An excerpt from The Psychopath Test, about a guest booker for the kind of daytime TV show where families mired in tragedy yell at each other.
“What did your job entail?” I asked her.
“We had a hotline,” Charlotte explained. “Families in crisis who want to be on TV called the hotline. My job was to call them back, repeatedly, over a matter of weeks, even if they’d changed their minds and decided not to do the show. There had to be a show. You had to keep going.”
Of course lots of jobs involve relentlessly calling people back. It is soul destroying—“Honestly, it was awful,” Charlotte said, “I mean, I’d been to university”—but not unusual.
At first all the tragedy she had to listen to over the phone would grind her down. But you need to be hard and focused to be a good researcher so she devised ways to detach herself from her potential interviewees’ misery.
“We started to laugh at these people,” she explained. “All day long. It was the only way we could cope. Then in the evening we would go to a bar and scream with laughter some more.”
“What kind of jokes did you make about them?” I asked her.
“If they had a speech impediment, that would be brilliant,” she said. “We put them on loudspeaker and gathered round and laughed and laughed.”
And, sure enough, Charlotte soon began to “feel removed from the person on the other end of the phone.”
***
And then Charlotte’s secret trick:
“I’d ask them what medication they were on,” said Charlotte. “They’d give me a list. Then I’d go to a medical website to see what they were for. And I’d assess if they were too mad to come onto the show or just mad enough.”
“Just mad enough?” I asked.
“Just mad enough,” said Charlotte.
“What constituted too mad?” I asked.
“Schizophrenia,” said Charlotte. “Schizophrenia was a no-no. So were psychotic episodes. If they’re on lithium for psychosis we probably wouldn’t have had them on. We wouldn’t want them to come on and then go off and kill themselves.” Charlotte paused. “Although if the story was awesome—and by awesome I mean a far-reaching mega family argument that’s going to make a really charged show—they would have to be pretty mad to be stopped.”
“So what constituted just mad enough?” I asked.
“Prozac,” said Charlotte. “Prozac’s the perfect drug. They’re upset. I say, ‘Why are you upset?’ ‘I’m upset because my husband’s cheating on me so I went to the doctor and he gave me Prozac.’ Perfect! I know she’s not THAT depressed, but she’s depressed enough to go to a doctor and so she’s probably angry and upset.”
“Did you get disappointed on the occasions you found they were on no drug at all?” I asked Charlotte. “If they were on no drug at all, did that mean they probably weren’t mad enough to be entertaining?”
“Exactly,” said Charlotte. “It was better if they were on something like Prozac. If they were on no drug at all, that probably meant they weren’t mad enough.”
You might think that Charlotte, over in England, with her ostensibly foolproof secret medication-listing trick, would be immune to inadvertently booking guests who were the wrong sort of mad. But you would be mistaken.
“We once had a show called ‘My Boyfriend Is Too Vain,’” she said. “I pushed the vain boyfriend for the details of his vanity. Push push push. He drinks bodybuilder shakes all the time. He does the whole Charles Atlas. We put him on. Everyone laughs at him. Couple of days later he calls me up and while he’s on the phone to me he slices open his wrists. He has severe body dysmorphic disorder, of course. I had to stay on the phone with him while we waited for the ambulance to arrive.” Charlotte shuddered. “It was awful,” she said.