Chapter 10 and 11

  In chapter 10 of Jon Ronson's "The Psychopath Test" Ronson examines the history of how the DSM evolved from DSM I to DSM IV and he also discusses how Robert Spitzer helped contribute to the evolution of the DSM. Ronson writes about how there are now all these different types of disorders that people can be diagnosed with such as bipolar disorder and many others. He writes how many of these methods are hard to diagnose appropriately because there are no direct symptoms to the disorders which, makes it all the more easier to cause wrong diagnoses of disorders. Ronson writes how Spitzer sent in fake psychopaths to mental institutions to show that the psychology system was not really effective. His experiment showed how the mental institutions made lots of false accusations of people having disorders. When Ronson interviews Spitzer he tells Ronson about how some of the DSM III disorders could have been a mistake and these mistakes could have triggered more false convictions. Spitzer says that he does not like to think about his work that he has achieved as possibly being a mistake because he knows for a fact that some of it could have been.

  Overall, I thought the book was very interesting and really does help you think more about how psychology works in the world. I think that psychology is sort of a subject which, has lots of controversial issues which, makes it a difficult subject to study. I also was surprised that Tony from Broadmoor was released because it just seemed strange to me how they could know for sure whether or not someone was a psychopath in the first place and how they were cured. You never know if the person somehow mastered the art of being normal and accepting that he was a psychopath supposedly, and this can make the psychopath be able to get out of the mental institution. I also feel like it is wrong to diagnose pre-adolescents or adolescents at psychopaths at such a young age because at those ages is when they begin to learn more about how to express themselves and they are learning what is right from what is wrong. This can cause the people to act in odd ways but, this does not mean that they have a disorder it could just mean that they are learning proper ways to behave. I also feel that the way that Ronson describes pharmaceutical companies is the same as I learned in a educational film in sex class about how they just make all these medications to cure disorders when the disorder possibly do not even exist. The companies are just in it for the money.