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The Psychopath Test

[a Journey Through the Madness Industry]
Oct 01, 2019hinahusain rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
I found it a bit challenging to get into this book (I listened to the audiobook), mainly because of the author’s style of storytelling. He doesn’t tell you what his experiences and findings reveal; just that he had them, and how he reacted, and he leaves it to the reader/listener to piece it all together. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad way to write a book, but I think I was expecting something a little more research and science-backed and not so much the author’s first-hand account of his journey down the mental illness field of research. The last 1/3 of the book was the most fascinating part for me - the over-diagnosis of mental illness in children, and how the field of psychiatry isn’t all that different from a corporation or Big Pharma. It’s all about elite gatekeepers wanting to label and compartmentalize things they see and understand (or don’t understand) with the ultimate goal of justifying their own existence. Towards the end, psychopathy seemed like just another condition that may be present in a fraction of the population, but sensationalist arguments from within the mental health field have blown it way out of proportion, and now it’s come to mean nothing at all (just like autism and ADD).