Can LSD Fix A Psychopath?

No... no it cannot, but some "genius" tried this...

All right guys, it’s time to talk about naked psychopaths on drugs! Yay, right?

When I first heard about this insanity, I was reading Jon Ronson’s, The Psychopath Test, which we discussed previously in my review of Robert Hare and his work. In the book, Ronson spent a great deal of time traveling about and exploring many aspects of psychopathy and its perception in said book, and the result was interesting. I enjoyed his account, but of course, it is quite limited in content, as Ronson himself is not remotely an expert on the subject. He did do a fair bit of research into some of the lesser-explored areas surrounding psychopathy, one of which was, The Oak Ridge Experiment.

First I will include what Ronson had to say about this experiment. That way you are working with the same knowledge that I had when I first heard about it. I will be adding my two cents along the way:

Elliott Barker returned from London, his head a jumble of radical ideas garnered from his odyssey, and applied for work at a unit for psychopaths inside the Oak Ridge hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario. Impressed by the details of his great journey, the hospital board offered him a job.

The psychopaths he met during his first days at Oak Ridge were nothing like R. D. Laing’s schizophrenics. Although they were undoubtedly insane, you would never realize it. They seemed perfectly ordinary. This, Elliott deduced, was because they were burying their insanity deep beneath a façade of normality. If the madness could only, somehow, be brought to the surface, maybe it would work itself through and they could be reborn as empathetic human beings. The alternative was stark: unless their personalities could be radically altered, these young men were destined for a lifetime of incarceration.

Psychopaths are not insane. This is a fundamental failure in approach, as they are attempting to remedy something that isn’t there, to begin with. Why this is the mentality at the time, I don’t know, but I would guess this has to do with psychopath being equated to bad person that does bad things, regardless of the actual reason. No matter why a person undertakes what is considered a heinous action, they will be considered psychopathic by people that think this way. This mentality is limiting for the understanding of psychopathy, of course, but also for every other reason that people have to do terrible things, of which there are numbers of reasons beyond comprehension.

And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD from a government-sanctioned lab, Connaught Laboratories, University of Toronto. He handpicked a group of psychopaths (“They have been selected on the basis of verbal ability and most are relatively young and intelligent offenders between seventeen and twenty-five,” he explained in the October 1968 issue of the Canadian journal of Corrections ); led them into what he named the Total EncounterCapsule, a small room painted bright green; and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world’s first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.

The ages of people included in this group are two-fold ridiculous. On the hand, you have people that are too young to be considered psychopathic. On the other, you are giving developing minds LSD. That alone is an ethics issue, albeit one that is understood based on modern sensibilities, as well as the psychopathy and age aspect, but all the same, as useless as this experiment will turn out to be in terms of results, it was useless based on the cohort alone. None of the people involved likely qualified for a diagnosis of psychopathy, but we will of course, never know. This brings up other issues that we will get into along the way.

Elliott’s raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven-day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions—no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion(at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim’s own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another even if they were, in the words of an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, “in a state of arousal while doing so.”

This just sounds unhinged. Nothing about this seems that it would do anything other than animalize whoever is being put through this. They are treating them like they would lab rats, and keeping their minds locked into trips that they have no idea what the impact of those trips actually are on the brain. This isn’t micro-dosing, this is a lot of LSD over a long, unbroken period of time. How this was considered acceptable, even in the sixties, I have no idea.

My guess is that this would have been a more enjoyable experience within the context of a Palm Springs resort hotel than a secure facility for psychopathic murderers.

Elliott himself was absent, watching it all from behind a one-way mirror. He would not be the one to treat the psychopaths. They would tear down the bourgeois constructs of traditional psychotherapy and be one another’s psychiatrists.

Are you kidding me? You have people tripping balls and you think this is going to be anything other than destructive? I have never done LSD, nor do I have much of an interest in it, however, I can say that no one that I know that has done it would think that something about being on it would suddenly make them a qualified therapist. I have several people tell me the thoughts that they had while tripping, and how they believed they were enlightened and seeing God, but when they came out of it realized that they were disconnected trails of nonsense. Some of them write while in that state, and most of what they write down literally makes no sense.

There were some inadvertently weird touches. For instance, visitors to the unit were an unavoidable inconvenience. There would be tour groups of local teenagers: a government initiative to demystify asylums. This caused Elliott a problem. How could he ensure the presence of strangers wouldn’t puncture the radical atmosphere he’d spent months creating? And then he had a brainwave. He acquired some particularly grisly crime-scene photographs of people who had committed suicide in gruesome ways, by shooting themselves in the face, for instance, and he hung them around the visitor’s necks. Now, everywhere the psychopaths looked they would be confronted by the dreadful reality of violence.

