Free The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson

Hare’s psychopath checklist!”
    And then our two hours were up, and a guard called time, and with barely a good-bye, Tony obediently rushed across the Wellness Centre and was gone.

3.
     
    PSYCHOPATHS DREAM IN BLACK-AND-WHITE
     
    I t was the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel who first suggested, early in the nineteenth century, that there was a madness that didn’t involve mania or depression or psychosis. He called it “manie sans delire” —insanity without delusions. He said sufferers appeared normal on the surface but they lacked impulse controls and were prone to outbursts of violence. It wasn’t until 1891, when the German doctor J. L. A. Koch published his book Die Psychopatischen Minderwertigkeiter , that it got its name: psychopathy.
    Back in the old days—in the days before Bob Hare—the definitions were rudimentary. The 1959 Mental Health Act for England and Wales described psychopaths simply as having “a persistent disorder or disability of mind (whether or not including subnormality of intelligence) which results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct on the part of the patient, and requires or is susceptible to medical treatment.”
    The consensus from the beginning was that only 1 percent of humans had it, but the chaos they caused was so far-reaching it could actually remold society, remold it all wrong, like when someone breaks his foot and it gets set badly and the bones stick out in odd directions. And so the urgent question became: How could psychopaths be cured?
     
     
    In the late 1960s a young Canadian psychiatrist believed he had the answer. His name was Elliott Barker. His strange story has all but faded away now, except for making the odd fleeting cameo—a once beautiful but now broken 1960s star—in the obituary of some hopeless Canadian serial killer, but back then his peer group was watching his experiments with great excitement. He looked to be on the cusp of something extraordinary.
    I happened to come across references to him in academic papers I read during the weeks after I visited Tony in Broadmoor, and Essi Viding, and was trying to understand the meaning of psychopathy. There were allusions to his warm-spiritedness; his childlike, if odd, idealism; his willingness to journey to the furthest corners of his imagination in his attempts to cure psychopaths. These were phrases I hadn’t seen anywhere else in reports about psychiatric initiatives inside asylums for the criminally insane, and so I began sending e-mails to him and his friends.
    “Elliott lies very low and does not grant any interviews,” e-mailed a former colleague of his, who didn’t want to be named. “He is a sweet man who to this day has a lot of enthusiasm for helping people.”
    “I know of nothing comparable to what Elliott Barker did,” e-mailed another, Richard Weisman, a social science professor at York University in Toronto who wrote a brilliant paper on Barker—“Reflections on the Oak Ridge Experiment with Mentally Disordered Offenders”—for the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. “It was a unique synthesis of a number of different cultural trends in the ’60s in Canada and Elliott was lucky to have a remarkably free hand in his improvisations.”
    I became quite obsessed with piecing together the Oak Ridge story. I fired off e-mails to no avail: “Dear Elliott, I never usually persevere so much and please accept my apologies for doing so,” and “Is there anything I can do to convince you to talk to me?” and “I promise this will be my last e-mail if I don’t hear from you!”
    And then I had a stroke of luck. While other prospective interviewees might have found my somewhat fanatical determination odd, perhaps even unnerving, Elliott and his fellow former Oak Ridge psychiatrists found it appealing, and the more I hassled them, the more they were quietly warming to me. Finally, they began to open up and answer my e-mails.
     
     
    It all started in