At first glance Jon Ronson might seem an odd choice of speaker for the Occulture Festival which returns to Brighton next week.
After all, the festival attracts esoterics. The audiences are likely to include many people who believe in something. And Ronson seems to specialise in not believing in anything.
He questions the orthodox and unorthodox alike.
His innocent approach has rather amusingly snared some subjects but also engendered sympathy towards some unlikely people.
Ronson, 45, said that he took part in Occulture in Brighton a few years ago – 2003 – and it went well. He also spoke during the Brighton Festival last year.
He seemed modestly unsure as to why he was picked to give his impending talk and said: “I’ve always felt that the name implies that they’re interested in the occult.
“I see my audience as a broad church. I’m a hardcore sceptic. I believe in trying to take a scientific approach.
“I completely realise that some sceptics are quite pig-headed and dogmatic about people who believe in things.
“I’m a humanist. I like people. I believe in tolerance. I may not necessarily agree with people who believe in the paranormal but I respect their right to believe in things.”
Although he advocates a scientific approach, those in his audience who favour folk wisdom may well approve of the way that his last book seemed to debunk one branch of medical science.
The Psychopath Test – A Journey Through the Madness Industry made psychiatry look more like voodoo than a rigorous and impartial scientific framework.
He confronted Robert Spitzer, the editor of psychiatry’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
Under Spitzer, the DSM ballooned in size – although he decided that being gay was no longer a mental illness.
But being a bored or boisterous child can be. And those medicalised conditions are proving highly profitable for the pharmaceutical sector.
Ronson asked Spitzer whether he had “inadvertently created a world in which some ordinary behaviours were being labelled mental disorders”. Spitzer said: “I don’t know.”
Ronson also interviewed the eminent Robert Hare. The gentle mockery of Hare’s widely used Psychopathy Checklist, Revised (PCL-R) cast doubt on the balance between inconsistent value judgments versus scientific measure.
The Manufacture of Madness by Thomas S Szasz was published in 1971. In 1990 it was on my University reading list. Good to see that the mental health industry still has much needed scrutineers and critics like Ronson.
I worry especially about people at a loose career end in their lives who decide to become counsellors when they run out of other ways to validate themselves.