1장
The Hunt for Madness: A Journey Into the Psychopathic Mind
What makes someone a psychopath? Is it possible that the most successful people in our society-CEOs, politicians, and other powerful figures-might actually be functioning psychopaths? Jon Ronson's bestselling exploration of this question has captivated millions of readers since its 2011 publication, earning praise from The New York Times as "wonderfully entertaining" and The Guardian as "both terrifying and hilarious." The book follows Ronson's journey from investigating a mysterious literary puzzle to becoming trained in spotting psychopaths, eventually leading him to question whether our modern obsession with labeling mental disorders might itself be a form of madness. With over a million copies sold and translations in 30 languages, this darkly comic odyssey through the corridors of power and the institutions of mental health challenges us to reconsider what separates sanity from madness in our increasingly label-obsessed world.
2장
The Mystery of Being or Nothingness
It all began with a cryptic book. After receiving an apologetic email from Dave McKay, a religious leader I'd offended, my anxiety subsided only to be replaced by a new mystery. Deborah Talmi, a neuroscientist, had contacted me about an unusual book that had been anonymously mailed to academics around the world. Meeting her at a Costa Coffee shop, I examined the peculiar volume titled "Being or Nothingness" - an expensively produced work with deliberately cut holes on page 13 and filled with cryptic statements like "The sixth day after I stopped writing the book I sat at B's place and wrote the book."
My investigation took me to Gothenburg, Sweden, following my only lead - the name Petter Nordlund listed as the English translator. I rented a car, its clean smell triggering memories of past investigations, including my time following conspiracy theorist David Icke. When I questioned a man named Levi Shand about delivering these books to Professor Douglas Hofstadter, he spun an elaborate tale about finding them under a railway bridge and encountering "at least six" beautiful French women at Hofstadter's home. Something didn't feel right.
When I contacted Hofstadter directly, he confirmed my suspicions, calling Levi's story "sheer fabrication" and revealing he'd received about 80 copies from the book's true author - a Swedish psychologist using the pseudonym "Joe K" whom Hofstadter described as "smart but unbalanced." Upon meeting Petter Nordlund in Sweden, his cryptic behavior confirmed my suspicions despite his denials.
This strange beginning sparked a fascinating question: how could one person's mental peculiarities create such widespread ripples of intellectual examination? It made me wonder if madness, rather than rationality, might be the true engine driving society - a question that would shape my journey into the world of psychopaths and mental disorders.
3장
The Scientologists' War on Psychiatry
After my encounter with Petter Nordlund, I purchased the DSM-IV-TR, psychiatry's 943-page diagnostic bible listing 374 mental disorders. Surprisingly, despite its comprehensiveness, it contained nothing specifically about psychopaths. The closest matches were Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder.
My research led me to Brian Daniels, a Scientologist working for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), dedicated to exposing psychiatrists as frauds. Despite my initial apprehension, we bonded over our shared skepticism of psychiatry. Brian proudly recounted his recent triumph - taking down TV psychiatrist Dr. Raj Persaud for plagiarism after Persaud had criticized Scientology. When I asked if Brian had any current cases proving psychiatrists couldn't be trusted, he mentioned Tony - a man allegedly trapped in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital after faking madness to avoid prison.
This connection took me to Saint Hill Manor, L. Ron Hubbard's former residence in the East Grinstead countryside. The palatial estate stood impeccably preserved, featuring Islamic tiles, summer and winter rooms, a peculiar mural of British figures portrayed as monkeys, and Hubbard's personal items displayed like religious relics. There, Tommy Davis, Scientology's chief spokesperson, defended the Church against recent allegations while my tour guide Bob Keenan proudly showed me a Coca-Cola syrup stain from Hubbard's personal soda machine - preserved like a sacred artifact.
While critics believe Scientology's anti-psychiatry crusade stems from Hubbard's own mental instability, Church representatives portrayed him as a genius humanitarian who discovered that psychiatrists and pharmaceutical industries were conspiring against him because his Dianetics principles threatened their business. A Church video biography boldly declared, "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."
Hubbard described the "antisocial personality" as someone who "cannot feel any sense of remorse or shame. They approve only of destructive actions. They appear quite rational. They can be very convincing." He instructed Scientologists to "ruin them utterly" and "use black propaganda to destroy reputation," claiming that institutional psychiatrists could all be convicted of "extortion, mayhem and murder."
Interestingly, the CCHR has won some significant victories against genuine psychiatric abuses. In the 1970s and 1980s, they campaigned against Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey, who ran a private psychiatric hospital in Sydney where between twenty-six and eighty-five patients died from complications of his experimental treatments. When faced with prosecution, Bailey committed suicide in September 1985, leaving a note: "Let it be known that the Scientologists and the forces of madness have won."
