Welcome back to Readers Digress, the podcast where we read nonfiction books so you don’t have to (unless you want to). Join us, hosts Mollie Fox and Kate Kiriakou, as we use a nonfiction book as the springboard to discuss relevant themes and their relation to current events, pop culture, and our personal experiences.

This week we’re discussing Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test, a journalistic investigation not into psychopaths, but into the industry that studies and profits from them, or “the madness industry.” 

Using psychologist Bob Hare’s Psychopath Test—a checklist of observable characteristics psychopaths share—Ronson begins the book by following a series of prisoners and business executives who have either been diagnosed as psychopaths or Ronson presumes to be psychopaths. In the latter part of the book, after visiting with one of these individuals and finding him unsatisfactorily “psychopathic enough,” Ronson ingeniously pivots his book to exploring the second question—why is it so important for us to diagnose others in ways that help us categorize them? And how helpful is this, really?

Summary of the book (4:00)

Our key takeaways (6:49)

Our favorite quotes (23:58)

What questions do we still have? (39:15)

References: 30 Rock reference (S03E19); The Ezra Klein Show, “Best Of: Robert Sapolsky on the toxic intersection of poverty and stress” (10/10/20); P.S. Homosexuality wasn’t removed from the DSM until 1973.

What to check out next: Kate suggests The Butterfly Effect and Last Days of August by Jon Ronson (podcast series) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975 film). Mollie suggests MindHunter (Netflix TV series) and The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker (nonfiction book).

Music by Waterboi via Pixabay

Music by Waterboi via Pixabay