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

I was immediately intrigued upon hearing about The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson, which is probably fitting seeing as I was a psychology major during my undergrad years at UCLA. 

People use the word "psychopath" flippantly in every day life to excuse the somewhat offbeat things that others do. But what is a psychopath? I turned to Ronson and The Psychopath Test to find out more. The statistics mentioned in the overview are baffling: "They say one out of every hundred people in a psychopath. You probably passed one on the street today." How is that possible? It's a statistic that's difficult to wrap your mind around. It's a fact that suggests that many of the people we interact with on a day-to-day basis could very well be psychopaths. 

I found Ronson's personal experience in The Psychopath Test to be fascinating. He tells what he has recently learned about psychopaths and how at a chemical level their brains are wired differently. It is a condition that is incurable causing their brains to be unable to experience empathy, leaving them to be "manipulative, deceitful, charming, seductive, and delusional."

During the course of the novel, Ronson meets an influential and well respected psychologist who strongly believes that many of the business leaders and politicians in our world are in fact high-functioning psychopaths who have managed to use their condition in order to succeed in the professional world. 

I found The Psychopath Test to be a fascinating read and loved accompanying Ronson on his "journey through the madness industry".


Quotes

• "There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things."
• "Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have are your memories"
• "If you're beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of these traits in yourself, if you're feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one."