Tony in Broadmoor. I hadn'theard from him in months, and then out of the blue he called.
"Jon!" he said. He sounded excited. "There's going to bea tribunal. I want you to come. As my guest."
"Ah," I said, trying to sound pleased for him. Tony wasforever pushing for tribunals, year after year, for the 14 years he hadbeen inside Broadmoor's DSPD unit. His optimism was tireless. But the outcomewas always the same. They'd come to nothing.
Journalists hardly ever made it to a DSPD unit and I was curious to seeinside. According to Maden, the chief clinician at Tony's unit, it wouldn'texist without Hare's psychopath check-list. Tony was there because he hadscored high on it, as had all 300 DSPD patients. The official line wasthat these were places to treat psychopaths with a view to one day sendingthem back out into the world. But the widespread theory was the whole thing wasin 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 saidI 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 itwould not be appropriate for me to tell you what they are."
"Are your thoughts about Tony strongly positive or stronglynegative?" 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 themagistrates telling me that if I reported the details of what happenedinside 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 barristercongratulated him. The process would take three months – either tofind him a bed for a transitional period in a medium-secure unit, orto 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 variouspsychiatrists who'd been invited to assess him. They told me thingsI didn't know about Tony: how his mother had been an alcoholic andused regularly to beat him up and kick him out of the house; how most ofher boyfriends were drug addicts and criminals; how he was expelled from schoolfor threatening his dinner lady with a knife; how he was sent to special schoolsbut ran away because he missed his mother.
I wondered if sometimes the difference between a psychopath inBroadmoor and a psychopath on Wall Street was the luck of being borninto a stable, rich family.
I spotted Professor Maden. I thought he might seem disappointed, but infact he looked delighted. I wandered over.
"Ever since I went on a Bob Hare course, I've believed thatpsychopaths are monsters," I said. "They're just psychopaths – it'swhat defines them, it's what they are." I paused. "But isn't Tonykind of a semi-psychopath? A grey area? Doesn't his story prove that people inthe 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 theyare 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 somebodyelse's fault. But he's not a serious, predatory offender. He can be a bully inthe right circumstances, but doesn't set out to do serious harm for its ownsake. 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 thepapers, "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, byamesbrosshop.com. Dead Man Suit, by agiandsam.com; T-shirt, by Mantaray, fromdebenhams.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 andfloral shirt, both by Jeff Banks at debenhams.com; Cravat, byaspinaloflondon.com; Shoes, by tandfslackshoemakers.com. Styling: Tara Sugar.Hair and make-up: Laurey Simmons.
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