The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (8 page)
Read The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry Online
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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“What was the nature of the research?” I asked.
There was a silence. And then Bob quietly said, “The antisocial personality.”
The Antisocial Personality[This type of personality] cannot feel any sense of remorse or shame. They approve only of destructive actions. They appear quite rational. They can be very convincing.—L. RON HUBBARD,
Introduction to Scientology Ethics
, 1968
Hubbard, while living at Saint Hill, began to preach that his enemies, such as the American Psychiatric Association, were Antisocial Personalities, malevolent spirits obsessed with focusing their evil onto him. Their malice had fermented over countless lifetimes, many millions of years, and it was a powerful force indeed. He wrote that it was the duty of every Scientologist to “ruin them utterly . . . use black propaganda to destroy reputation.” Although he later canceled the order (“It causes bad public relations,” he wrote), it was this uncompromising attitude—“We want at least one bad mark on every psychiatrist in England, a murder, an assault, or a rape or more than one. . . . There is not one institutional psychiatrist alive who, by ordinary criminal law, could not be arraigned and convicted of extortion, mayhem and murder”—that led to the formation of the anti-psychiatry wing, the CCHR, in 1969.
The CCHR visualized psychiatry as Hubbard had depicted it, as a Dark Empire that had existed for millennia, and themselves as a ragtag rebel force tasked with defeating the Goliath.
And they have won some epic victories. There was, for example, their campaign back in the 1970s and 1980s against the Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey. He ran a small, private, suburban psychiatric hospital in Sydney. Patients would turn up suffering from anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, obesity, premenstrual syndrome, and so on. Harry Bailey would greet them and ask them to swallow some tablets. Sometimes the patients knew what was coming, but sometimes they didn’t. To those who asked what the pills were for, he’d say, “Oh, it is normal practice.”
So they’d take them and fall into a deep coma.
Harry Bailey believed that while his patients were in their comas, their minds would cure themselves of whichever mental disorders afflicted them. But somewhere between twenty-six and eighty-five of his patients sank too deep and died. Some choked on their own vomit, others suffered heart attacks and brain damage and pneumonia and deep vein thrombosis. The Scientologists eventually got wind of the scandal and set a team onto investigating Bailey, encouraging survivors to sue and the courts to prosecute, which they did, much to the indignation of Harry Bailey, who believed his work to be pioneering.
In September 1985, when it became clear he was destined for jail, he wrote a note: “Let it be known that the Scientologists and the forces of madness have won.” Then he went out to his car and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, washed down with beer.
Harry Bailey was dead and hopefully not making use of the afterlife to arm himself with yet more malevolent power to mete out to the human race during some dreadful future lifetime.
When I got home from Saint Hill, I watched the CCHR video,
Psychiatry: An Industry of Death
. Much of it is a well-researched catalog of abuses perpetrated by psychiatrists throughout history. Here was the American physician Samuel Cartwright identifying in 1851 a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom was “the desire to run away from slavery” and the cure was to “whip the devil out of them” as a preventative measure. Here was the neurologist Walter Freeman hammering an ice pick through a patient’s eye socket sometime during the 1950s. Freeman would travel America in his “lobotomobile” (a sort of camper van) enthusiastically lobotomizing wherever he was allowed. Here was behavioral psychologist John Watson spraying a baby with some unidentified clear liquid that I hoped wasn’t acid, but by that point in the DVD I wouldn’t have put anything past those bastards.
Psychiatry: An Industry of Death
. Much of it is a well-researched catalog of abuses perpetrated by psychiatrists throughout history. Here was the American physician Samuel Cartwright identifying in 1851 a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom was “the desire to run away from slavery” and the cure was to “whip the devil out of them” as a preventative measure. Here was the neurologist Walter Freeman hammering an ice pick through a patient’s eye socket sometime during the 1950s. Freeman would travel America in his “lobotomobile” (a sort of camper van) enthusiastically lobotomizing wherever he was allowed. Here was behavioral psychologist John Watson spraying a baby with some unidentified clear liquid that I hoped wasn’t acid, but by that point in the DVD I wouldn’t have put anything past those bastards.
