Read Online The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson - Free Book Online

Broadmoor.
    “Tony,” his e-mail read, “ did get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison.”
    He was sure of it, he said, and so were many other psychiatrists who’d met Tony during the past few years. It was now the consensus. Tony’s delusions—the ones he’d presented when he had been on remand in jail—just, in retrospect, didn’t ring true. They were too lurid, too clichéd. Plus the minute he got admitted to Broadmoor and he looked around and saw what a hellhole he’d got himself into, the symptoms just vanished.
    “Oh!” I thought, pleasantly surprised. “Good! That’s great!”
    I had liked Tony when I met him but I’d found myself feeling warier of him those past days so it was nice to have his story verified by an expert.
    But then I read Professor 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 e-mail. “Tony’s a psychopath ?” I thought.
    I didn’t know very much at all about psychopaths back then, only the story James had told me about Essi Viding back when I was solving the Being or Nothingness mystery: She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them. So I didn’t know much about psychopaths, but I did know this: it sounded worse.
    I e-mailed Professor Maden: “Isn’t that like that scene in the movie Ghost when Whoopi Goldberg pretends to be a psychic and then it turns out that she actually can talk to the dead?”
    “No,” he e-mailed back. “It isn’t like that Whoopi Goldberg scene. Tony faked mental illness. That’s when you have hallucinations and delusions. Mental illness comes and goes. It can get better with medication. Tony is a psychopath. That doesn’t come and go. It is how the person is.”
    Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you’d expect of a psychopath. Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.
    “There is no doubt about Tony’s diagnosis,” Professor Maden’s e-mail concluded.
    Tony rang again. I didn’t answer.
     
     
    “Classic psychopath!” said Essi Viding.
    There was a silence.
    “Really?” I asked.
    “Yeah!” she said. “How he turned up to meet you! It’s classic psychopath!”
    After I received my e-mail from Professor Maden, I called Essi to see if she’d meet with me. I had just told her about the moment I’d first seen Tony, how he had strolled purposefully across the Broadmoor Wellness Centre in a pin-striped suit, like someone from The Apprentice , his arm outstretched.
    “ That’s classic psychopath?” I asked.
    “I was visiting a psychopath at Broadmoor one time,” Essi said. “I’d read his dossier. He’d had a horrific history of raping women and killing them and biting their nipples off. It was just hideous, harrowing reading. Another psychologist said to me, ‘You’ll meet this guy and you’ll be totally charmed by him.’ I thought, ‘No way!’ And you know what? Totally! To the point that I found him a little bit fanciable. He was really good-looking, in peak physical condition, and had a very macho manner. It was raw sex appeal. I could completely understand why the women he had killed went with him.”
    “The idea that wearing a sharp suit might be an indication that the guy’s a psychopath,” I said. “Where does that come from?”
    “The Hare Checklist,” said Essi. “The PCL-R.”
    I looked blankly at her.
    “It’s a kind of psychopath test designed by a Canadian psychologist called Bob Hare,” she said. “It’s the gold standard for diagnosing psychopaths. The first item on the checklist is Glibness/ Superficial Charm.”
    Essi told me a little about Bob Hare’s