“Demystifying asylums”? I do not imagine that a room full of naked people with erections, screaming incomprehensible sexual fantasies out into the ether did anything to accomplish that. Good lord, the ego on these people that they thought this was anything useful. There was no care about whether these people would want to be seen in that state. Granted, a psychopath wouldn’t care, but we will get into that in the next post.

On top of that, in these very heightened states of tripping, you are introducing violent imagery. Who thought this was a good idea for anyone, psychopath or not? If a person is inclined to violence, and apparently it was a prerequisite to get into this program (again, something we will be getting into a bit later) why would you introduce images of it to a mind that is not connected to reality and expect that mind to come to a rational conclusion about it? That’s dumb as hell.

Elliott’s early reports were gloomy. The atmosphere inside the Capsule was tense. Psychopaths would stare angrily at one another. Days would go by when nobody would exchange a word. Some noncooperative prisoners especially resented being forced by their fellow psychopaths to attend a program where they had to intensively discuss their reasons for not wanting to intensively discuss their feelings. Others took exception to being forced to wear little-girl-type dresses (a psychopath-devised punishment for cooperation in the program). Plus, nobody liked glancing up and seeing some teenager peering curiously through the window at them with a giant crime-scene photograph dangling around his neck. The whole thing, for all the good intentions, looked doomed to failure.

I very much doubt that the little girl dress-up was devised by a psychopath. That is something that was thought of by someone that understands the value of shame, and psychopaths don’t feel shame, so this would not occur to one of us. Someone that does understand it, and also has a sadistic streak would dream this up.

It would be accurate to say that a psychopath would be annoyed at the expectation of delving into deep emotional aspects as we lack them entirely and creating them out of whole cloth is kind of annoying to have to do once, let alone over and over again. You have to remember what you said last time, make it equally believable this time, and it’s just a lot of nonsense.

I managed to track down one former Oak Ridge inmate who had been invited by Elliott to join the program. Nowadays Steve Smith runs a plexiglass business in Vancouver. He’s had a successful and ordinary life. But back in the late 1960s he was a teenage drifter, incarcerated for thirty days at Oak Ridge in the winter of 1968 after he was caught stealing a car while tripping on LSD.

There is a bit more to this story than that, but we will address it later.

“I remember Elliott Barker coming into my cell,” Steve told me. “He was charming, soothing. He put his arm around my shoulder. He called me Steve. It was the first time anyone had used my first name in there. He asked me if I thought I was mentally ill. I said I thought I wasn’t. ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘I think you are a very slick psychopath. I want you to know that there are people just like you in here who have been locked up more than twenty years. But we have a program here that can help you get over your illness.’ So there I was, only eighteen at the time, I’d stolen a car so I wasn’t exactly the criminal of the century, locked in a padded room for eleven days with a bunch of psychopaths, the lot of us high on scopolamine[a type of hallucinogenic] and they were all staring at me.”

So… that’s the criteria to get into this so-called “psychopath” study? He stole a car. What about that makes him a psychopath? It sounds to me like this Elliot Barker guy is trolling for victims to include in his experiment. It is clear that the bar for entry into the padded room with other “psychopaths” is less than that of a medium-security prison, but sure, let’s just decide, without any kind of evaluation, that he’s a psychopath. You might be wondering, is there was anything about this guy that made people think that he was dangerous or psychopathic in any way?

Remember the part where it said he was arrested for stealing a car “while tripping on LSD”? Yeah, that isn’t what happened. He stole a car, and had LSD on him. He didn’t want to be caught with it, so he ate it. when he was booked he was feeling the effects of the LSD, and that is what got him a ticket to Oak Ridge.

“What did they say to you?”

“That they were there to help me.”

“What’s your single most vivid memory of your days inside the program?” I asked.

“I went in and out of delirium,” Steve said. “One time, when I regained consciousness, I saw that they’d strapped me to Peter Woodcock.”

“Who’s Peter Woodcock?” I asked.

“Look him up on Wikipedia,” he said.

Peter Woodcock (born March 5, 1939) is a Canadian serial killer and child rapist who murdered three young children in Toronto, Canada, in 1956 and 1957 when he was still a teenager. Woodcock was apprehended in 1957, declared legally insane and placed in Oak Ridge, an Ontario psychiatric facility located in Penetanguishene.—FROM WIKIPEDIA

“That does sound unpleasant,” I said. “Oh. I’ve just found a video interview with him.”

PETER WOODCOCK: I regret that children died, but I felt like God. It was the power of God over a human being.

