The Psychopath Test

Journalist Jon Ronson wants to know what makes a psychopath and how the professionals who identify them go about it. The trail starts with a strange book that someone mailed to a group of academics. It leads him to Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist who created the 20-item Psychopathy Checklist.

Hare trains Ronson to recognise the traits on that list, and Ronson tries it out in person. He meets a Haitian paramilitary leader accused of atrocities and a corporate executive known for ruthless cost-cutting. He also visits a patient at Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, who says he faked madness to avoid prison and has been held there for years.

The book widens to cover what Ronson calls the madness industry: unorthodox therapies, psychiatric diagnosis of children, and profiling that contributed to a wrongful arrest. Scientology's campaign against psychiatry also features.

Ronson grows uneasy about how quickly a checklist can pin a label on someone, and about how confirmation bias colours the judgement of the experts who use it. This is narrative journalism with a funny, anxious, self-deprecating narrator, and it leaves more questions open than it settles.