There's a person in my life who seems to love assigning psychological types - usually quite unflatteringly - to the people he encounters. Lately, he hThere's a person in my life who seems to love assigning psychological types - usually quite unflatteringly - to the people he encounters. Lately, he has been pinpointing the psychopaths in his social circle. The way he describes it, it would seem that every tenth person walking this planet must be a psychopath.
Is there something to that? Are psychopaths - people who are physically incapable of feeling empathy, possibly due to a pathologically functioning amygdala - really that common, especially among those who rise to stardom in business and politics? Or is this a product of the way psychopaths are defined, and the overzealous eyes of someone who believes that they have the power to spot a psychopath without an MRI machine? That is the question that sends Jon Ronson on a quest in this book.
I picked up this book not out of a special interest in psychopaths, but because I found Ronson's podcast on the history of the culture wars quite good. Ronson seems to have a talent for taking commonly accepted truths (such as, the DSM lists the diagnostic criteria for real mental disorders that cause suffering, and should be treated if possible) and asking - how might a reasonable person question this truth. This then leads him to find people who take such questioning away from reasonable territory and into the realm of conspiracy theory and misinformation.
Ronson's narrative does pull us into some interesting stories, and I enjoyed a fair bit of the book. It does go down paths that don't seem relevant or necessary and serve to frustrate the reader instead of intriguing us. This applies to the opening part of the book, which centers around a mysterious booklet that has been disseminated to a group of scientists. Chapter 1 can be fully skipped by readers who are finding it boring, as I didn't find the book gripping until chapter 2, at which point it grabbed me whole.
But the occasional meandering nature of the book isn't my main issue with it. In the course of this book, Ronson repeatedly questions whether psychiatric diagnoses are real or if the whole discipline is built around people who love assigning pathological labels to normal variations in human behavior. On occasion, Ronson does mediate these musings with a mention that he knows some people whose mental illness is real and not a frivolous invention by MD-carrying shills colluding with big pharma. For instance:
I knew from seeing stricken loved ones that many of the disorders listed - depression and schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and so on - are genuine and overwhelming and devastating.
In the next sentence, though, he goes back to the possibility that the DSM is a sham, lingering on this side of the question for far longer than the two instances I remember of Ronson acknowledging the possibility that it is real.
It is possible to put a medical field under careful examination and bring out some aspects of it that may be outdated and should be improved. But it must be done with care and diligence. This book does not do this in a way that takes care to avoid causing harm and perpetuate stigma, even though I believ that is not Ronson's intention.
The part where Ronson opens the DSM for the first time and diagnoses himself with 12 disorders, then asks how can this book possibly be based in reality, reminded me of something that happened right around the time of this book's publication. A young woman came to a psychotherapist, suspecting that she had bipolar disorder. She was getting auditory hallucinations every night and occasionally was experiencing mild catatonia. When she asked the psychotherapist if she was going through a depressive episode, he answered "We're all a little bit depressed". Five months later, she went to another office, where a psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar and prescribed meds. A couple of weeks later, the hallucinations were gone and never returned.
The one thing that I did gain from Jon Ronson's books, though, was an interest in psychopathy. But I think a more thorough book will be necessary to make me feel like I've learned something about the subject....more
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