INTERVIEWER: Why was that important to you?

WOODCOCK: It was the pleasure it gave me. I got very little pleasure from anything else in life. But in the strangling of children I found a degree and a sensation of pleasure. And of accomplishment. Because it was such a good feeling I wanted to duplicate it. And so I went out to seek duplication.

INTERVIEWER: People would be horrified to hear you view it as an accomplishment.

WOODCOCK: I know, but I’m sorry, this is not meant for sensitive ears. This is a terrible recitation. I’m being as honest as I can.—The Mask of Sanity (BBC DOCUMENTARY)

“Why were you strapped to Peter Woodcock?” I asked Steve.

“He was my ‘buddy,’ making sure I got through the drug trip safely.”

“What did he say to you?”

“That he was there to help me.”

Peter Woodcock could never be reasonably considered psychopathic. All one has to do is look at his early life, and it can be determined that diagnosing him with psychopathy would never be possible. Remember Peter Woodcock’s name, because we are going to discuss him in the second part of this post that will come out next week.

That was all Steve said about his time with Peter Woodcock. He depicted it as a fleeting hallucinatory nightmare. But a few months later, in March 2010, when I e-mailed Steve to ask if he’d heard the news that Woodcock had just died, he replied: “That makes my skin crawl. God damn! You see, I have a deep but unwanted connection with that monster. We had matching small flower tattoos on both our right forearms. We did it together—typical jailhouse tattoos.”

Getting a matching tattoo with a multiple-child-killer was just the kind of twisted thing that happened inside the Oak Ridge Capsule, Steve said, where nothing made sense, where reality got malformed through LSD, where psychopaths all around you were clawing at the walls, where everyone was suffering sleep deprivation, and Elliott Barker was watching it all from behind a one-way mirror.

But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected began to happen. The transformation was captured by a CBC documentary maker, Norm Perry, who was invited into Oak Ridge by Elliott in 1971. It is an incredibly moving film. These tough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to care for one another inside the Capsule.

“I love the way you talk,” one prisoner tells another. There is real tenderness in his voice. “You just let it flow from you as if you own all the words in the world. They’re your personal property and you make them dance for you.”

We see Elliott in his office, and the look of delight on his face is quite heartbreaking. He’s trying to conceal it, trying to adopt an air of professionalism, but you can tell. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even telling their parole boards not to consider them for release until after they’ve completed their therapy. The authorities are astonished. Patients never request not to be let out.

“His psychopaths”. That as a phrase is rather telling. He sees these people as possessions, not as individuals. I would guess anyone that enjoys drugs would likely be unlikely to request leaving a program where they are in liberal supply. I would also want to know what he means by “some”. Is that one person, more than one, half, or most of them? “Some people” is not a very clear number that allows vagueness to be hidden behind.

By the mid-1970s, the milieu at Oak Ridge became, if anything, a little too beautiful. This was when Elliott—tired and a bit burned out and wanting a break—stepped down for a while and a prodigy, a young psychiatrist named Gary Maier, took the helm. Oak Ridge staff were quite taciturn on the subject of what had occurred under Gary Maier’s stewardship. “He was no Elliott, that was for sure,” e-mailed one staff member, who didn’t want to be named. “Whereas Elliott to all appearances was a conservative-looking fellow in spite of the outlandish treatment ideas, Gary was a long-haired,sandal-clad hippie.”

Oh really? “A little too beautiful”? BS. If this experiment was working, if they were actually producing the results that they claimed, Barker would have stayed there reveling in the fact that he had come up with the strategy to deal with “psychopaths”. Instead, he turned tail and dropped the program on someone else. Of course, they are trying to say that it was a success, but behavior is far better evidence in my estimation.

Nowadays Gary Maier lives in Madison, Wisconsin. He’s semi-retired but still practices psychiatry at two maximum-security prisons there. When I met him for breakfast at the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Milwaukee, he told me how he first heard about Elliott’s program. It was at a government-sponsored recruitment seminar for psychiatry graduates. Barry Boyd, who ran Oak Ridge, was one of the speakers. He eulogized Elliott to the audience and recounted the program’s many success stories.

“Like Matt Lamb,” Gary said. “This Matt Lamb fellow had apparently killed people.” (The nineteen-year-old Matt Lamb had been hiding behind a tree near a bus stop in Windsor, Ontario, in January 1967, when a group of young people walked past. He jumped out from behind the tree and without saying a word shot them all. Two of them, a twenty-year-old girl and a twenty-one-year-old boy, died.) “And when they asked him what it was like to kill those strangers, he said it was like squashing bugs. He was one of Elliott’s. . . I wouldn’t want to say all-stars, but he had about as cold a personality as psychopaths have and he really seemed to warm up and benefit from the program.”

