There is no evidence

There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.

Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test

More and more diagnoses

"Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal," said Allen Frances. "That boundary is very populous. The most crowded boundary is the boundary with normal."
"Why?" I asked.
"There's a societal push for conformity in all ways," he said. "There's less tolerance of difference. And so maybe for some people having a label is better. It can confer a sense of hope and direction. 'Previously I was laughed at, I was picked on, no one liked me, but now I can talk to fellow bipolar sufferers on the Internet and no longer feel alone.'"

Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test

Invention of mental illnesses

Someone would yell out the name of a potential new mental disorder and a checklist of its overt characteristics, there'd be a cacophony of voices in assent or dissent, and if Spitzer agree, which he almost always did, he'd hammer it out then and on an old typewriter, and there it would be, sealed in stone.

...

Any psychiatrist could pick up the manual they were creating - DSM-III - and if the patient's overt symptoms tallied with the checklist, they'd get the diagnosis.

And that's how practically every disorder you've ever heard of or have been diagnosed with came to be invented, inside that chaotic conference room, under the auspices of Robert Spitzer.

Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test

You can find more about Robert Spitzer and DSM on Wikipedia.

Pretend insanity

At an agreed time, each of them told the duty psychiatrist that they were hearing a voice in their head that said the words "empty," "hollow," and "thud." That was the only lie they would be allowed to tell. Otherwise they had to behave completely normally.

All eight were immediately diagnosed as insane and admitted into the hospitals. Seven were told they had schizophrenia; one manic depression.

Rosenhan had expected the experiment would last a couple of days. That's what he'd told his family: that hey shouldn't worry and he'd see them in a couple of days. The hospital didn't let him out for two months.

In fact, they refused to let any of the eight out, for an average of nineteen days each, even though they all acted completely normally from the moment they were admitted.

...

There was only one way out. They had to agree with the psychiatrist that they were insane and then pretend to get better.

...

One mental hospital challenged Rosenhan to send some more fakes, guaranteeing they'd spot them this time. Rosenhan agreed, and after a month, the hospital proudly announced they had discovered forty-one fakes. Rosenhan then revealed he'd sent no one to the hospital.

Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test

You can read more about Ronsenhan experiment on Wikipedia (also in Czech).

Eradicate empathy

Plenty of people dehumanize others - find ways to eradicate empathy and remorse from their day jobs - so they can perform their jobs better. That's presumably why medical students tend to throw human cadavers at each other for a joke, and so on.

Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test

Corporate psychopaths

He blamed psychopaths for the brutal excesses of capitalism itself, that the system at its cruelest was a manifestation of a few people's anomalous amygdalae.

Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test

I like to hurt people

I put notices on the notice board, and a girl turn up. Young girl. She was a second-year student. About nineteen. She said, "This is a personality test, isn't it?" I said, "Yes." She said, "I've got a bad personality. I like to hurt people." I thought she was winding me up. I said, "Okay, fine." So we went through the tests. When she was looking at the photographs of the mutilated bodies, the sensors showed that she was getting a kick off them. Her sexual reward center - it's a sexual thing - was fired up by blood and death. It's subconscious. It happens in milliseconds. She found those things pleasant.

...

"She told me she'd tried to join the RAF," he said, "because they're the only part of the Ministry of Defence that allow women to operate weapon systems, but they sussed her out and rejected her. So she ended up doing history. Hers wasn't psychopathy in terms of being a manipulative con man. She told me about her homicidal desire the minute she met me, which suggest she wouldn't score high on the trait of smooth deceptiveness. But at the core of psychopathy is a lack of moral restraint. If a person lacks moral restraint and also happens to get turned on by violence, then you end up with a very dangerous serial-killer type who lusts after killing and doesn't have any moral hang-ups about doing so. There must be people in the population who get turned on by killing but have moral restraints that prevent them from acting out their fantasies, unless they're drunk or tired or whatever. I guess she falls into this category, which is why she tried to join the RAF, so she could obtain a socially respectable opportunity to gratify her homicidal urges."

Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test

Normal people

People who are normal (i.e., sane, sensible) don't try to open lines of communication with total strangers by writing them a series of disjointed, weir, cryptic messages.

Jon Ronson: The Psychopath Test