The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson

  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.

  Humiliatingly for Dr. Raj, the scrutinizer of celebrities’ personality disorders became the scrutinized.

  “Is Persaud a narcissist,” opined The Guardian, “or a man so plagued by self-doubt that he doesn’t obey the rules of academia because he doesn’t think he belongs in it?”

  Now he no longer appeared on TV or in the newspapers. Brian seemed quietly pleased with his success.

  “I’m interested in the idea,” I said to him, “that many of our leaders suffer from mental disorders. . . .”

  Brian raised his eyes slightly at the words “mental disorders.”

  “But first,” I said, “I wanted to make sure that I can depend upon those people who do the diagnoses. So, do you have anything big on the go at the moment that you believe will prove to me that psychiatrists cannot be trusted?”

  There was a silence.

  “Yes,” said Brian. “There’s Tony.”

  “Who’s Tony?” I asked.

  “Tony’s in Broadmoor,” said Brian.

  I looked at Brian.

  Broadmoor is Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. It was once known as Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. It was where they sent Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer, who killed three children and two teenagers in the 1960s; and Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who killed thirteen women in the 1970s, crept up behind them and hit them over the head with a hammer; and Kenneth Erskine, the Stockwell Strangler, who murdered seven elderly people in 1986; and Robert Napper, who killed Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in July 1992—stabbed her forty-nine times in front of her toddler son. Broadmoor is where they send the pedophiles and the serial killers and the child murderers, the ones who couldn’t help themselves.

  “What did Tony do?” I asked Brian.

  “He’s completely sane!” said Brian. “He faked his way in there! And now he’s stuck. Nobody will believe he’s sane.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “He was arrested years ago for something,” said Brian. “I think he beat someone up or something, and he decided to fake madness to get out of a prison sentence. He thought he’d end up in some cushy local hospital but instead they sent him to Broadmoor! And now he’s stuck! The more he tries to convince psychiatrists he’s not crazy, the more they take it as evidence that he is. He’s not a Scientologist or anything but we’re helping him with his tribunals. If you want proof that psychiatrists are nuts and they don’t know what they’re talking about and they make it up as they go along, you should meet Tony. Do you want me to try and get you into Broadmoor?”

  Was all this true? Was there really a sane man in Broadmoor? I automatically started thinking about what I’d do if I had to prove I was sane. I’d like to think that just being my normal, essentially sane self would be enough, but I’d probably behave in such an overly polite and helpful and competent manner I’d come across like a mad butler with panic in his eyes. Plus it turns out that when I’m placed in an insane environment, I tend to get almost instantly crazier, as evidenced by my recent shrieking of the word “YEAL!” onboard the Ryanair flight to Gothenburg.

  Did I want to meet Tony?

  “Okay,” I said.

  The Broadmoor visitors’ center was painted in the calming hues of a municipal leisure complex—all peach and pink and pine. The prints on the wall were mass-produced pastel paintings of French doors opening onto beaches at sunrise. The building was called the Wellness Centre.

  I had caught the train here from London. I began to yawn uncontrollably around Kempton Park. This tends to happen to me in the face of stress. Apparently dogs do it, too. They yawn when anxious.

  Brian picked me up at the station and we drove the short distance to the hospital. We passed through two cordons—“Do you have a mobile phone?” the guard asked me at the first. “Recording equipment? A cake with a hacksaw hidden inside it? A ladder?”—and then on through gates cut out of high-security fence after fence after fence.

  “I think Tony’s the only person in the whole DSPD unit to have been given the privilege of meeting people in the Wellness Centre,” Brian said as we waited.

  “What does DSPD stand for?” I asked.

  “Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder,” said Brian.

  There was a silence.

  “Is Tony in the part of Broadmoor that houses the most dangerous people?” I asked.

  “Crazy, isn’t it?” laughed Brian.

  Patients began drifting in to sit with their loved ones at tables and chairs that had been nailed to the ground. They all looked quite similar to each other, quite docile and sad-eyed.

  “They’re medicated,” whispered Brian.

  They were mostly overweight, wearing loose, comfortable T-shirts and elasticized sweatpants. There probably wasn’t much to do in Broadmoor but eat.

  I wondered if any of them were famous.

  They drank tea and ate chocolate bars from the dispenser with their visitors. Most were young, in their twenties, and their visitors were their parents. Some were older, and their partners and children had come to see them.

  “Ah! Here’s Tony now!” said Brian.

  I looked across the room. A man in his late twenties was walking toward us. He wasn’t shuffling like the others had. He was sauntering. His arm was outstretched. He wasn’t wearing sweatpants. He was wearing a pin-striped 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.

  And of course, as I watched him approach our table, I wondered if the pinstripe was a clue that he was sane or a clue that he wasn’t.

  We shook hands.

  “I’m Tony,” he said. He sat down.

  “So Brian says you faked your way in here,” I said.

  “That’s exactly right,” said Tony. />
  He had the voice of a normal, nice, eager-to-help young man.

  “I’d committed GBH [Grievous Bodily Harm],” he said. “After they arrested me, I sat in my cell and I thought, ‘I’m looking at five, 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.’ But they didn’t send me to some cushy hospital. They sent me to bloody BROADMOOR.”

  “How long ago was this?” I asked.

  “Twelve years ago,” said Tony.

  I involuntarily grinned.

  Tony grinned back.

  Tony said faking madness was the easy part, especially when you’re seventeen and you take drugs and watch a lot of scary movies. You don’t need to know how authentically crazy people behave. You just plagiarize the character Dennis Hopper played in the movie Blue Velvet. That’s what Tony did. He told a visiting psychiatrist that 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.

  Plagiarizing 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 the David Cronenberg movie Crash, in which people derive sexual pleasure from enacting car crashes. 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 Tony.

  “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.

  Brian sat next to us, chuckling wryly about the gullibility and inexactness of the psychiatry profession.

  “They took my word for everything,” Tony said.

  Tony said the day he arrived at Broadmoor he took one look at the place and realized he’d made a spectacularly bad decision. He urgently asked to speak 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.

  “I thought the best way to seem normal,” he said, “would be to talk to people normally about normal things like football and what’s on TV. That’s the obvious thing to do, right? I subscribe to New Scientist. I like reading about scientific breakthroughs. One time they had an article about how the U.S. Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives. So I said to a nurse, ‘Did you know that the U.S. Army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives?’ Later, when I read my medical notes, I saw they’d written, Thinks bees can sniff out explosives.”

  “When you decided to wear pinstripe to meet me,” I said, “did you realize 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. It was Sunday lunchtime and they looked like they were dressed for an old-fashioned Sunday lunch. The fathers were in suits, the mothers in neat dresses. One unfortunate woman, sitting a few tables away from me, had both her sons in Broadmoor. I saw her lean over and stroke their faces, one after the other.

  “I know people are looking out for ‘nonverbal clues’ to my mental state,” Tony continued. “Psychiatrists love ‘nonverbal clues.’ They love to analyze 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? And you know they’re really paying attention. So you get self-conscious. You try to smile in a sane way. But it’s just . . .” Tony paused. “It’s just . . . impossible.”

  I suddenly felt quite self-conscious about my own posture. Was I sitting like a journalist? 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 only behave well 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-bynumbers. But later on 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.”

  (It might seem strange that Tony was allowed to read his medical files, and allowed to pass them on to me, but that’s what happened. And, anyway, it was no stranger than the fact that the Scientologists had somehow got me inside Broadmoor, a place where journalists are almost always forbidden. How had they managed it so effortlessly? I had no idea. Maybe they possessed some special, mysterious in or maybe they were just very good at circumventing bureaucracy.)

  After Tony read that report, he said, he stopped being well behaved. He started a kind of war of noncooperation instead. This involved staying in his room a lot. He really wasn’t fond of hanging around with rapists and pedophiles anyway. It was unsavory and also quite frightening. On an earlier occasion, for instance, he had gone into the Stockwell Strangler’s room and asked for a cup of lemonade.

  “Of course! Take the bottle!” said the Stockwell Strangler.

  “Honestly, Kenny, a cup’s fine,” said Tony.

  “Take the bottle,” he said.

  “Really, I just want a cup,” said Tony.

  “TAKE THE BOTTLE!” hissed the Stockwell Strangler.

  On the outside, Tony said, not wanting to spend time with your criminally insane neighbors would be a perfectly understandable position. But on the inside it demonstrates you’re withdrawn and aloof and you 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 noncooperation period stated. “He does not engage [with other patients].”

  Then Tony devised a radical new scheme. He stopped talking to the staff, too. He realized that if you engage with therapy, it’s an indication you’re getting better, and if you’re getting better, they have the legal right to detain you, and so if he took no therapy at all, he couldn’t get better, he’d be untreatable, and they’d have to let him go. (As the law stands in the UK, you cannot indefinitely detain an “untreatable” patient if their crime was a relatively minor crime like GBH.)

  The problem was that at Broadmoor if a nurse sits next to you at lunch and makes small talk, and you make small talk back, that’s considered engaging with therapy. So Tony had to tell them all, “Will you sit on another table?”

  The psychiatrists realized it was a tactical ploy. They wrote in their reports that it proved him to be “cunning” and “manipulative” and also that he was suffering from “cognitive distortion” because he didn’t believe he was mad.

  Tony was funny and quite charming for most of my two hours with him, but toward the end he got sadder.

  “I arrived here when I was seventeen,” he said. “I’m twenty-nine now. I’ve grown up in Broadmoor, 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.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “With a piece of wood with a nail in it,�
� said Tony. “When the guy tried to put his eye back into the socket, I had to leave the room.”

  Tony said just being here can be enough to turn someone crazy. Then one of the guards called out a word—“Time”—and Tony shot from our table and across the room to the door that led back to his block. All the patients did the same. It was a display of tremendous, extreme, acute good behavior. Brian gave me a lift back to the station.

  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? Brian said it was open-and-shut. Every day Tony was in Broadmoor was a black day for psychiatry. The sooner they got him out, and Brian was determined to do everything he could, the better it would be.

  The next day I wrote to Professor Anthony Maden, the head clinician in 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”—and while I waited for a reply, I wondered why Scientology’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard, had first decided to create Brian’s organization, the CCHR. How did Scientology’s war with psychiatry begin? I called Brian.

  “You should try over at Saint Hill,” he said. “They’ll probably have some old documents relating to this.”