It seems like they are just interring people into a psychiatric hospital based on age and crime. I find the idea that this experiment only included males seventeen to twenty-five, a bit suspicious. Why only those ages? It can’t be due to health concerns because you can see an abject lack of care in the treatment of the prisoners. It can’t be because those criminals weren’t available, because that is just nonsensical. There had to be criminals that were over the age of twenty-five and committed crimes that were at that level.

When Barry Boyd recounted the Matt Lamb story at the recruitment seminar, some of the psychiatry graduates gasped to hear that he was now a free man, declared cured in 1973, a Capsule success story, and was living with Elliott and his family at their farm, spending his days peacefully whitewashing fences and pondering his future. He had stayed trouble-free, but the consensus was that psychopaths invariably lapsed into chaos. Inviting Matt Lamb to live with him was a huge leap of faith, like a lion tamer sharing a house with his lion.

I have no idea if Matt Lamb was psychopathic or not, but I will say that they didn’t either. He was too young for them to be able to make that determination, and it is clear that this program did not care in the first place. It certainly was a risk to share a house with a murderer, especially one that you tortured for a good while, but that’s another story.

But Gary didn’t gasp. He clasped his hands in delight. At the end of the night he approached Barry Boyd.

“If there’s ever a job going at Oak Ridge . . .” he told him. As it happened, Elliott was searching for a collaborator, and a few weeks later they offered the job to Gary.

That evening Gary had a spontaneous out-of-body experience. He took it as a sign that it was right.

“That evening Gary had a spontaneous out-of-body experience. He took it as a sign that it was right.”

If you have a “spontaneous out-of-body experience” it is a sign you need to go to be evaluated. Medically, mentally, what have you, but what it does not mean is that you are a qualified doctor that should have anything to do with the mental health of others. In fact, I would argue, it specifically means that you are not qualified to do so, so sit down.

“And how did you feel on your first day at work?” I asked.

“I felt like I was home,” Gary said.

All right, fair warning, this next part is going to make you question the entire mental health field. It certainly made me question it.

Gary has the thick, muscular body of a prison guard but the goatee and kind eyes of a sixty-seven-year-old hippie. He said he saw the men at Oak Ridge back then as searching souls with kind hearts, just like he was. He gazed into their eyes and he didn’t fear them.

*Head on desk*

If these people were actually psychopaths, there were not “souls searching for kind hearts”. How naïve can you be? That is some next-level projection there, Skippy. However, as I am certain that pretty much none of these men were psychopaths, and all of them were the lab rats of these idiots’ beliefs that they are gods, he was looking at victims of abuse.

“When you gaze into the eyes of another person, you can only see as far as his closed door,” he said. “So take it as an opportunity to knock on that door. If he doesn’t want to open the door, you bow to him and you say, ‘That’s fine. When you’re ready.’ ”

Dude man, you need to lay off the drugs yourself. Seriously.

“What would be behind their closed doors?” I asked.

“Freedom,” said Gary.

Oh, it gets better. You ready for this part?

And there was freedom at Oak Ridge, Gary said, freedom everywhere: “One guy had a real liking for another guy who lived in a different ward. He’d see him in the yard. So he’d simply leave his body, walk through the walls, make love to the guy, and then come back to his cell. We all said he should feel free to continue to do it as long as he was gentle. He kept me personally apprised of their lovemaking. I have no idea what that other fellow experienced.” Gary laughed sadly. “I haven’t had that memory for a long time,” he said.

Yup, you just read that. I know you didn’t want to, but I had to, and the rule is that if I have to, you get to come along for the ride. Let’s pretend for a moment that this thousand points of light genius really believes in this treatment. He thinks that this guy fantasizing about raping another dude and detailing that fantasy to him is somehow a good thing, and that somehow this is going to make him better. I don’t know what Mr. Walk Through Walls to Rape a Fellow Inmate was incarcerated for, but if it was sexual assault, maybe this is not the best fantasy to be encouraging. Just sayin’.

They were the best days of Gary’s life. He knew how to make these men well.

No. No, you did not. You did nothing but cause problems you ego maniacal nutbag.

“I honestly believe I was doing a job that most Canadian psychiatrists couldn’t do,” he said. And the hospital administrators had faith enough in him to allow him to take his psychopaths on a journey into uncharted waters. Like the Dream Group.

Oh, this should be fun, huh?

