The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
This book meanders a lot but usually manages to stay pretty interesting and engaging. It covers some history into how psychopaths were diagnosed and treated previously (using a lot of techniques that would be considered inethical today), and also how they are diagnosed and treated today (using the psychopath checklist).I found some parts quite fascinating, like that after many failed attempts at 'curing' psychopaths, many researchers declared it as incurable, and suggest instead that a better approach is simply to improve our ability to recognize them, then lock the dangerous ones up permanently. But this makes any misdiagnosis very dangerous (as he shows with one patient that pretended to be insane to escape prison and then ends up stuck with the much worse sentence of 'psychopathy' with a lifetime in a mental hospital)He also explains how we arrived at using 'checklists' as a way to describe mental disorders in general (thanks to Robert Spitzer) and how this can often result in a culture of over-diagnosing everything, including those disorders which get closer to normal behaviour. I found his conclusions to be pretty reasonable and appropriately ambiguous.I think it would have been a better book if it was a tad shorter but all in all a worthy read In This book we follow the author in his journey through the madness industry and the world of psychopaths. Ronson learns to spot psychopaths using Robert Hare's check list and upon putting this new knowledge to test he learns that even ordinary people can have eccentric and crazy edges.I enjoyed the style of the writing, it was engaging and kept me interested. I particularly loved how the author analyses and critisizes his own thoughts through out the book.
What do You think about The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry (2012)?
I liked this for some very interesting parts, but the book was too disjointed for me.
—frenda97
Not great.....kind of a stretch to get through it.
—Mikaela
