The Psychopath Test

by Jon Ronson

  “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 psychopath test. From the way she described it, it sounded quite odd. She said you can go on a course where Hare himself teaches you ways of stealthily spotting psychopaths by reading suspects’ body language and the nuances of their sentence construction, etc.

  “How old is Tony?” she asked.

  “Twenty-nine,” I said.

  “Well, good luck to Professor Maden,” she said. “I don’t think his offending days are over.”

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  Suddenly Essi seemed to me like a brilliant wine taster, identifying a rare wine through spotting the barely discernible clues. Or maybe she was like a clever vicar, believing wholeheartedly in something too imperceptible ever to prove.

  “Psychopaths don’t change,” she said. “They don’t learn from punishment. The best you can hope for is that they’ll eventually get too old and lazy to be bothered to offend. And they can seem impressive. Charismatic. People are dazzled. So, yeah, the real trouble starts when one makes it big in mainstream society.”

  I told Essi that I’d seen how Petter Nordlund’s crazy book had briefly messed up her colleagues’ hitherto rational worlds. Of course there was nothing at all psychopathic about Petter—he seemed anxious and obsessive, just like I was, albeit quite a lot more so. But as a result of the Being or Nothingness adventure, I’d become fascinated to learn about the influence that madness—madness among our leaders—had on our everyday lives. Did Essi really believe that many of them are ill with Tony’s condition? Are many of them psychopaths?

  She nodded. “With prison psychopaths you can actually quantify the havoc they cause,” she said. “They make up only twenty-five percent of the prison population but they account for sixty to seventy percent of the violent crime that happens inside prisons. They’re few in number but you don’t want to mess with them.”

  “What percentage of the non-prison population is a psychopath?” I asked.

  “One percent,” said Essi.

  Essi said if I wanted to understand what a psychopath is, and how they sometimes rise to the top of the business world, I should seek out the writings of Bob Hare, the father of modern psychopathy research. Tony will no doubt be incarcerated because he scored high on the Bob Hare Checklist, she said.

  And so, after I left her office, I found an article by Hare that described psychopaths as “predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, sex and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse. What is missing, in other words, are the very qualities that allow a human being to live in social harmony.”

  Tony called. I couldn’t keep ignoring him. I took a breath and picked up the phone.

  “Jon?” he said.

  He sounded small and faraway and echoey. I imagined him on a pay phone halfway down a long corridor.

  “Yes, hello, Tony,” I said, in a no-nonsense way.

  “I haven’t heard from you in a while,” said Tony.

  He sounded like a child whose parents had suddenly started acting frostily for no obvious reason.

  “Professor Maden says you’re a psychopath,” I said.

  Tony exhaled impatiently.

  “I’m not a psychopath,” he said.

  There was a short silence.

  “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.” Tony paused. “It’s like witchcraft,” he said. “They turn everything upside down.”

  “What makes them believe you’re a psychopath?” I said.

  “Ah,” said Tony. “Back in 1998 when I was faking mental illness, I stupidly included some fake psychopathic stuff in there. Like Ted Bundy. Remember I plagiarized a Ted Bundy book? Ted Bundy was definitely a psychopath. I think that’s the problem.”

  “Okay,” I said. I sounded unconvinced.

  “Trying to prove you’re not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you’re not mentally ill,” said Tony.

  “How did they diagnose you?” I asked.

  “They give you a psychopath test,” said Tony. “The Robert Hare Checklist. They assess you for twenty personality traits. They go down a list. 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 zero, one, or two. If your total score is thirty or more out of forty, you’re a psychopath. That’s it. You’re doomed. You’re labeled 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. . . .

  Tony’s voice had risen in anger and frustration. I heard it bounce across the walls of the DSPD unit. Then he controlled himself and lowered his voice again.

  “And then you’re stuck somewhere like this,” he said. “If I’d just done my time in prison, I’d have been out seven years ago.”

  “Tell me more about the psychopath test,” I said to Tony.

  “One of the questions they ask you to assess you for Irresponsibility is: ‘Do you mix with criminals?’ Of course I mix with criminals. I am in bloody Broadmoor.”

  He clearly had a point. But still, Brian knew he and Tony were in danger of losing me. He called and asked if I wanted to visit Tony one last time. He said he had a question he wanted to spring on Tony and he wanted me to hear it. And so the three of us spent another Sunday lunchtime eating chocolate and drinking PG Tips in the Broadmoor Wellness Centre.

  Tony wasn’t wearing the pinstripe this time, but he was still by far the best-dressed potential sufferer of a dangerous and severe personality disorder in the room. We made small talk for a while. I told him I wanted to change his name for this story. I asked him to choose a name. We decided on Tony. Tony said knowing his luck, they’ll read this and diagnose him with Dissociative Identity Disorder.