“People dream, and I wanted to capture what was going on in their dreams,” Gary said. “So before they went to bed, I’d have them hold hands and say, ‘Let me experience my dream life in this community.’ And then they would quietly go to sleep and dream.

”When they awoke, they’d head straight to the Dream Group, which consisted of an equal number of psychopaths and schizophrenics.“The problem,” Gary said, “was that the schizophrenics had incredibly vivid dreams—dream after dream after dream—but the psychopaths would be lucky if they even had a dream.”

I am a psychopath, and we do indeed dream. I don’t remember most of my dreams, and they don’t affect me in any way past being interesting, but I know that they exist. Maybe, and here’s a thought, don’t drug the ever-living hell out of people, and then expect them to be able to recount their dreams. Or, another thought, and follow me here, maybe they didn’t want to tell you because you’re a lunatic that probably shouldn’t be told… well any… any of the things that you might want to know about.

“Why do schizophrenics dream more than psychopaths?” I asked.

Prove that this is true. Can you? No. No, you cannot.

“I don’t know.” Gary laughed. “I do remember the schizophrenics usually dreamed in color—the more intense a dream, the more likely it’s going to be in color—but the psychopaths, if they managed to have a dream at all, dreamed in black-and-white.”

Oh my good lord, are you where that stupid myth got started? I always wondered where that came from, and I remember that it was in the Ronson book, but I guess I missed the part where this scholar among men proclaimed it to be fact. This does not even take all your brain cells to be holding hands to figure out. Let’s see if you guys get it faster than this guy did.

What time period was this taking place in? The sixties.

When did half of American homes have TV sets? 1955.

What would have captivated most children and would they spend a fair amount of time watching because it was brand new? Television.

What color was television? Black and white.

For this guy to think that people dreaming in black and white was unusual in that time period (he still thinks this when Ronson interviewed him) he would have to be discounting the massive effect the introduction of TV would have on society as a whole.

For the record, psychopaths do not dream in black and white.

All this was creating a power imbalance. In regular group meetings, Gary said, the schizophrenics would be subservient to the psychopaths, “but suddenly the poor psychopaths had to sit and listen to the schizophrenics go on about dream one, dream two, dream three…”

That sounds excruciating.

When it was time for the patients to vote on whether to continue the Dream Group, the schizophrenics said yes, but the psychopaths vociferously argued against it and were victorious.

“Just because of the power struggle?” I asked.

“Well, there was that,” said Gary, “plus who wants to listen to some schizophrenic’s boring dream?”

Literally no one. No one wants that. Why would this be something that anyone else should have to be subjected to? You know who wants to hear about your dreams? NO ONE. Keep it to yourself, it’s not that interesting.

Then there was the mass chanting.

What now?

“We’d do it after lunch. We chanted Om for maybe twenty-five minutes. It was so pleasurable for the guys. The ward sounded like sort of an echo chamber, and pretty soon they started to chant Om in harmony.” Gary paused. “We used to have visiting psychiatrists. One day one of them was sitting in on the chant when she suddenly jumped up and ran from the room. It was quite an embarrassment. We found her out in the corridor.

Yes, you should be embarrassed. I assume that’s what you meant to say. Not that she should have been embarrassed, because it sounds like you were leading a cult, not a therapy group.

You.. you shouldn’t be doing that. No cults. *smack with a rolled-up newspaper* Bad doctor. You should know better.

She said, ‘Being in that room was like a freight train coming to run me over. I just had to get out of it.’ ”

“She panicked?”

“She panicked,” Gary said. “She thought she’d lose control and would somehow be attacked.”

You told this woman that she was in a room with a bunch of psychopaths and schizophrenics that are chanting OM for the better part of a half-an-hour and you think she wasn’t rightfully a little creeped out? Dude, introspection time. For a guy that is apparently interested in leading a cult down the Primrose path of self-enlightenment, you should be able to figure this one out. It should not be hard.

Gary’s most vivid Oak Ridge memories involved gentle psychopaths learning and growing but foolish psychiatrists and security guards conspiring to spoil everything. Which is exactly, he said, what happened when it all went too far, when it all went somewhat Heart of Darkness.

Oh my… this sweet honeypie of dumbassery. And I am not the only one that thinks so, this is a memo from his medical director.

Concern has been expressed as to the direction of recent developments in treatment. The use of LSD appears to be undergoing some change from the approach originally approved [along with] the introduction of mystical concepts. I would ask you to gently de-escalate these aspects of your program.—MEMO FROM OAK RIDGE MEDICAL DIRECTOR BARRY BOYD TO GARY MAIER, AUGUST 11, 1975

Oo oo oo, let me translate.

