The constant jokes are insanely funny but fail to mask the lack of a deeper purpose to Jon Ronson’s excursion into the world of psychiatry
The difficulty with reviewing Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test is that, if I am to be honest, I risk sounding like a person with no sense of humour – and who wants to be one of those? Certainly not Ronson, whose joke rate is as indiscriminate as it is high, by which I mean that though the belly laughs come thick and fast – my God, he is funny – they are occasionally accompanied by a certain kind of queasiness. And, in the case of The Psychopath Test, perhaps more than occasionally.
Ronson's new book is provocative and interesting, and you will, I guarantee, zip merrily through it. But it also reveals, sometimes painfully, the limitations of his journalistic technique. He skates when you want him to dig; he does that amazed, disingenuous thing, when a little old-fashioned anger and indignation would serve him far better; he makes peculiar connections between things that are not really connected at all. His subject is huge and tragic and terrifying but there is something tinny and unfinished about his investigation. Finishing up, you gaze at his bibliography and wonder, with a sigh, where to begin.
The book starts, for want of any better launch pad, with a shaggy dog story. Ronson is asked by the friend of a friend to investigate the appearance of an elaborate handmade book, Being or Nothingness, that has begun appearing in the pigeonholes of academics and other wonks across the world. Chasing this mystery, like a spaniel after its tail, he stumbles on Bob Hare, the Canadian psychologist who has formulated a supposedly definitive questionnaire for the diagnosing of psychopaths. Hare's test is, even by his account, overused, and it's easy to see why: its 20-point checklist, so easy to understand, is seductive and thrilling.
You will enjoy this bit. Even as you reassure yourself you have no psychopathic tendencies (anyone who worries they are an unfeeling, manipulative lunatic is probably quite cuddly), you will mentally run through your friends and neighbours and find them wanting (tick, tick, tick, you will go, the behaviour of that woman who told you to get a manicure the day your mother died now satisfyingly explained). In fact, so obvious are its temptations, a part of you will perhaps be eager to sympathise with another of Ronson's new acquaintances, "Brian", a Scientologist who works in the cult's anti-psychiatry wing. Which could be equally dangerous, in the circumstances.
More dubious even than Hare's checklist, though, is the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders), the endlessly expanding catalogue of conditions published by the American Psychiatric Association. The DSM, now approaching its fifth great edition, runs to hundreds of pages and includes such nebulous-sounding illnesses as intermittent explosive disorder (temper tantrums), relational disorder (pissed off with a relative) and sluggish cognitive tempo disorder (you may lack motivation). It is this directory that we have to blame for, among other things, the appalling rise in the number of children in the US now on drugs to treat their "bipolar disorder". Ronson meets Robert Spitzer, the editor under whose aegis the DSM bulged most preposterously, and asks him if he doesn't think that he has created a world in which the line between psychiatric diagnoses and normal behaviour has become perilously blurred. "I don't know," says Spitzer, a reply which would be hilarious if it wasn't so disgraceful.
Ronson, then, thinks we should be suspicious of psychiatry and all who sail in it – or at least as suspicious as we are of any other organised and powerful group of human beings. For sanity is not a fixed concept. You or I might consider your average Scientologist to be a nutter. But is he mentally ill? Probably not (though the DSM might find a way to disagree). And what about Ronson's friend, "Tony", a patient in the most secure part of Broadmoor, who is unexpectedly considered to be sufficiently "sane" to be released? It's not like his scores on the Hare scale have flipped to "normal".
I don't have a problem with all this: it's fascinating, and righteous. But I worry when Ronson fails, as he does at one point, fully to distinguish between psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and I fail to see what much of the rest of his book is for. His parade of muddle-heads, eccentrics and monsters (though not necessarily psychopaths) feels oddly rehearsed, a comedic add-on. David Shayler, the cross-dressing former MI5 officer; Al Dunlap, a swaggering Master of the Universe with a fetish for statues of sharks and other predators; Petter Nordlund, the strange author of the aforementioned Being or Nothingness: these people's antics, rubbing up against Ronson's own neuroses, will make you hoot. But to what end? It's like his friend, the film-maker Adam Curtis, tells him: this is just a tapestry of craziness. And, as such, it distorts as much as it enlightens. Even as Ronson tells you to beware Hare, Spitzer and co, his own compendium suggests that the madness is, nevertheless, all about.
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