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Book: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Quotes of Book: The Psychopath Test: A Journey
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  1. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    The days that followed passed slowly. I lay in my hotel room and watched the kind of strange European TV that would probably make perfect sense if I understood the language, but because I didn't, the programs just seemed dreamlike and baffling. In one studio show a group of Scandinavian academics watched as one of them poured liquid plastic into a bucket of cold water. It solidified, they pulled it out, handed it around the circle, and, as far as I could tell, intellectualized on its random misshapenness. I phoned home but my wife didn't answer. It crossed my mind that she might be dead. I panicked. Then it turned out that she wasn't dead. She had just been at the shops.
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  2. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    Bedlam: an institution with a history so fearsome it gave its name to a synonym for chaos and pandemonium.
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  3. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    Practically every prime-time program is populated by people who are just the right sort of mad, and I now knew what the formula was. The right sort of mad are people who are a bit madder than we fear we're becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren't as anxious as they are. We might be paranoid but we aren't as paranoid as they are. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we're not as mad as they are.
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  4. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.
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  5. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    I couldn't see where the collection of Burger King figurines fit in, but I supposed there was no reason why psychopaths shouldn't have unrelated hobbies.
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  6. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    People who are normal {i.e., sane, sensible} don't try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weird, cryptic messages.
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  7. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    Serial killers ruin families,' shrugged Bob. 'Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.
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  8. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    Ask a victim to look at the positive things and she'll say, 'I can't. My eyes are swollen,"
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  9. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    Shall we go?' he murmured, perhaps regretting his decision to show me his army of plastic cartoon figurines.
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  10. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don't act like Blofeld-monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.
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  11. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he'd inadvertently created a world in which ordinary behaviours were being labelled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, 'I don't know.
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  12. Jon Ronson _ The Psychopath Test: A Journey

    Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal," said Allen Frances. "That boundary is very populous. The most crowded boundary is the boundary with normal.""Why?" I asked."There's a societal push for conformity in all ways," he said. "There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. 'Previously I was laughed at, I was picked on, no one liked me, but now I can talk to fellow bipolar sufferers on the Internet and no longer feel alone.'" He paused. "In the old days some of them may have been given a more stigmatizing label like conduct disorder or personality disorder or oppositional defiant disorder. Childhood bipolar takes the edge of guilt away from parents that maybe they created an oppositional child.
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