What in the actual hell are you doing down there Gary? This is a hospital, not a hippy commune. Knock it off or you are out of here so hard and there will be phone calls made about you. If you value your career, it ends today.

“Okay, you saw that memo,” said Gary. “Ah.”

“What happened?”

Gary let out a sigh. “Right . . .” he began.

I bet I know. He got fired. Let’s find out if I’m right.

Gary asked me to consider what happens when any of us—no matter what age we are—go home to visit our parents at Christmas. It doesn’t matter how wise and insightful adult life has made us. “Two days with your parents at Christmas and you’ll all just be swatted back to the deepest level of the family’s pathology.”

He had that exact same problem at Oak Ridge. “We’d give these guys LSD. They’d have these marathon weekends, and they’d change, but then they’d go back to a general ward that wasn’t ready for the change. So they’d be swatted right back.”

Two steps forward, two steps back. If only the entire general ward—every psychopath in the whole place—could somehow achieve metaphysical enlightenment at the same time...

Told you, cult. Also, they didn’t change. That’s called tripping, and when your brain is, you know, tripping, it makes you act like a different person.

And then it came to him: a mass LSD trip! It was radical but critical, the only way to break down the deep pathology of the ward.

Oh dude, you are so fired. Watch. Watch how fired this guy is going to be.

“I saw it as the culmination of all the stuff I had done,” Gary said. “Give everyone the rite of passage of LSD at the same time. Or over a few days. Well, that was very upsetting for the security staff. They came into work and I said to them, ‘Just leave the guys alone.’ ”

You don’t say? The security guards weren’t keen on a bunch of criminals being let loose while tripping their brains out all at one time? I am going to guess that they complained about their safety to their boss, and you got sent packing.

And so the guards, bristling with anger and uncertainty, were forced to stand back as twenty-six serial killers and rapists ran around, en masse, off their heads on LSD.

You really don’t see the problem with what you did, do you?

“I probably didn’t play my cards properly there,” Gary said. “I think the guards lost their identity. The union guys probably thought I was going to get people fired.”

Wow. So he still doesn’t see what he did wrong, and he blamed the guards for the results. Just wow wow wow wow…. wow.

A few days later Gary received the warning memo, and a few days after that he turned up for work to discover that his keys no longer fit the locks. The guards had changed them overnight. One told him—from the other side of the bars—that he was fired and he could never set foot in Oak Ridge again.

Didn’t I tell you dude was so going to get fired?

“Oh well,” Gary said now, pushing what was left of his breakfast across his plate. “I was ready to move on.”

Oh, you lying liar who lies. No, you weren’t. You wanted to lead your little cult to metaphysical enlightenment and got canned for it, but don’t like the notion of personal responsibility. You are just like the criminals that you were torturing you just found a way to commit egregious acts without getting arrested.

During the years that followed Gary’s departure, Elliott Barker continued to win over fans from across the criminal-psychiatry community. Maybe he really had achieved something nobody had managed before: “For the first thirty years of Oak Ridge, no one charged with a capital offense was ever released from here,” he had told documentary maker Norm Perry. “But there is real hope now that patients are breaking out of their psychological prison of indifference to the feelings of others, a prison that to a greater or lesser extent confines us all. We are making people well again—people who killed or raped while mentally ill—we are making them well and able to be safe and useful members of society.”

Oh, we’ll see how successful that was.

Elliott’s best friends in the world were, he’d tell his neighbors, ex–Oak Ridge patients. His father had been a violent alcoholic who had beaten his family and committed suicide when Elliott was ten. I wondered whether that was why he’d dedicated his life to teaching psychopaths to be tender.

What… does that have to do with psychopathy? Unresolved childhood issues should not be brought into your evaluation of a construct. If it is, you aren’t seeing what is, you are molding it to be what you want it to be. Hard fail.

And patients were indeed released from Oak Ridge. Elliott kept in touch with many, inviting them to stay at his farm in Midland, Ontario, where they played racquetball together and built fences and planted crops.

Well, you're just dumb. That was just a dumb bunny move. Do not invite convicted violent criminals over to your family’s home. Bad things will happen to you, or them, or both, and you will have no one to blame but yourself.

Back home in London, as I began to piece this story together, I was bowled over by Elliott’s accomplishments. I felt terribly sorry for Tony, trapped in Broadmoor. So many psychopathic murderers—fortunate to have been under Elliott and Gary’s radical tutelage—had been declared cured and freed. Why couldn’t Broadmoor adopt some of Elliott’s ideas? Of course they seemed hokey and dated and naive and perhaps overly reliant on hallucinogenics, but they were surely preferable to locking someone up forever because he happened to score badly on some personality checklist.

