Reader's Choice Book Club--Frisco Public Library discussion

Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, says "Psychopaths are usually the people you'd least expect them to be." Scary, huh? Come to our book discussion tomorrow evening, and we'll see if we can track down a few -- maybe even in our own group! After all, the book also states, "Everyone is a bit psychopathic." Our own DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) expert, Katie, will be leading us in a discussion of many of the thought-provoking and controversial issues this book brings up. Be sure to join us, at 7 p.m. in the 5th floor City Room.

In "The Psychopath Test," the author writes that as psychiatric diagnoses proliferate, the boundaries of "normal behavior" grow increasingly more narrow. Some psychiatrists believe that "false epidemics" in psychiatry have occurred, the most recent being autism, attention deficit, and childhood bipolar diagnoses. Would you agree? Disagree?

Looking at the checklist without the training does make me nervous. It would seem almost too easy to mislabel an individual. I also imagine I would feel jst as nervous looking at a pilot's pre-flight checklist or a surgeon's checklist. Not having the specialized training makes my reading of the checklist far less sophisticated. So this becomes a question of how much confidence do I have in those who use the checklists for those behaviors.