4장
The Man Who Faked Madness
Tony explained that convincing people you're sane is far harder than convincing them you're crazy. His attempts at normal behavior backfired - discussing scientific articles about bumblebees detecting explosives was recorded as "Thinks bees can sniff out explosives." When he volunteered to garden and behaved well, psychiatrists wrote this proved he could only function in a hospital environment. When he changed tactics and stopped cooperating, they labeled him "cunning" and "manipulative" with "cognitive distortion" for not believing he was mad.
"I arrived here when I was seventeen. I'm twenty-nine now. I've grown up in Broadmoor," he lamented, describing horrific incidents he'd witnessed including a man's eye being gouged out with a nail.
Tony's letters from Broadmoor revealed the disturbing content he'd used to convince psychiatrists he was mentally ill in 1998. Beyond the Dennis Hopper lines from "Blue Velvet," he claimed the CIA was following him, that people had black eyes instead of real ones, and that he considered hurting someone to silence the voices in his head. He talked about stealing airplanes, enjoying making people suffer, and finding hurting people better than sex.
His file also detailed his actual crime: brutally beating a homeless alcoholic named Graham who had made an inappropriate comment about a friend's daughter. After initially walking away from the confrontation, Tony returned to kick and head-butt the motionless man repeatedly.
When Professor Anthony Maden, Tony's chief clinician, finally emailed me, he confirmed Tony had indeed faked mental illness to avoid prison. But then came the twist: "Most psychiatrists who have assessed him, and there have been a lot, have considered he is not mentally ill, but suffers from psychopathy." Maden explained that faking mental illness to escape prison was exactly the kind of manipulative behavior expected from a psychopath. "Tony's faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong," he wrote.
When I shared Tony's story with psychologist Essi Viding, she immediately recognized the pattern: "Classic psychopath!" She explained that psychopaths don't change or learn from punishment - the best hope is they'll eventually become too old and lazy to offend. Though they make up only 1% of the general population, they cause disproportionate damage - in prisons, they're just 25% of inmates but account for 60-70% of violent crime.
5장
The Psychopath Test
Bob Hare, the creator of the influential PCL-R Checklist used worldwide by justice departments and parole boards, scoffed at idealistic treatment approaches: "They had psychopaths naked and talking about their feelings! They had psychopaths on beanbags! They had psychopaths acting as therapists to their fellow psychopaths!" With his yellow-white hair and red eyes, Hare appeared battle-worn from a lifetime confronting "the very forces of evil."
Unlike treatment-focused approaches, Bob Hare focused on detection rather than cure after being repeatedly deceived by psychopaths. On his first day as a prison psychologist at British Columbia Penitentiary, an inmate tailor deliberately made him a comically mismatched uniform despite meticulously taking measurements. Another psychopath even cut his car's brake cables.
These experiences drove Hare to develop scientific methods for identifying psychopaths. He recruited psychopathic and non-psychopathic volunteers from the prison population and conducted experiments measuring their physiological responses. When he warned subjects they would receive painful electric shocks and counted down from ten, non-psychopathic prisoners showed dramatic increases in perspiration and fear responses. The psychopaths, however, "didn't break a sweat." Even more remarkably, when the test was repeated, psychopaths showed no anticipatory fear response despite knowing exactly how painful the shock would be.
When electric shocks were outlawed in the early 1970s, Hare shifted his approach. Drawing inspiration from Hervey Cleckley's 1941 book "The Mask of Sanity," which described how psychopaths conceal their condition beneath engaging normalcy, Hare began searching for linguistic and behavioral patterns that might reveal psychopaths.
In 1975, he organized a conference at a ski resort near Saint Moritz, gathering 85 experts to pool observations about psychopaths' verbal and nonverbal behaviors. The findings formed the basis for Hare's famous twenty-point PCL-R Checklist, which includes items like: glibness/superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect, callous/lack of empathy, parasitic lifestyle, poor behavioral controls, promiscuous sexual behavior, early behavior problems, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, and failure to accept responsibility for actions.
I attended one of Hare's training workshops where we gathered in a tent beside a tidal estuary to learn how to apply the checklist. We watched a video of "Case Study H," a neatly dressed, good-looking man who positioned his chair directly under the panic button - a subtle intimidation tactic that Hare pointed out as typical psychopathic control behavior. Throughout the interview, we identified numerous checklist items, including shallow affect when describing breaking a child's arm ("it just snapped") and lack of empathy when locking his stepmother in a closet for twelve hours ("it was pathetic").
Most chillingly, Case Study H recounted manipulating an angry teenager into attacking his parents with a baseball bat, calling himself "the puppet master pulling the strings." When asked if he would change anything about his past, he philosophized, "The hotter the fire when forging a sword, the tighter the bond on the blade."
Over three days, my skepticism evaporated as I became a devoted follower of Hare's methods. I felt newly empowered, like a TV drama profiler who could identify psychopaths through their language patterns and behaviors. But Bob made a startling admission as I drove him to the train station: "I should never have done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well."
6장
Psychopaths in Power
Bob proposed a straightforward solution to society's greatest injustices: psychopaths in positions of power. "Serial killers ruin families," he explained. "Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies." This was the answer to why the world contains so much savage economic injustice and brutal warfare - psychopaths are the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond of society.
Harvard Medical School's Martha Stout confirmed this theory, noting psychopaths are everywhere - in restaurants, offices, and marriages. They're typically more charming than most people, studying normal humans while lacking warm emotions themselves. When I asked what advice she'd give to psychopaths reading this book, she said they'd likely dismiss it through arrogance. For spouses of psychopaths, her advice was simple: "Leave. You're not going to hurt someone's feelings because there are no feelings to hurt."
Stout explained that psychopaths love power and winning, which is why they're disproportionately represented in leadership positions. "The higher you go up the ladder, the greater the number of sociopaths you'll find there," creating a frightening reality where the 99% have their lives manipulated by "that psychopathic fraction up there."
I tested my theory with Adam Perkins, a clinical neuroscience researcher, that anxiety is neurologically opposite to psychopathy regarding amygdala function. After confirming this, he demonstrated by giving me a painful electric shock during a dummy fMRI scan, confirming I was above average on the anxiety scale. Adam warned me to be careful around psychopaths, sharing a disturbing story about a 19-year-old female student whose brain scans showed sexual arousal when viewing mutilated bodies. Despite her homicidal desires, there was no mechanism to stop her since she hadn't committed any crimes.
As Bob and I approached Cardiff, I questioned whether powerful psychopaths could really hide their juvenile delinquency. "They find ways to bury it," Bob replied. "Early Behavior Problems doesn't necessarily mean juvenile hall. It could mean secretly torturing animals." Though accessing CEOs and politicians would be difficult, Bob insisted this was "a story that could change forever the way people see the world."
7장
The Predator's Mansion
At the forbidding Coxsackie Correctional Facility in upstate New York, I arrived amid icy rain to meet Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, former leader of FRAPH, a Haitian paramilitary group responsible for horrific atrocities including slicing off faces, burning children alive, and forcing sons to rape their mothers at gunpoint.
Years earlier, I'd met Constant in Queens, where he lived in exile. During that strange meeting, well-dressed men came and went, huddling in corners for private conversations. When I asked how he passed time in his confined life, he led me through alleyways to an apartment filled with tiny plastic McDonald's and Burger King promotional figurines - Dumbos, Goofys, Muppets, Batmen and more covering every surface. "What impresses me most about them is the artistry," he explained awkwardly.
Now serving 12-37 years for mortgage fraud, Constant initially presented as humble and emotional during our prison visit, expressing shock at his long sentence and concern about being liked. But then came the revelation: "If people like you, you can manipulate them to do whatever you want them to do!" His desperate need to be liked wasn't emotional at all - it was tactical. "I'm giving you my deepest secrets here, Jon!" he admitted with a shrug.
I drove back to New York City congratulating myself for cracking him open with the word "weakness." He'd revealed his true self - a man without empathy who strategically manipulates people by making them like him, selecting which emotions to display. When I mentioned the women who testified against him, he dismissed their rape allegations with an airy "blah blah blah" and air quotes around "doctor."
This experience led me to Al Dunlap, former CEO of Sunbeam, whose Florida mansion was filled with an unsettling number of predatory animal sculptures - stone lions and panthers with bared teeth, eagles swooping down, hawks with fish in talons - scattered across the grounds, around the lake, in the pool complex, and throughout the rooms.
Dunlap had made his reputation closing plants for Scott, America's oldest toilet paper manufacturer, firing people in eerie, sometimes amusing ways. When one proud employee mentioned working there thirty years, Dunlap looked genuinely perplexed: "Why would you want to stay with a company for thirty years?" The day Sunbeam announced Dunlap as CEO, share prices skyrocketed from $12.50 to $18.63 - the largest jump in NYSE history. When he announced firing half of Sunbeam's 12,000 employees, shares jumped again to $28.
Together with shareholders, Dunlap went on a year-long rampage across rural America, closing plants in Shubuta, Bay Springs, Laurel, Cookeville, Paragould, Coushatta and beyond, turning communities into ghost towns. With each closure, Sunbeam's share price soared, reaching $51 by spring 1998.
When I visited Shubuta, Mississippi, I found a dying town - Sarah's House of Glamour, the Jones Brothers Market, the Bank of Shubuta, all boarded up alongside storefronts so faded you couldn't tell what they once were. The few remaining residents wandered the streets, some drunk, some elderly. Brad, my local guide, remembered when Shubuta was "bustling" and "wonderful" with low crime. Everyone had worked at the Sunbeam plant making beautiful Art Deco toasters.
When I mentioned I was meeting Dunlap the next day, Stewart's face darkened in shock. "He's not in jail?" he asked. "He's in the opposite of jail," I replied. "He's in a vast mansion."
8장
The Right Sort of Madness
As I reflected on my obsession with psychopaths, my friend Adam Curtis confronted me about my journalistic methods. "You're like a medieval monk," he said, "stitching together a tapestry of people's craziness." He pointed out how journalists like me travel the world waiting for "gems" that invariably turn out to be manifestations of mental disorders - the extreme aspects of someone's personality. I initially resisted this critique, but realized I had indeed felt disappointed whenever Al Dunlap said something reasonable that didn't fit my psychopath narrative.
This realization led me to Charlotte Scott, a former TV producer who had worked on shows like Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle. Charlotte revealed how she'd developed a system for finding the "right sort of madness" for reality TV. She would ask potential guests what medications they were taking, then research those drugs to determine if they were "too mad" or "just mad enough" for television.
"Schizophrenia was a no-no," Charlotte explained. "So were psychotic episodes. If they're on lithium for psychosis, we probably wouldn't have had them on." But she admitted that if the story was "awesome" - meaning a dramatic family argument - "they would have to be pretty mad to be stopped."
The ideal candidates were on Prozac: "Prozac's the perfect drug. They're upset... but she's depressed enough to go to a doctor and so she's probably angry and upset." Charlotte confessed that guests taking no medication at all were disappointing - "that probably meant they weren't mad enough" for entertaining television.
Reality TV's exploitation of mental vulnerability sometimes leads to tragedy, as with Deleese from Texas who appeared on Extreme Makeover. The show required family members to discuss how ugly the contestant was before their transformation. Deleese's family, including her sister Kellie, were coached to say cruel things about her appearance while Deleese listened on a monitor nearby. After filming these segments, producers abruptly canceled Deleese's makeover because her recovery time wouldn't fit their schedule. Deleese returned home devastated, realizing her family truly thought she looked "like a freak." Her sister Kellie, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was so consumed with guilt that she eventually took an overdose of pills and alcohol and died.
I realized there seemed to be an unspoken media consensus about which types of madness were entertaining versus uncomfortable. This made me reflect on my own two-decade career of "madness-spotting" as a journalist, and how my recent psychopath-hunting had made me somewhat power-crazed. I recognized an uncomfortable truth - there's "something quite psychopathic about journalism, about psychology, about the art of madness-spotting," a realization that extended beyond entertainment and reality TV circles into political journalism.
9장
The Avoidable Death of Rebecca Riley
At a lavish Scientology banquet at L. Ron Hubbard's manor house, I witnessed a ceremony honoring major donors before Lady Margaret McNair, head of Scientology's anti-psychiatry wing, delivered a scathing critique of proposed mental disorders for DSM-V. She ridiculed conditions like "Intermittent Explosive Disorder" (for honking your horn in anger), "Internet Addiction," "Relational Disorder" (for fighting with your spouse), and "Sluggish Cognitive Tempo Disorder" (for laziness). While the anti-psychiatrists seemed to dismiss genuine mental suffering to suit their ideology, I wondered how psychiatric diagnosis had expanded to include so many human behaviors.
Robert Spitzer revolutionized psychiatry with DSM-III, transforming a 65-page booklet into a 494-page tome filled with checklists and diagnostic criteria. When researchers tested these new criteria on the general population, they discovered over 50 percent of Americans qualified as mentally ill. The manual became a sensation, selling over a million copies - far more than there were psychiatrists. People began self-diagnosing using the checklists, finding relief in having names for their suffering. Drug companies were delighted, suddenly having hundreds of new disorders to create medications for.
Psychiatrist Gary Maier described being courted by pharmaceutical representatives who spent their lunch discussing his hobby of Indian effigy mounds before asking why he wasn't using their products. When Maier confronted them, saying "You guys are the enemy. You've hijacked the profession," one representative offered him Viagra samples as they were leaving. "Like street pushers," he concluded bitterly.
The children's book "Brandon and the Bipolar Bear" exemplifies the troubling trend of childhood bipolar diagnosis. Cambridge professor Ian Goodyer, like most non-American psychiatrists, firmly states childhood bipolar disorder simply doesn't exist: "It is an illness that emerges from late adolescence. It is very, very unlikely indeed that you'll find it in children under seven years of age." Yet American children under seven are increasingly receiving this diagnosis.
Allen Frances, who succeeded Spitzer as DSM editor and expanded the manual to 886 pages, now regrets contributing to three "false epidemics" in psychiatry: autism, attention deficit, and childhood bipolar. With autism, adding Asperger's syndrome caused diagnosis rates to jump from less than 1 in 2,000 to more than 1 in 100. But Frances considers the childhood bipolar epidemic even more troubling, with "kids with extreme irritability and moodiness and temper tantrums being called bipolar" due to drug company and advocacy group influence.
On December 13, 2006, four-year-old Rebecca Riley died after her parents gave her an overdose of antipsychotic drugs prescribed for her bipolar disorder - none approved for children. They had habitually medicated her to "shut her up." Rebecca had been diagnosed at just three years old by Dr. Kayoko Kifuji, a follower of Dr. Joseph Biederman's childhood bipolar research, despite Rebecca barely being able to speak in sentences. In a CBS interview before her murder conviction, Rebecca's mother Carolyn admitted to Katie Couric that Rebecca probably didn't have bipolar disorder: "Maybe she was just hyper for her age."
10장
The Madness Industry's Final Verdict
More than a year after receiving the mysterious book from Deborah Talmi, I received an excited call from Tony at Broadmoor. He invited me to his tribunal and asked me to use his real name in my book. I found myself reflecting on the various people I'd encountered - were they true psychopaths like Toto Constant, questionable cases like Al Dunlap who embraced traits of the checklist as entrepreneurial virtues, harmlessly eccentric like David Shayler, or wrongly judged like Rebecca Riley and Colin Stagg for simply being difficult or abnormal?
I entered The Paddock Centre - one of Britain's five Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder units created after psychopath Michael Stone murdered Lin and Megan Russell in 1996. The bland, modern facility featured pastel yellow walls, bright lighting eliminating all shadows, and prominent red panic buttons. While officially presented as treatment centers using cognitive behavioral therapy and chemical castration to rehabilitate psychopaths, many believe these units are merely schemes to keep psychopaths locked up indefinitely.
To my surprise, Tony's tribunal lasted just five minutes, with the shocking outcome that Tony would be freed. Independent psychiatric reports revealed Tony's troubled childhood with an alcoholic mother who regularly beat him, making me wonder if sometimes the difference between a psychopath in Broadmoor and one on Wall Street was simply being born into a stable, rich family.
Professor Maden expressed nuanced views about Tony's condition, acknowledging his "high level of some psychopathic traits" while noting "he's not a serious, predatory offender." Maden criticized Bob Hare's approach of treating psychopaths "almost as if they are a different species," emphasizing that "you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label" and that Tony had "many endearing qualities when you look beyond the label."
Meeting Bob Hare at Heathrow one last time, I mentioned Tony's release. "Oh dear," Bob responded. When I shared Tony's clinician's criticism that Bob spoke of psychopaths as a different species, Bob defended himself firmly: "It's dimensional. I use 'psychopath' as a convenience term, like calling someone with high blood pressure 'hypertensive.'" Yet he admitted, "My gut feeling, deep down, is that maybe they are different." Bob dismissed critics as "left-wing academics who don't like labels" and justified his focus on negative traits: "I could say he's a good talker, dances well... but at the same time, he screws around and kills people. So what am I going to emphasize?" He warned that when drug companies develop treatments for psychopathy, the diagnostic threshold would inevitably drop.
Weeks later, I received a package from Gothenburg - a copy of "Being or Nothingness," the mysterious book that started my journey. Petter had emailed warning me I'd receive something containing an important message. Inside the book was a card with a painting of a butterfly and blue iris. The handwritten message inside contained just two words: "Good Luck."
The madness business reduces people to their maddest edges. Some, like Tony, get locked up in DSPD units for scoring too high on Bob's checklist. Others appear on TV at nine p.m., their ordinary attributes edited out, becoming benchmarks of how we shouldn't be. Between the genuinely ill and the perfectly sane are those in the middle - overlabeled people who become nothing more than splurges of madness in the minds of those who benefit from it.
