Two recent stories have me thinking that TDAR ought to open a Psychological Services Division. First, today’s NYTimes reports an ongoing battle on Wikipedia over the publication of all 10 plates from Hermann Rorschach’s famous Rorschach test, the ambiguous inkblots that a patient is supposed to interpret. I had no idea that these things were still used for psychological examinations, but it turns out they remain pretty important. Not only does the current Wikipedia article include the inkblots, it lists some common responses and analyses. For irate psychologists, “the Wikipedia page is the equivalent of posting an answer sheet to next year’s SAT,” according to Noah Cohen of the Times.

I love the SAT comparison for all the problems it raises. The obvious distinction is that one test is a standardized multiple choice exam and the other is an open-ended, more interpretive exercise. But the more interesting problem with this comparison, it seems to me, is that it suggests that there might be a “right” and “wrong” answer on a psychological exam, as if one could get a better or worse score. What would it mean to cheat on one of these tests?

This brings me to the second story, which I heard on the NPR show This American Life not long ago. Jon Ronson tells the story of young British guy who faked his way into a mental hospital. The man (Ronson gives him the pseudonym Tony) was heading to jail for a street fight and thought faking mental illness would get him into a cushier facility.

Tony didn’t have any answers to Rorshach inkblots, but he did have a childhood of watching horror movies full of the criminally insane. In his conversations with prison psychologists, he simply lifted Dennis Hopper’s character from Blue Velvet, then bits from Hellraiser, Clockwork Orange, and Cronenberg’s Crash.

When Tony arrived in England’s Broadmoor Mental Hospital, he realized he had made a big mistake. He was surrounded by the most violent and disturbed serial killers and pedophiles from all of the United Kingdom. But it turns out it’s a lot harder to convince people that you’re sane than it is to get them to think you’re crazy. Acting “normal” when you’re in such a horrific environment can look like a sign of insanity. Over a decade later, Tony is still in Broadmoor, long after he would have finished his prison term had he never pretended to be mentally ill.

Tony’s story is incredibly depressing, but Ronson tells it beautifully with a bit of humor. I highly recommend listening to it (free for streaming). Ronson’s basic conclusion is, “you should be careful not to tell people you’re crazy because you might turn out to be way too convincing.”

More generally, it all has me thinking about the idea of the psychiatric exam, a weird mix of traditional test-taking and total performance. In closing, I propose a TDAR exploratory commission for a possible psychiatric division, building on our findings from Test-Taking, Test-Making and the Final Exam.