The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry Read Online Free PDF Page B

continents, had become intrigued and paranoid and narcissistic because of it. They’d met on blogs and message boards and had debated for hours, forming conspiracy theories about shadowy Christian organizations, etc. One of them had felt motivated to rendezvous with me in a Costa Coffee. I’d flown to Sweden in an attempt to solve the mystery. And so on.
    I thought about my own overanxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality? I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness.
    Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?
    I told Deborah all of this. She frowned.
    “That Being or Nothingness thing,” she said. “Are you sure it was all because of one crazy Swedish man?”

2.
     
    THE MAN WHO FAKED MADNESS
     
    T he DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99. It sits on the shelves of psychiatry offices all over the world and lists every known mental disorder. There are currently 374 known mental disorders. I bought the book soon after I’d returned from my coffee with Deborah and leafed through it, searching for disorders that might compel the sufferer to try to achieve a position of power and influence over others. Surprisingly, this being such a vast book packed with so many disorders, including esoteric ones like Frotteurism (“rubbing against a non-consenting person in a public transportation vehicle while usually fantasizing an exclusive, caring relationship with the victim, most acts of frottage occur when the person is aged 12–15, after which there is a gradual decline in frequency”), there was nothing at all in there about psychopaths. Maybe there had been some backstage schism in the psychopath-defining world? The closest I could find was Narcissistic Personality Disorder, sufferers of which have “a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement,” are “preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success,” are “exploitative,” “lack empathy,” and require “excessive admiration,” and Antisocial Personality Disorder, which compels sufferers to be “frequently deceitful and manipulative in order to gain personal profit or pleasure (e.g., to obtain money, sex or power).”
    “I could really be on to something,” I thought. “It really could be that many of our political and business leaders suffer from Antisocial or Narcissistic Personality Disorder and they do the harmful, exploitative things they do because of some mad striving for unlimited success and excessive admiration. Their mental disorders might be what rule our lives. This could be a really big story for me if I can think of a way to somehow prove it.”
    I closed the manual.
    “I wonder if I’ve got any of the 374 mental disorders,” I thought.
    I opened the manual again.
    And I instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones.
     
     
    General Anxiety Disorder was a given. But I hadn’t realized what a collage of mental disorders my whole life has been, from my inability to grasp sums (Arithmetic Learning Disorder) and the resultant tense homework situations with my mother (Parent-Child Relational Problem) right up to the present day, to that very day , in fact, which I had spent much of getting jittery with the coffee (Caffeine Induced Disorder) and avoiding work (Malingering). I suspect it was probably unusual to suffer from both General Anxiety Disorder and Malingering, unproductiveness tending to make me feel anxious, but there it was. I had both. Even sleep offered no respite from my mental disorders. There was Nightmare Disorder, which is diagnosed when the sufferer dreams of being