The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (30 page)

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Authors: Jon Ronson

Tags: #Social Scientists & Psychologists, #Psychopathology, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Popular Culture.; Bisacsh, #Social Science, #Popular Culture, #Psychopaths, #General, #Mental Illness, #Biography & Autobiography, #Social Psychology, #History.; Bisacsh, #History

BOOK: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
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“Because of their pensions and their situation and their interests. But I had a phone call from two people who said, ‘I was there. I know what happened. You’re right. Forgive me for not saying anything. Maybe when I’ve collected my pension, I’ll say so.’”
“I don’t suppose any of them have collected their pensions yet?”
“Folks look after their own lives. You can’t blame them. It’s rough-and-tumble. . . .”
“Oh,” I said.
He looked at me. “Let me try and help you with this . . .” he said.
 
 
For the next half-hour Britton patiently broke down the events of the honey trap for me to demonstrate that at no point did he do anything wrong. His rule throughout was that “the suspect, Colin Stagg, must be the person who introduces every single element. What you may then do is reflect that back. You must never introduce it first. If you do, you’re fulfilling
your
hopes, you see?”
I was openmouthed. I didn’t know where to start.
“But what about Lizzie’s past ritual murders?” I said.
“How . . . sorry . . . what are you thinking there?” Britton softly replied, shooting me a hostile glance.
“She said she could only love a man who’d done something similar,” I said.
“If someone you were walking out with said that to you,” Britton said, “what would you do?” He paused and repeated,
“What would you do?”
“But he was clearly desperate to lose his virginity to her,” I said.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said.
It was bewildering that Britton really seemed unable to appreciate how misshapen the honey trap had been, but just as startling to me was the realization that it was in some ways an extreme version of an impulse that journalists and nonfiction TV makers—and perhaps psychologists and police and lawyers—understand well. They had created an utterly warped, insane version of Colin Stagg by stitching together the maddest aspects of his personality. Only the craziest journalist would go as far as they did, but practically everyone goes a
little
way there.
He glared at me. He repeated his position. At no point during the operation did he cross the line.
“Not even when you said that the chance of there being two such ‘highly sexually deviant’ men on Wimbledon Common at the same time was incredibly small?” I asked.
“Well, remember,” he replied, “Robert Napper was there, Colin Stagg wasn’t. Therefore . . .”
“Colin Stagg was there that morning,” I said.
“But he wasn’t on the Common
at the same time
!” said Britton.
He shot me a victorious look.
“Do you think Colin Stagg has a deviant sexual personality?” I asked.
“I don’t know Colin Stagg,” he replied.
There was a frosty silence.
“Are these the questions you came to ask?” he said.
We got the bill.
10.
 
THE AVOIDABLE DEATH OF REBECCA RILEY
 
O
n a balmy evening I was invited to a black-tie Scientology banquet at L. Ron Hubbard’s old manor house in East Grinstead. We drank champagne on Hubbard’s terrace, overlooking uninterrupted acres of English countryside, and then we were led through to the Great Hall where they sat me at the head table, next to Tony Calder, former manager of the Rolling Stones.
The night began with a strange ceremony. The Scientologists who had increased their donations to over £30,000 were invited onto the stage to accept crystal statuettes. They stood there, beaming, in front of a painted panorama of heavenly clouds as the five-hundred-strong audience rose to its feet in applause, dry ice pumping around them, giving them a kind of mystical glow.
Then Lady Margaret McNair, head of the UK branch of the CCHR, Scientology’s anti-psychiatry wing, made a long and quite startling speech detailing the new mental disorders proposed for inclusion in the forthcoming edition of
DSM
—
DSM-V
.
“Have you ever honked your horn in anger?” she said. “Well! You’re suffering from Intermittent Explosive Disorder!”
“Yeah!” the audience yelled. “Congratulations!”
Actually, Intermittent Explosive Disorder is described as “a behavioral disorder characterized by extreme expressions of anger, often to the point of uncontrollable rage, that are disproportionate to the situation at hand.”
“Then there’s Internet Addiction!” she continued. The audience laughed and catcalled.
Actually, Internet Addiction had already been rejected by the
DSM-V
board. It had been the idea of a Portland, Oregon–based psychiatrist named Jerald Block: “Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder that merits inclusion in DSM-V,” he wrote in the March 2008
American Journal of Psychiatry
. “Negative repercussions include arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue.”
But the
DSM-V
board had disagreed. They said spending too long on the Internet might be considered a symptom of depression, but not a unique disorder. They agreed to mention it in
DSM-V
’s appendix, but everyone knew the appendix was the graveyard of mental disorders.
(I didn’t want to admit it to the Scientologists, but I was secretly in favor of Internet Addiction being classified a disorder, as I rather liked the idea of those people who had debated whether I was a shill or stupid being declared insane.)
Lady Margaret continued her list of outrageous proposed mental disorders:
“Ever had a fight with your spouse? Then you’re suffering from Relational Disorder!”
“Woo-hoo!” yelled the audience.
“Are you a bit lazy? Then you’ve got Sluggish Cognitive Tempo Disorder!”
Then there was Binge Eating Disorder, Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder, Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder . . .
Many in the audience were successful local businesspeople, pillars of the community. I had the feeling that the freedom to argue with their wives and pump their horns in anger were freedoms they truly held dear.
 