  Then, suddenly, Brian leaned forward.

  “Do you feel remorse?” he asked.

  “My remorse,” Tony instantly replied, leaning forward, too, “is that I’ve not only screwed up my victim’s life but also my own life and my family’s lives and that’s my remorse. All the things that could have been done in my life. I feel bad about that every day.”

  Tony looked at me.

  “Did his remorse sound a bit rattled off?” I thought. I looked at Tony. “Did they rehearse this? Was this a show for me? And, also, if he really felt remorse, wouldn’t he have said, ‘My remorse is that I’ve not only screwed up my life but also my victim’s life . . .’? Wouldn’t he have put his statement of remorse in that order? Or maybe it was in the right order. I don’t know. Should I want him released? Shouldn’t I? How do I know?” It crossed my mind that perhaps I should be campaigning for
his release in print in a way that appeared crusading but actually wasn’t quite effective enough to work. Like planting barely noticeable seeds of doubt into the prose. Subtle.

  I felt myself narrow my eyes, as if I were trying to bore a hole through Tony’s skull and peer into his brain. The look of concentrated curiosity on my face was the same look I had back at that Costa Coffee when Deborah first slid her copy of Being or Nothingness over to me. Tony and Brian could tell what was going through my mind. The two men leaned back in disappointment.

  “You’re sitting there like an amateur sleuth trying to read between the lines,” said Brian.

  “I am.” I nodded.

  “That’s all psychiatrists do!” said Brian. “See? They’re nothing but amateur sleuths, too! But they’ve got the power to influence parole boards. To get someone like Tony locked away indefinitely if he has the misfortune to fail Bob Hare’s psychopath checklist!”

  And then our two hours were up, and a guard called time, and with barely a good-bye, Tony obediently rushed across the Wellness Centre and was gone.

  3.

  PSYCHOPATHS DREAM IN BLACK-AND-WHITE

  It was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who first suggested, early in the nineteenth century, that there was a madness that didn’t involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it “manie sans delire”—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 J. L. A. Koch published his book Die Psychopatischen Minderwertigkeiter, that it got its name: psychopathy.

  Back in the old days—in the days before Bob Hare—the definitions were rudimentary. The 1959 Mental Health Act for England and Wales described psychopaths simply as having “a persistent disorder or disability of mind (whether or not including subnormality of intelligence) which results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct on the part of the patient, and requires or is susceptible to medical treatment.”

  The consensus from the beginning was that only 1 percent of humans had it, but the chaos they caused was so far-reaching it could actually remold society, remold it all wrong, like when someone breaks his foot and it gets set badly and the bones stick out in odd directions. 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. His strange story has all but faded away now, except for making the odd fleeting cameo—a once beautiful but now broken 1960s star—in the obituary of some hopeless Canadian serial killer, but back then his peer group was watching his experiments with great excitement. He looked to be on the cusp of something extraordinary.

  I happened to come across references to him in academic papers I read during the weeks after I visited Tony in Broadmoor, and Essi Viding, and was trying to understand the meaning of psychopathy. There were allusions to his warm-spiritedness; his childlike, if odd, idealism; his willingness to journey to the furthest corners of his imagination in his attempts to cure psychopaths. These were phrases I hadn’t seen anywhere else in reports about psychiatric initiatives inside asylums for the criminally insane, and so I began sending e-mails to him and his friends.

  “Elliott lies very low and does not grant any interviews,” e-mailed a former colleague of his, who didn’t want to be named. “He is a sweet man who to this day has a lot of enthusiasm for helping people.”

  “I know of nothing comparable to what Elliott Barker did,” e-mailed another, Richard Weisman, a social science professor at York University in Toronto who wrote a brilliant paper on Barker—“Reflections on the Oak Ridge Experiment with Mentally Disordered Offenders”—for the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. “It was a unique synthesis of a number of different cultural trends in the ’60s in Canada and Elliott was lucky to have a remarkably free hand in his improvisations.”

  I became quite obsessed with piecing together the Oak Ridge story. I fired off e-mails to no avail: “Dear Elliott, I never usually persevere so much and please accept my apologies for doing so,” and “Is there anything I can do to convince you to talk to me?” and “I promise this will be my last e-mail if I don’t hear from you!”

  And then I had a stroke of luck. While other prospective interviewees might have found my somewhat fanatical determination odd, perhaps even unnerving, Elliott and his fellow former Oak Ridge psychiatrists found it appealing, and the more I hassled them, the more they were quietly warming to me. Finally, they began to open up and answer my e-mails.

