It’s interesting to me that the authors chose to interview both Ronald Schouten, whose work I’m not familiar with but who seems to have a fairly nuanced view on the topic, and also Jon Ronson, who is a journalist most well known re: sociopathy for writing a book about the pitfalls in the diagnostic process and the treatment, once diagnosed, of sociopathic people.

I have a lot of conflicted feelings about Ronson’s work in particular, because I’ve previously read The Psychopath Test and a number of his other pieces (particularly about “callout culture”), and in him I see the germ of one good idea that’s corrupted by, essentially, an inexperienced and unwarranted over-optimism.

Let me explain what I mean by that.

He’s probably got something about the way that we use personality disorders to identify people we view as untreatable and unreachable and then, essentially, attempt to create markers of these intrinsically-dangerous humans so that we can effectively avoid them. I have concerns about that, myself: the constant use of “narcissistic” when a person really means “abusive” and the popularity of armchair diagnosing sociopathy and narcissistic PD and borderline PD bug me. In particular I am really wary of the way that BPD diagnoses are often handed out almost as a form of psychiatric abuse–once you get one, they can be like a permanent black mark identifying you as a Problem.

That’s not helpful, and we know from research on DBT and why it works that it’s kind of the opposite of what you want to do to mitigate BPD particularly–particularly because BPD, if you run down the list of characteristics, often reads like a longer way to say: “Abuse victim. Lots of trauma. No good coping mechanisms.”

Which does not mean that it’s not a diagnosis that doesn’t apply to a hell of a lot of abusive people, too. And it strikes me that what we, the community of people talking about these diagnoses and describing what abusers look like, especially serial abusers, so that they can be identified and watched for…

we’re not talking about the personality disorders, here.

we’re talking about trying to identify abusive people. who may or may not be abusive to all the people around us.

So those are the things where I probably more or less agree with Ronson. Let me get into the part where I think he’s really and truly dangerously naive:

Jon Ronson doesn’t really seem to understand abusers as a phenomenon of their own, and he is dangerously invested in the idea that there are “two sides” to any given conflict in which both are probably somehow right. For example, he doesn’t seem to understand why callout culture exists–in part, because of the democratization of marginalized voices!–and he appears to be really, really dangerously easily snowed by any person who is charming and kind to him in person, even if that person has a long and well-documented history of behaving abusively to vulnerable people to whom he has access.

It drives me nuts about his work. It’s very seductive, thinking that you’re the only person who can see the real, empathic person under the dehumanizing warning label, and given his career since writing that book–which seems to be empathizing with people who are labeled abusive, often at the expense of their victims–it really horrifies me about his choices as a person.