This talk was about psychopathy and whether it’s appropriate to diagnose someone based on a checklist. Jon Ronson, the speaker, told about his encounter with a man named Tony. Tony committed assault then faked madness to get out of serving his sentence. Instead, he was sent to Broadmoor, a mental hospital that houses those with mental disabilities that cause them to kill and rape and commit other serious crimes. When speaking to Tony’s clinician, he discovered that they have accepted that Tony faked his mental disorder but as a result they have diagnosed him with psychopathy. This then interested Jon in what qualifies someone to be a psychopath. He discovered the checklist, and learned that about 1 in 100 people are psychopaths. Tony spend 14 years total in Broadmoor, the whole time trying to convince them that he was sane. He said the doctors there just looked for ways to prove his madness. For example, the said he was aloof and grandiose because he tended to stay in his room and not mingle with the other patients. They basically took every chance they could to check off another item on the psychopathy checklist. Ronson then decided to become more educated in psychopathy and eventually dubbed himself a ‘psychopath spotter’. He learned that the number of psychopaths rises among CEOs and business leaders. The reason behind this is that capitalism encourages psychopathy by rewarding things such as lack of empathy, glibness, and a cunning and manipulative behavior. Ronson decided to interview an asset stripper from the 90s named Al Dunlap, known for reducing some businesses’ workforces by more than 30% in some cases. He observed that Dunlap fit only some characteristics of psychopathy. He concluded with saying that we live in a world that loves to put people in boxes, loves to check the boxes on the checklist. Ronson saw that everything isn’t black and white, the grey area is where you find the complexity, like Tony and Al.
This TED talk was interesting because the speaker utilized visual and auditory aid to tell his story. There were drawings on the screen behind him that went along with his narrative. Also, there were sounds that highlighted important points in the story. He explained his authority on the subject by stating that he took a psychopath spotting course created by Robert Hare, the maker of the checklist. He researched this topic for two years and has written multiple books on mental disorders.
Ronson used two big examples to support his argument. He walked through the story of Tony, a patient in the Broadmoor institution, and Al, a former capitalist king. What he uncovered is that it is not easy to name someone a complete psychopath. He called Tony a “semi-psychopath”. It was interesting that he led with a personal experience. He said that he flipped through a copy of the DSM in a friend’s house and found that he had 12 mental disorders. He uses comedy like this throughout multiple points in the narrative. His argument was easy to follow. He may have a bias on the subject because he is also a journalist. He stated that because of this, he was able to notice that he was sometimes only using the information that he wanted for the book he was writing. This is what led him to the epiphany that eventually became his argument.
Ronson used visual and auditory aspects to evoke emotions from the audience. Also, his story was personal, and he let the audience hear what his thoughts were throughout the entire process. Using personal experience to evoke emotion was effective in his case. For example, the mental disorders that he diagnosed himself with from the DSM were all very relatable: generalized anxiety disorder, nightmare disorder, malingering, and parent-child relational problems. Another example he used pulled at the heart-strings of the audience. He said that we’re so eager to diagnose mental disorders these days that there are cases of children as young as 4 being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Appealing to emotion was very effective in this talk.
Ultimately, the purpose of his talk was to convince the audience that mental disorders are not black and white. Each case is special and different. I chose to write about this TED talk because I have watched it before and I thought it was very interesting how he conveyed his information. I originally chose to watch this because, just as Ronson stated, we love to discover what’s wrong with us. I recently watched a Brain Games episode in which they gave you a mini test to discover if you were a psychopath or not. This then increased my interest on the subject of mental disorders which led me to watch this talk. Also, we’ve been studying human nature in class with Jekyll and Hyde. Ronson and Stevenson actually support the same idea, it’s impossible to be exclusively one thing or another (good vs. evil, normal vs. psychopath). I find it to be very true that we, as a society, tend to categorize people in multiple ways. Ronson really challenged the validity behind that. Overall I thought this talk was very interesting and challenged my thinking on the subject.