  It all started in the mid-1960s. Elliott Barker was a budding psychiatrist back then, just out of college. While trying to decide which career path to take, he began reading in psychiatry magazines about the emergence of radical therapeutic communities, where the old hierarchies of the wise therapist and the incompetent patient had been torn down and replaced with something more experimental. Intrigued, he and his young wife took a bank loan and set off on a year-long round-the-world odyssey to visit as many of these places as they could.

  In Palm Springs, California, he heard about nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of a psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim. The hotel the sessions took place in combined (as the advertising material back then stated) “abundant trees and wildlife” with the facilities of a “high class resort.” There, Bindrim would ask his fully clothed clients, who were strangers to one another and usually middle- to upper-class California freethinkers and movie stars, first to “eyeball” each other, and then hug, and wrestle, and then, in the dark and to the accompaniment of New Age music, remove their “tower of clothes.” They would sit naked in a circle, perform a “meditation-like hum,” and then dive headlong into a twenty-four-hour nonstop nude psychotherapy session, an emotional and mystical roller coaster during which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess their innermost fears and anxieties.

  “Physical nakedness,” Bindrim would explain to visiting journalists, “facilitates emotional nakedness and therefore speeds up psychotherapy.”

  Bindrim’s most divisive idea was what he termed “crotch eyeballing.” He’d instruct a participant to sit in the center of the circle with legs in the air. Then he’d command the others to stare at that person’s genitals and anus, sometimes for hours, while he sporadically yelled, “This is where it’s at! This is where we are so damned negatively conditioned!”

  Sometimes he’d direct participants to address their genitals directly. One journalist who attended a session—Life magazine’s Jane Howard—reported in her 1970 book Please Touch: A Guided Tour of the Human Potential Movement a conversation between Bindrim and a participant named Lorna.

  “Tell Katy what things happen in your crotch,” Bindrim ordered her. Katy was Lorna’s vagina. “Say, ‘Katy, this is where I shit, fuck, piss and masturbate.’ ”

  There was an embarrassed silence.

  “I think Katy already knows that,” Lorna eventually replied.

  Many travelers around the California human potential movement considered nude psychotherapy to be a step too far, but Elliott, on his odyssey, found the idea exhilarating.

  A Paul Bindrim nude psychotherapy session, photographed by Ralph Crane on December 1, 1968.

  Elliott’s odyssey took him onward, to Turkey and Greece and West Berlin and East Berlin and Japan and Korea and Hong Kong. His most inspiring day occurred in London when (he told me by e-mail) he “met with [the legendary radical psychiatrists] R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper and visited Kingsley Hall, their therapeutic community for schizophrenics.”

  As it happened, R. D. Laing’s son Adrian runs a law firm just a few streets away from my home in North London. And so—in my quest to understand Elliott’s influences—I called in to ask if he’d tell me something about Kingsley Hall.

  Adrian Laing is a slight, trim man. He has the face of his father but on a less daunting body.

  “The point about Kingsley H
all,” he said, “was that people could go there and work through their madness. My father believed that if you allowed madness to take its natural course without intervention—without lobotomies and drugs and straitjackets and all the awful things they were doing at the time in mental hospitals—it would burn itself out, like an LSD trip working its way through the system.”

  “What kind of thing might Elliott Barker have seen on his visit to Kingsley Hall?” I asked.

  “Some rooms were, you know, beguilingly draped in Indian silks,” Adrian said. “Schizophrenics like Ian Spurling—who eventually became Freddie Mercury’s costume designer—would dance and sing and paint and recite poetry and rub shoulders with visiting freethinking celebrities like Timothy Leary and Sean Connery.” Adrian paused. “And then there were other, less beguiling rooms, like Mary Barnes’s shit room down in the basement.”

  “Mary Barnes’s shit room?” I asked. “You mean like the worst room in the house?”

  “I was seven when I first visited Kingsley Hall,” Adrian said. “My father said to me, ‘There’s a very special person down in the basement who wants to meet you.’ So I went down there and the first thing I said was, ‘What’s that smell of shit?’”

  The smell of shit was—Adrian told me—coming from a chronic schizophrenic by the name of Mary Barnes. She represented a conflict at Kingsley Hall. Laing held madness in great esteem. He believed the insane possessed a special knowledge—only they understood the true madness that permeated society. But Mary Barnes, down in the basement, hated being mad. It was agony for her, and she desperately wanted to be normal.

  Her needs won out. Laing and his fellow Kingsley Hall psychiatrists encouraged her to regress to the infantile state in the hope that she might grow up once again, but sane. The plan wasn’t going well. She was constantly naked, smearing herself and the walls in her own excreta, communicating only by squeals and refusing to eat unless someone fed her from a bottle.