 
I didn’t know what to think. There are a lot of ill people out there whose symptoms manifest themselves in odd ways. It seemed untoward for Lady Margaret—for all the anti-psychiatrists, Scientologists, or otherwise—to basically dismiss them as sane because it suited their ideology. At what point does querying diagnostic criteria tip over into mocking the unusual symptoms of people in very real distress? The CCHR had once sent around a press release castigating parents for putting their children on medication simply because they were “picking their noses”:
Psychiatrists have labeled everything as a mental illness from nose picking (Rhinotillexomania) to altruism, lottery and playing with “action dolls.” They market the spurious idea that DSM disorders such as spelling and mathematics disorders and caffeine withdrawal are as legitimate as cancer and diabetes.
—JAN EASTGATE, PRESIDENT, CITIZENS COMMISSION
ON HUMAN RIGHTS INTERNATIONAL, JUNE 18, 2002
 
 
The thing was, parents weren’t putting their children on medication for picking their noses. They were putting them on medication for picking them until their facial bones were exposed.
 
 
But as Lady Margaret’s list continued, it was hard not to wonder how things had ended up this way. It really did seem that she was on to something, that complicated human behavior was increasingly getting labeled a mental disorder. How did this come to be? Did it matter? Were there consequences?
The answer to the first question—How did it come to be?—turned out to be strikingly simple. It was all because of one man in the 1970s: Robert Spitzer.
 
 
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve enjoyed classifying people.”
In a large, airy house in a leafy suburb of Princeton, New Jersey, Robert Spitzer—who is in his eighties now and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, but still very alert and charismatic—sat with his housekeeper and me, remembering his childhood camping trips to upstate New York.
“I’d sit in the tent, looking out, writing notes about the lady campers,” he said. “What I thought about each. Their attributes. Which ones I was more taken with.” He smiled. “I’ve always liked to classify things. Still do.”
His camping trips were a respite from his tense home life, the result of a “chronic psychiatric outpatient mother. She was a very unhappy lady. And she was well into psychoanalysis. She went from one analyst to another.”
And she never got better. She lived unhappy and she died unhappy. Spitzer watched this. The psychoanalysts were useless, flailing around. They did nothing for her.
He grew up to be a psychiatrist at Columbia University, his dislike of psychoanalysis remaining undimmed. And then, in 1973, an opportunity to change everything presented itself.
 
 
David Rosenhan was a psychologist from Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania, and Princeton. Like Spitzer, he’d grown tired of the pseudoscientific, ivory-tower world of the psychoanalyst. He wanted to demonstrate that they were as useless as they were idolized, and so he devised an experiment. He co-opted seven friends, none of whom had ever had any psychiatric problems. They gave themselves pseudonyms and fake occupations and then, all at once, they traveled across America, each to a different mental hospital. As Rosenhan later wrote:
They were located in five different states on the East and West coasts. Some were old and shabby, some were quite new. Some had good staff-patient ratios, others were quite understaffed. Only one was a strict private hospital. All of the others were supported by state or federal funds or, in one instance, by university funds.
 
At an agreed time, each of them told the duty psychiatrist that they were hearing a voice in their head that said the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” That was the only lie they would be allowed to tell. Otherwise they had to behave completely normally.
All eight were immediately diagnosed as insane and admitted into the hospitals. Seven were told they had schizophrenia; one, manic depression.
Rosenhan had expected the experiment would last a couple of days. That’s what he’d told his family: that they shouldn’t worry and he’d see them in a couple of days. The hospital didn’t let him out for two months.
In fact, they refused to let any of the eight out, for an average of nineteen days each, even though they all acted completely normally from the moment they were admitted. When staff asked them how they were feeling, they said they were feeling fine. They were all given powerful antipsychotic drugs.
Each was told that he would have to get out by his own devices, essentially by convincing the staff that he was sane.
 
Simply telling the staff they were sane wasn’t going to cut it.
Once labeled schizophrenic the pseudopatient was stuck with that label.
—DAVID ROSENHAN, “ON BEING SANE IN INSANE PLACES,” 1973
 
 
There was only one way out. They had to agree with the psychiatrists that they were insane and then pretend to get better.
 
 
When Rosenhan reported the experiment, there was pandemonium. He was accused of trickery. He and his friends had faked mental illness! You can’t blame a psychiatrist for misdiagnosing someone who presented himself with fake symptoms! One mental hospital challenged Rosenhan to send some more fakes, guaranteeing they’d spot them this time. Rosenhan agreed, and after a month, the hospital proudly announced they had discovered forty-one fakes. Rosenhan then revealed he’d sent no one to the hospital.
 
 
The Rosenhan experiment was a disaster for American psychiatry. Robert Spitzer was delighted.
“It was very embarrassing,” he said to me now. “The self-esteem of psychiatry got very low as a result of it. It had never really been accepted as part of medicine because the diagnoses were so unreliable, and the Rosenhan experiment confirmed it.”
Spitzer’s respect lay instead with psychologists like Bob Hare, who eschewed psychoanalysis for something more scientific—checklists—emotionless catalogs of overt behavior. If there was only some way of bringing that kind of discipline into psychiatry.
Then he heard there was a job opening, editing the new edition of a little-known spiral-bound booklet called
DSM
.
“The first edition of
DSM
had been sixty-five pages!” Spitzer laughed. “It was mainly used for state hospitals reporting on statistics. It was of no interest to researchers at all.”
He happened to know some of the
DSM
people. He’d been around when gay activists had lobbied them to get the mental disorder of Homosexuality removed. Spitzer had been on the activists’ side and had brokered a deal that meant being gay was no longer a manifestation of insanity. His intervention gained him respect from everyone, and so when he expressed interest in the job editing
DSM-III
, it was a foregone conclusion.

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