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

have seen on his visit to Kingsley Hall?” I asked.
    “Some rooms were, you know, beguilingly draped in Indian silks,” Adrian said. “Schizophrenics like Ian Spurling—who eventually became Freddie Mercury’s costume designer—would dance and sing and paint and recite poetry and rub shoulders with visiting freethinking celebrities like Timothy Leary and Sean Connery.” Adrian paused. “And then there were other, less beguiling rooms, like Mary Barnes’s shit room down in the basement.”
    “Mary Barnes’s shit room?” I asked. “You mean like the worst room in the house?”
    “I was seven when I first visited Kingsley Hall,” Adrian said. “My father said to me, ‘There’s a very special person down in the basement who wants to meet you.’ So I went down there and the first thing I said was, ‘What’s that smell of shit?’”
    The smell of shit was—Adrian told me—coming from a chronic schizophrenic by the name of Mary Barnes. She represented a conflict at Kingsley Hall. Laing held madness in great esteem. He believed the insane possessed a special knowledge—only they understood the true madness that permeated society. But Mary Barnes, down in the basement, hated being mad. It was agony for her, and she desperately wanted to be normal.
    Her needs won out. Laing and his fellow Kingsley Hall psychiatrists encouraged her to regress to the infantile state in the hope that she might grow up once again, but sane. The plan wasn’t going well. She was constantly naked, smearing herself and the walls in her own excreta, communicating only by squeals and refusing to eat unless someone fed her from a bottle.
    “The smell of Mary Barnes’s shit was proving a real ideological problem,” Adrian said. “They used to have long discussions about it. Mary needed to be free to roll around in her own shit, but the smell of it would impinge upon other people’s freedom to smell fresh air. So they spent a lot of time trying to formulate a shit policy.”
    “And what about your father?” I asked. “What was he like in the midst of all this?”
    Adrian coughed. “Well,” he said, “the downside of having no barriers between doctors and patients was that everyone became a patient.”
    There was a silence. “When I envisaged Kingsley Hall, I imagined everyone becoming a doctor,” I said. “I suppose I was feeling quite optimistic about humanity.”
    “Nope,” Adrian said. “Everyone became a patient. Kingsley Hall was very wild. There was an unhealthy respect for madness there. The first thing my father did was lose himself completely, go crazy, because there was a part of him that was totally fucking mad. In his case, it was a drunken, wild madness.”
    “That’s an incredibly depressing thought,” I said, “that if you’re in a room and at one end lies madness and at the other end lies sanity, it is human nature to veer towards the madness end.”
    Adrian nodded. He said visitors like Elliott Barker would have been kept away from the darkest corners, like Mary Barnes’s shit room and his father’s drunken insanity, and instead steered toward the Indian silks and the delightful poetry evenings with Sean Connery in attendance.
    “By the way,” I said, “did they ever manage to formulate a successful shit policy?”
    “Yes,” Adrian said. “One of my dad’s colleagues said, ‘She wants to paint with her shit. Maybe we should give her paints .’ And it worked.”
    Mary Barnes eventually became a celebrated and widely exhibited artist. Her paintings were greatly admired in the 1960s and 1970s for illustrating the mad, colorful, painful, exuberant, complicated inner life of a schizophrenic.
    “And it got rid of the smell of shit,” Adrian said.
     
     
    Elliott Barker returned from London, his head a jumble of radical ideas garnered from his odyssey, and applied for work at a unit for psychopaths inside the Oak Ridge hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario. Impressed by the details of