But then it veered into speculative territory. Here was Harvard psychologist B. F. Skinner apparently cruelly isolating his baby daughter Deborah in a Perspex box for a year. The archive actually captured her looking quite happy in the box, and I later did some fact-checking and discovered she’s contended throughout her life that the box was basically just a crib and she was hardly ever in there anyway and her father was in fact a lovely man.
The DVD commentary said, “In every city, every state, every country, you will find psychiatrists committing rape, sexual abuse, murder, and fraud.”
A few days later a letter arrived from Tony in Broadmoor. “This place is awful at night time, Jon,” he wrote. “Words cannot express the atmosphere. I noticed that the wild daffodils were in bloom this morning. I felt like running through them as I used to in my childhood with my mum.”
Tony had included in the package copies of his files. So I got to read the exact words he used to convince psychiatrists back in 1998 that he was mentally ill. The Dennis Hopper
Blue Velvet
stuff he had told me about was right there—how 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—but there was a lot more. He’d really gone to town. He told the psychiatrists that the CIA was following him, and that people in the street didn’t have real eyes, they had black eyes where their eyes should be, and perhaps the way to make the voices in his head go away was to hurt someone, to take a man hostage and stick a pencil in his eye. He said he was considering stealing an airplane because he no longer got a buzz from stealing cars. He said he enjoyed taking things that belonged to other people because he liked the idea of making them suffer. He said hurting people was better than sex.
Blue Velvet
stuff he had told me about was right there—how 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—but there was a lot more. He’d really gone to town. He told the psychiatrists that the CIA was following him, and that people in the street didn’t have real eyes, they had black eyes where their eyes should be, and perhaps the way to make the voices in his head go away was to hurt someone, to take a man hostage and stick a pencil in his eye. He said he was considering stealing an airplane because he no longer got a buzz from stealing cars. He said he enjoyed taking things that belonged to other people because he liked the idea of making them suffer. He said hurting people was better than sex.
I wasn’t sure which movies those ideas had been plagiarized from. Or even if they had been plagiarized from movies. I felt the ground shift under my feet. Suddenly I was a little on the side of the psychiatrists. Tony must have come over as extremely creepy back then.
There was another page in his file, a description of the crime he committed back in 1997. The victim was a homeless man, an alcoholic named Graham who happened to be sitting on a nearby bench. He apparently made “an inappropriate comment” about the ten-year-old daughter of one of Tony’s friends. The comment was something to do with the length of her dress. Tony told him to shut up. Graham threw a punch at him. Tony retaliated by kicking him. Graham fell over. And that would have been it—Tony later said—had Graham stayed silent. But Graham didn’t. Instead he said, “Is that all you’ve got?”
Tony “flipped.” He kicked Graham seven or eight times in the stomach and groin. He left him, walked back to his friends, and had another drink. He then returned to Graham—who was still lying motionless on the floor—bent down and repeatedly head-butted and kicked him again. He kicked him again in the face and walked away.
I remembered that list of movies Tony said he plagiarized to demonstrate he was mentally ill. One was
A Clockwork Orange
, which begins with a gang of thugs kicking a homeless man while he was on the ground.
A Clockwork Orange
, which begins with a gang of thugs kicking a homeless man while he was on the ground.
My phone rang. I recognized the number. It was Tony. I didn’t answer it.
A week passed and then the e-mail I had been waiting for arrived. It was from Professor Anthony Maden, the chief clinician at Tony’s Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder unit inside Broadmoor.
“Tony,” his e-mail read, “
did
get here by faking mental illness because he thought it would be preferable to prison.”
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.
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.
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?”
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.
The Apprentice
, his arm outstretched.
“
That’s
classic psychopath?” I asked.
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.”
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.
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.
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