Sunday, June 11, 2023

The Psychopath Test

 I finished reading The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through The Madness Industry by Jon Ronson, a British author. The book was published in 2011 and was a best seller in Britain and also here in the United States. As research the author visited known psychopaths, psychologists and psychiatrists. He visited jails and mental institutions. There is a diagnostic checklist called the Hare Psychopathy Checklist which has 20 items to score. He visited Robert D. Hare who wrote the checklist. He visited Scientologists who don't believe in mental illness nor the psychiatric treatment of mental illness. He visited one psychopath in a mental institution who doesn't believe he is a psychopath but the doctors disagree so he stays incarcerated. The story was interesting but I thought the presentation was a bit haphazard. This was definitely a light read and not a scholarly look at psychopathy.


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