Broadmoor doesn’t want to be sued. That’s why.

I learned that, fascinatingly, two researchers in the early 1990s had undertaken a detailed study of the long-term recidivism rates of psychopaths who had been through Elliott’s program and been let out into society. Its publication would surely have been an extraordinary moment for Elliott and Gary and the Capsule. In regular circumstances, 60 percent of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to re-offend.

Something tells me that this is not going to go the way that those involved tell themselves it went.

What percentage of their psychopaths had?

As it turned out: 80 percent.

The Capsule had made the psychopaths worse.

Oh.

One, Cecil Gilles, was declared cured and released after many intensive therapeutic months. Within days he had grabbed at random a fourteen-year-old girl, sexually assaulted her, and thrown her, unconscious, from a bridge into a creek. She managed to crawl to a nearby house and in through a window where she was found later that night lying on the kitchen floor. She survived but suffered severe scars from where her head had hit the bottom of the creek.

Yup, sounds like a real winner. I wonder how his racquetball game was.

Another, Joseph Fredericks, was released from Oak Ridge in 1983 and within weeks attacked a teenage girl with a knife and sodomized a ten-year-old boy. He was released again a year later and attacked an eleven-year-old boy. After being released four years after that, he headed to a mall called Shoppers World, where he abducted and raped an eleven-year-old boy, Christopher Stephenson. The boy wrote a note to his parents:

“Dear Mom and Dad, I am writing you this note.”

And then the note stopped.

When the police caught Fredericks, he showed them the boy’s body and said, “He was such a nice boy. Why did he have to die?”

That dude is either trolling the cops with that statement or had some disconnect with reality. I wonder how many of these guys developed some form of psychosis after the repeated doses of LSD?

Matt Lamb—whom Gary had described as not one of Elliott’s “all-stars,” but almost—ended his days in less inauspicious circumstances. While whitewashing fences and pondering his future at Elliott’s ranch, he decided to become a soldier. The Israeli army turned him down because he was a psychopath. (“See?” Gary said. “They have standards.”) But the Rhodesian army welcomed him and he died in a shoot-out with supporters of Robert Mugabe.

That’s weird, I thought that Matt Lamb was as gentle as a… well… lamb now. Sorry, had to. They literally gave it to me there guys, so it had to be used. Go figure, that guy was not nearly as reformed as Barker likes to pretend.

Most discomforting for the program was what happened with the multiple-child-killer Peter Woodcock. This was the man Steve Smith had once been attached to. He was given his first-ever three-hour pass one summer’s day in 1991. His psychiatrists were unaware that he had secretly allotted ten minutes of it (3:10 p.m. to 3:20 p.m.) to kill a fellow psychiatric patient, Dennis Kerr, who had spurned his advances. He invited Kerr into the woods behind the hospital and chopped him one hundred times.

“I did it,” he explained during his trial, “to see what effect a hatchet would have on a body.” Kerr died as a result of “chopping injuries” to his head and neck.

That patient is dead because of these two idiots, Barker and Gary-boy here. They decided for their own purposes that this dangerous guy should be allowed to have a pass, and the first thing he does? Go after someone that rejected him like the murderer he clearly was.

Later, after Woodcock had been returned to Oak Ridge, he was interviewed by the BBC about the murder:

INTERVIEWER: What was going through your mind at the time? This was someone you loved.

WOODCOCK: Curiosity, actually. And an anger. Because he had rebuffed all my advances.

INTERVIEWER: And why did you feel someone should die as a result of your curiosity?

WOODCOCK: I just wanted to know what it would feel like to kill somebody.

INTERVIEWER: But you’d already killed three people.

WOODCOCK: Yes, but that was years and years and years and years ago.

Translation. I like killing people and wanted to kill someone. I thought, hey, I haven’t chopped someone up yet. Let’s give that a go, shall we? Oh, I got caught, well, I did it because I wanted to do it. So there.

The interview’s most painful moment was when Woodcock admitted that Elliott and Gary’s program was kind of to blame, because it had taught him how to be a more devious psychopath. All those chats about empathy were like an empathy-faking finishing school for him:

“I did learn how to manipulate better,” he said, “and keep the more outrageous feelings under wraps better.”

Reality is a painful bitch, isn’t it? I don’t know how this actually taught anyone to manipulate better. You’re telling me that Woodcock wasn’t familiar with the flattery of ego manipulation tactic? Not buying it.

The Oak Ridge program was over. Elliott Barker, crushed by the weight of evidence against his life’s work, became a director of the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, specializing in counseling the children of psychopaths.

