A test you don’t want to ace – book review

NOVEL: The Psychopath Test (2011)

AUTHOR: Jon Ronson

Are you concerned that you or someone you know / love may be a psychopath? Well according to the 2011 modern non-fiction classic, The Psychopath Test, if you’re fretting that you might be a psycho, good news, almost by definition, you probably aren’t. However, if you are worried someone you know / love is the one with the icy amygdala, you have two options…

Either buy this book, or pack your bags.

‘The Psychopath Test’ is another mini-masterpiece from every reader’s favourite bespectacled Welsh dragon of journalism, Jon Ronson.

In the course of 300 easily digestible pages, through a mix of scientific research, journalistic rigour, and a desire to scratch beneath the seemingly inhumane and unredeemable surface of the psychopath, Jon provides us with a set of tools to identify the icemen among us, but crucially, he also provides us with the empathy and understanding to ensure these same tools of detection don’t become the pitchforks in a witch hunt.

For most of us, psychopaths are the lowest of the low, the least-human of the humans. We imagine them to be like reptiles cloaked in human skin, prowling around, looking for their next victim. At best they might break your heart, at worst, they might eat it.

So it’s understandable that there’s a popular will to take the good old ‘lock ‘em up and throw away the key’ approach. Better safe than sorry, right?

Well in the Psychopath Test, Ronson develops a different view.

In spite of having met bloody dictators, sadistic businessmen, and remorseless killers, Jon cautions against a seek and destroy mission.

Because after all, what right-minded person would choose to be this way? Who would want to trade places with the psychopath?

The book doesn’t only deal with psychopathy. It is a study on the blurry, vacillating line between mental disorder and personality type. It examines our infantile urge to make sanity and insanity a binary question, and queries whether the psychiatric community are as fit to adjudicate on high-stakes like this question as we like to think they are. But while the book deals with a serious stuff, Ronson’s sense of humour is never crushed by the weight of his subject.