The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (7 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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“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 But on the inside it demonstrates you’re withdrawn and aloof and you have a grandiose sense of your own importance.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.”
“Saint Hill?” I said.
“L. Ron Hubbard’s old manor house,” Brian said.
 
 
Saint Hill Manor—L. Ron Hubbard’s home from 1959 to 1966—stands palatial and impeccably preserved in the East Grinstead countryside, thirty-five miles south of London. There are pristine pillars and priceless twelfth-century Islamic tiles and summer rooms and winter rooms and a room covered from floor to ceiling in a mid-twentieth-century mural of great British public figures portrayed as monkeys—strange, formally funny satire from long ago commissioned by a previous owner—and a large modern extension, built by Scientology volunteers, in the shape of a medieval castle. Little keepsakes from Hubbard’s life, like his cassette recorder and personalized writing paper and a pith helmet, sit on side tables.
 
I pulled up assuming Brian would be there to put me in a room so I could quietly study the documents detailing the early days of the Church’s war on psychiatry. But as I turned the corner, I saw to my surprise that a welcoming committee of some of the world’s leading Scientologists had flown thousands of miles with the express purpose of greeting me and showing me around. They were waiting for me on the gravel driveway, dressed in immaculate suits, smiling in anticipation.
 
 
There had been sustained negative media reports about the Church those past weeks and someone high up had clearly decided that I may be the journalist to turn the tide. What had happened was three former high-ranking staff members—Marty Rathbun, Mike Rinder, and Amy Scobee—had a few weeks earlier made some startling accusations against their leader, and L. Ron Hubbard’s successor, David Miscavige. They said he routinely punished his top executives for being unsatisfactory Ideas People by slapping them, punching them, “beating the living fuck” out of them, kicking them when they were on the floor, hitting them in the face, choking them until their faces went purple, and unexpectedly forcing them to play an extreme all-night version of musical chairs.
“The fact is,” said the Church’s chief spokesperson, Tommy Davis, who had flown from Los Angeles to see me, “yes, people were hit. Yes, people were kicked while they were on the floor and choked until their faces went purple, but the perpetrator wasn’t Mr. Miscavige. It was
Marty Rathbun himself!
”
(Marty Rathbun has, I later learned, admitted to committing those acts of violence, but says he was ordered to by David Miscavige. The Church denies that claim.)
Tommy said that I, unlike most journalists, was a freethinker, not in the pay of anti-Scientologist-vested interests and willing to entertain unexpected realities. He handed me a copy of the in-house Scientology magazine,
Freedom
, which referred to the three people who had made the accusations against David Miscavige as The Kingpin, The Conman, and The Adulteress. The Adulteress was in fact “a repeat adulteress” who refused to “curb her wanton sexual behavior,” perpetrated “five incidents of extramarital indiscretions,” and “was removed from the Church for ecclesiastical crimes.”
I looked up from the magazine.
“What about the extreme all-night version of musical chairs?” I asked.
There was a short silence.
“Yes, well, Mr. Miscavige did make us do that,” said Tommy. “But it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it was reported. Anyway. Let’s give you a tour so we can educate you on what Scientology is really about.”
 
 
Tommy handed me over to Bob Keenan, my tour guide. “I’m L. Ron Hubbard’s personal PR rep in the UK,” he said. He was an Englishman, a former firefighter who had, he said, discovered Scientology “after I broke my back while putting out a fire at a gyppo’s flat in East London. There was a donkey in one of the bedrooms. I saw it, turned the corner, and fell through the floor. When I was recovering, I read
Dianetics
[Hubbard’s self-help book] and it helped me with the pain.”
The manor house was immaculate in a way that manor houses rarely are these days. It was as spotless and sparkling as manor houses in costume dramas set during those long-ago days when the British gentry had real power and unlimited money. The only stain I saw anywhere was in the Winter Room, where a small number of the gleaming marble floor tiles were slightly discolored.
“This is where Ron had his Coca-Cola machine,” explained Bob. He smiled. “Ron loved Coca-Cola. He drank it all the time. That was his thing. Anyway, one day the machine leaked some syrup. That’s what the stain is. There’s been a lot of debate about whether we should clean it up. I say leave it. It’s a nice thing.”
“Like a relic,” I said.
“Right,” said Bob.
“A kind of Coca-Cola Turin shroud,” I said.
“Whatever,” said Bob.
 
 
Anti-Scientologists believe that the religion and all that is done in its name, including its anti-psychiatry wing, are nothing less than a manifestation of L. Ron Hubbard’s madness. They say he was paranoid and depressed (he would apparently at times cry uncontrollably and throw things against the wall and scream). Tommy and Bob said Hubbard was a genius and a great humanitarian. They pointed to his record as a world-class Boy Scout (“The youngest Eagle Scout in America,” said Bob, “he earned twenty-one merit badges”), pilot, adventurer (the story goes that he once single-handedly saved a bear from drowning), an incredibly prolific sci-fi author (he could write an entire best-selling novel on a single overnight train journey), philosopher, sailor, guru, and whistle-blowing scourge of evil psychiatrists. They say Hubbard was the very first man to reveal that psychiatrists were dosing patients with massive amounts of LSD and electroconvulsive therapy in secret CIA-funded attempts to create brainwashed assassins. He published his account of the experiments in 1969 and it wasn’t until June 1975 that
The Washington Post
announced to an unsuspecting world that these programs (code-named MK-ULTRA) existed.
A person drugged and shocked can be ordered to kill and who to kill and how to do it and what to say afterwards. Scientologists, being technically superior to psychiatrists and about a hundred light-years above him morally, objects seriously to the official indifference to drug-electric-shock treatments. . . . Someday the police will have to take the psychiatrist in hand. The psychiatrist is being found out.
—L. RON HUBBARD, “PAIN-DRUG-HYPNOSIS,” 1969
 
 
They say Hubbard came to believe that a conspiracy of vested interests, namely the psychiatry and pharmaceutical industries, was behind the political attacks against him because his self-help principles of Dianetics (that we’re all laden by “engrams,” painful memories from past lives, and when we clear ourselves of them, we can be invincible, we can regrow teeth, cure blindness, become sane) meant that nobody would ever need to visit a psychiatrist or take an antidepressant again.
A Church video biography of Hubbard’s life says, “L. Ron Hubbard was probably the smartest man that has walked the face of this Earth. We had Jesus, we had Moses, we had Mohammed, all the great people. L. Ron Hubbard is one of this kind.”
 
The final stop on my guided tour was L. Ron Hubbard’s bedroom.
“The very last night he spent in this bed,” Bob said, “was the night of December thirtieth, 1966. The next night, New Year’s Eve, he left England, never to return.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The research he was conducting at the time was just too . . .” Bob fell silent. He gave me a solemn look.
“Are you saying his research was getting just too heavy and he had to leave England in fear for his life?” I asked.
“The conclusions he was coming to . . .” Bob said. An ominous tone had crept into his voice.
“L. Ron Hubbard was never in
fear
,” interjected Tommy Davis, sharply. “He would never
flee
from anywhere. It wouldn’t be right for people to think he
fled
. He only ever did anything on his own terms.”
“He left because he wanted a safe haven,” clarified Bill Walsh, one of the Church’s lead attorneys who had flown in from Washington, D.C., to meet me.

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