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

3.0

A few months ago, The Guardian published an excerpt from The Psycopath Test in their Saturday magazine. It concerned the story of a man, endowed with the pseudonym Tony, who was convicted of serious assault in his late teens and decided to “fake madness” to try and get placed in a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison (believing the former would be a more comfortable environment to spend a few years). Tony used references to mental health issues in popular culture to populate his apparent delusions – a strategy that may have seemed risky in terms of prompting discovery – and succeeded in avoiding jail. Instead of ending up in a comfortable local hospital however, Tony found himself diagnosed a psychopath and placed in England’s notorious Broadmoor unit, living amongst serial killers and rapists and remaining unreleased for far longer than he would have been had he served his original prison sentence. In this book, Jon Ronson has used Tony’s story as a springboard to analyse how exactly mental illness, and psychopathy, are diagnosed, and what approach society should take to managing them.

... [Read the rest of my review here: https://whathannahread.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/the-psychopath-test-by-jon-ronson/]