Just why? You don’t know anything about psychopaths. You might as well be counseling the children of aliens. You’re just as qualified.

“I have certainly always felt that Elliott’s heart was in the right place,” e-mailed a former colleague, who didn’t want to be named and who works at Oak Ridge today. “He’s been the subject of much criticism, of course, for his idea and methods and frequently has had malpractice suits against him. Yes, you guessed right, psychopaths from the program looking to make a lot of money. But Bob Hare and us have always agreed that psychopaths are born that way and not created by controlling mummies and weak fathers.”

“That’s lucky,” I e-mailed back, “as I am a weak father and my wife is a controlling mummy.”

That former colleague is just being nice, and that statement that the psychopaths are looking to make a lot of money… wow, wait until next week guys. Let’s see what you think about that statement after you read the second half.

They had psychopaths naked and talking about their feelings!” Bob Hare laughed. “They had psychopaths on beanbags! They had psychopaths acting as therapists to their fellow psychopaths!”

He shook his head at the idealism of it all.

“Incredible,” he said.

All right, I think that Robert Hare is a money-scheming pain in the rear, but he isn’t wrong here. This whole idea was nonsense, and anyone with working neurons in their heads would have been able to say so. Here’s a thought, don’t come up with LSD treatment regimes while on LSD. I have no actual proof that is how it happened, but you know that’s how this happened. You can almost hear the conversation regarding it.

“Whoa, things are like… so connected here. Like, we’re all one, man. You know what I mean? It’s like we’re a part of this energy that loves everyone. I bet that like… psychopaths… they’re just disconnected from the universal love, and if they could just feel that again, like… they’d totally be fixed. We should fix them. Then they can love everyone too, and there won’t be any more war or violence in the world.”

“Yeah man, that’s like deep… We should totally do that”

Idiots.

It was an August evening and I was drinking with Bob Hare in a hotel bar in rural Pembrokeshire, West Wales. He was a quite feral-looking man with yellow-white hair and red eyes, as if he’d spent his life in battle, battling psychopaths, the very forces of evil. It was exciting to finally meet him. While names like Elliott Barker and Gary Maier had all but faded away, surviving only in obscure reports detailing crazily idealistic psychiatric endeavors from days long gone, Hare is influential. Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used. It was the one used to diagnose Tony at Broadmoor and get him locked up for the past twelve years.

Yeah, he’s influential because he defends his empire with lawfare.

Bob Hare saw the Oak Ridge program as yet more evidence of psychopaths’ untrustworthiness. Try to teach them empathy and they’ll-cunningly use it as an empathy-faking training exercise for their own malicious ends. Indeed, every observer who has studied the Oak Ridge program has come to that same conclusion. Everyone, that is, except Gary Maier.

Hare got fooled by a bunch of criminals and has since built his psychopathy spotting program through abject hatred of people that he doesn’t even understand to begin with. It’s kind of an amazing grift.

“Yeah,” Gary had told me, “I guess we had inadvertently created a finishing school for them. There had always been that worry. But they were doing well in the program…”

Dude, your two sentences contradict one another. Seriously, you need to come back down to planet Earth. I am sure people here miss you.

They were doing well and then, suddenly, he got fired.

Hmm… wait a minute:

And so the guards, bristling with anger and uncertainty, were forced to stand back as twenty-six serial killers and rapists ran around, en masse, off their heads on LSD.

Nope. They were not doing well. Nothing about that sentence describes “doing well”.

“When they saw their leader be trashed like that, I think it empowered them,” Gary said. “There was like a ‘This is bullshit!’ And we got are bound.”

Oh my goodness… that ego. That is an impressively outsized ego.

Some of the psychopaths, Gary believed, went off and killed to teach the authorities a lesson—that’s what happens when you fire a man as inspiring as Gary Maier.

Holy lord… is he serious? This guy should not be near anyone in a position of authority. That is a very disturbing worldview. Dude, you are not that important. No one is. You need a serious reality check. They did what they did because they wanted to. They were not getting revenge for you. Had they actually been psychopaths, they didn’t care about you at all. You were a means to an end, and nothing more. As they weren’t likely psychopaths, you were their abuser. You are not a good person. You need to know this about yourself. Like… at all, and that’s coming from an actual psychopath. Self-reflect.

He sounded mournful, defensive, and utterly convinced of himself when he told me this, and I suddenly understood what a mutually passionate and sometimes dysfunctional bubble the relationship between therapist and client can be.

That isn’t a dysfunctional relationship. It is a power dynamic that is fluctuating into the realm of evil.

Let’s call this what it was.

Torture.

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry