The Psychopath Test
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) can be purchased now at Walmart for $122.70 with free shipping (thank goodness; it is heavier than a sack of bowling balls). It makes a great gift for all the Scientologists on your shopping list and is perfect for friends living in pretentious homes. With its attractive cover it provides a welcomed addition to any coffee table center piece and is guaranteed to impress guests and intimidate the hired help.
DSM-V is a list of mental disorders and was written by a committee of mental health care professionals (mostly psychiatrists) and is published by the American Psychiatric Association. The first edition was published in 1952 and was 65 pages long. It listed 106 mental disorders including homosexuality which was described as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” It took the high priests of psychiatry twenty-two years to admit that homosexuality was not a mental disorder but was nothing more than a prejudice based more on politics than psychiatry.
By 2013 the DSM had grown to a leviathan-sized 947 pages. Based on the increase in the size of the DSM from 1952 to 2013, mental illness has increased 628 percent in just sixty-one years. Unless you watch cable-news shows or listen to talk radio, you probably have not noticed that insanity is raging out of control in the world. What on earth is going on here? The answer lies not in the wind but in the money trail.
Sales of psychiatric drugs amounted to more than seventy billion dollars in 2010. Brands such as Prozac, Zoloft, and Lexapro are as recognizable to the average household as Ivory Soap. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is an exemplar of “drugs gone wild.” Dr. C. Keith Conners runs the ADHD clinical program at Duke University and is recognized as one of the leading ADHD researchers. According to him, recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that 15 percent of high school-age children are diagnosed with ADHD. The number of children on medication for this disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. Dr. Conners challenges the rising rates of diagnosis and calls it “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.”
Allen Frances, a psychiatrist and editor of DSM-IV made the following startling confession when he admitted, “It’s very easy to set off a false epidemic in psychiatry. And we inadvertently contributed to three that are ongoing now.” He goes on to list “autism, attention-deficit, and childhood bipolarity.” Ian Goodyear is a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Cambridge University. He along with almost every neurologist outside of the gravitational pull of the American Psychiatric Association does not believe that childhood bipolar disorder exist. “It is an illness that emerges from late adolescence. It is very, very unlikely indeed that you’ll find it in children under seven years old.”
Who among us believes that 3,500,000 young people are suffering from a Ritalin deficiency or that two percent of children are bipolar? It does not come close to passing the “laugh” test and is the result of a system where a committee of the most reality-challenged people on the planet get together and compile and publish list of mental disorders for profit. “Big Pharma” then jumps on the money wagon and manufactures drugs that allegedly treat the mental disorders as long there are a sufficient number of "sufferers" to make it profitable. Drug manufactures follow the introduction of their drugs by dispatching an army of representatives armed with an arsenal of samples, gifts, and valuable prizes available for simply writing prescriptions. The result is one monumental scam and a national disgrace.
The same merry band of psychiatrists who created the lists of mental disorders are the same people who decide who among our fellow citizens should be confined to a mental institution and when (if ever) they should be released. How effective are they in making this important determination?
Jon Ronson chronicles two revealing incidents in his book, The Psychopath Test. The first case of psychiatric malpractice occurred in 1973 when David L. Rosenhan, a Stanford University research psychologist who along with seven confederates performed an experiment to determine what would happen if sane people somehow found themselves committed to a psychiatric hospital. Rosenhan and his researchers checked into mental hospitals in five different states complaining of hearing a voice repeating the words “empty,” “hollow,” and “thud.” Other than that they appeared and acted normal. As soon as they were admitted they stopped complaining about their symptoms and immediately sought to convince the staff that they felt fine and asked to be released.
This was not to be. Their average length of hospitalization was nineteen days with a range from seven to fifty-two days. Seven of the pseudo patients were diagnosed as schizophrenic (“in remission”) and one as bipolar. Interestingly the actual patients in the hospital recognized immediately that the imposters were not real patients. They thought that they were journalists.
After Rosenhan published the results of his experiment he was challenged by one mental hospital to send his confederates to their facility with assurances that they would detect them as imposters. And this is the best part. He agreed to do it but in actuality did not send anyone. This did not prevent the hospital from “detecting” a steady stream of pseudo patients. In just a few months they rejected 10% of their new patients. Rosenhan’s conclusion: “It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals.”
The second case of psychiatric malpractice took place in London in the 1980s when Tony (pseudonym) at age 17 was arrested for assault after he was in a fight that resulted in serious injuries to the other combatant. Tony decided to fake insanity in order to avoid doing what would have been at most five years in prison. Somehow he thought that life in Broadmoor (London’s most notorious mental institution) would be more pleasant. Tony prepared for his psychiatric evaluation by reading a book about Ted Bundy and plagiarizing lines from movies like Blue Velvet staring Dennis Hopper. When he met with the psychiatrists he quoted a few lines such as “he liked to crash cars into walls for sexual pleasure” and “he wanted to kill women because he thought looking into their eyes as they died would make him seem normal.”
Tony’s plan worked perfectly and he was diagnosed as suffering from “Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder” and was committed to Broadmoor for an indefinite period of time. He quickly learned that life at Broadmoor was far from the world of pizza and video games that he imagined and began immediately attempting to convince the staff that he was sane and had just faked insanity in a misguided attempt to avoid prison. Tony learned that it is much easier to be diagnosed insane that it was to convince the staff otherwise. It took him fourteen years to convince the psychiatrists that he was sane and suitable for release.
The attending Broadmoor psychiatrists realized that Tony had faked insanity but “discovered” he was a psychopath based on his score on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist written by Robert D. Hare a researcher in the field of criminal psychology. The “test” consist of an evaluation based on twenty factors with scores ranging from zero to forty. Famous psychopaths like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy are representative of those scoring forty. Hare estimates that 1% of the general population, 4% of Fortune 500 corporate top executives, and 25% of the prison population are psychopaths. Tony scored 29 on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist and that was sufficient justification to keep him in Broadmoor for fourteen years.
According to Stephen Hawking in his 2010 book The Grand Design, the council of Monza, Italy passed an ordinance making it illegal to keep goldfish in a curved goldfish bowl. They maintained that it is cruel to keep a fish in a bowl with curved sides because it distorts their view of reality. What “curved bowl” is distorting the human species’ view of reality as we search for the truth of any issue or question? Reality or truth is shrouded in a veil of culture and dogma. The process of science is the only tool proven able to penetrate this cloud hiding the mysteries of the universe.
Rigorous and careful observations followed by the formulation of a hypothesis that explains the observations and results is the first step of the scientific method. In the next step predictions are made based on the hypothesis and tested. After the predictions are confirmed the hypothesis is vetted by the entire community of specialists in the field of inquiry who are challenged to replicate the results and confirm the predictions. This is a vital step because scientists suffer from what the DSM describes as “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” making them a most contentious group of people determined to find a flaw in their colleagues’ most cherished hypotheses. Only hypotheses surviving the crucible of the scientific method are promoted to theory, the highest standard of truth granted by science. Although theory is the hallmark of truth and reality, there is always some element of admitted uncertainty in any scientific theory. This is the major difference between dogma and scientific truth. Science always leaves the door open to the possibility of new evidence in the future.
The essence of mental health lies in the ability to discern reality from the noise of distortion promoted by the profit-motivated American Psychiatric Association. The most casual review of the successes and failures of psychiatry to diagnose and treat mental illnesses leads to the obvious conclusion that mental health and human happiness are too important to be left in the hands of the American Psychiatric Association and the pharmaceutical industry. It is time to employ science to the study of the human brain and behavior. The tools of science have fueled man’s understanding of the universe while simultaneously increasing the well-being and quality of life for the world’s seven billion citizens. Surely a cross-disciplinary team consisting of neurologists, chemists, physicists, biologists and other interested specialists motivated by the truth not profit would develop better solutions for defining, diagnosing, and treating mental illnesses.
