Author and journalist Geraint Anderson has revealed his disappointment after renowned clinical psychologist Kerry Daynes told him he is not a psychopath. The assessment came after Anderson had spent a year embracing the idea that he was a fully fledged psychopath, a belief fuelled by his own research and media portrayals.
A self-diagnosis born from research
In early 2025, while researching his book How to Con Friends and Manipulate People, a parody self-help guide, Anderson came across the PCL-R, or Psychopathy Checklist-Revised. The test consists of 20 questions, each scoring between zero and two points, generating a maximum score of 40. In the UK, a score of 25 or above has traditionally been used as the threshold for psychopathy.
Anderson found himself enthusiastically ticking boxes for 'superficial charm', 'impulsivity', and 'lack of remorse', ending up with a score of nine. He notes that generally people get between three to six, meaning his score was low but still over double what the average American man scores. His wife, however, informed him that he filled it in incorrectly and should have scored maximum points for emotional shallowness, irresponsibility, and lack of empathy.
Reflections on a City career
Armed with this new information, Anderson began to reflect on his time as an investment banker in the City. He has described the Square Mile as a vicious snake pit, and as Daynes later explained to him, banking 'directly rewards dark triad behaviour' – psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism. He wondered if that was why he had risen from lowly intern to heading up the second-highest-ranked equity team in London within nine years in the pre-crash 2000s.
His rapid ascent, he believed, could only be explained by his adoption of ruthless, manipulative, and hyper-focused behaviour that thrived on the trading floor. Tricks such as fake calls to headhunters within earshot of his boss, taking credit for work done by a shy colleague, and subtly badmouthing competitors for the bonus pool were all used to maximize his earnings. Yet he must have had some kind of conscience, as his antics led him to write an anonymous column called 'Cityboy' and a memoir of the same name, both of which helped assuage the guilt.
Losing control of the narrative
After his new book was published in July this year, Anderson's story took another turn. Journalists and podcasters began to put him in the same bracket as Ted Bundy, Jack the Ripper, and even Simon Cowell. The satirical book praising the virtues of lying, cheating, and trampling over your grandmother to get ahead somehow became his psychological CV. One article was headlined 'I was a City Boy Psychopath', while a podcast appearance was billed: 'He knows how psychopaths manipulate you. He's one of them!'
Anderson watched helplessly as he lost control of the narrative, with his wife declaring: 'I told you so.' He faced two choices: indignantly deny the allegations or roll with them and hope they helped sales. He chose the latter and began to revel in his newfound status. He found that being labelled a psychopath freed him up to be completely disinhibited and extreme, while feeling less responsible for his more controversial behaviour. His self-diagnosis had become a 'get out of jail free card'.
A more nuanced appraisal
This realisation led Anderson to seek a proper assessment from Daynes, who had co-authored a book with a good friend of his. Using a series of questionnaires and two Zoom calls, Daynes concluded that Anderson was perhaps a 'situational psychopath', who could dial up certain dark-triad personality traits when circumstances demanded it, and that this was actually 'the sweet spot for success'. Anderson recognised it as a fair assessment, noting that after all those podcasts, he wasn't Hannibal Lecter after all, but just quite good at impersonating him when his workplace required it.
Anderson reflects that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and that diagnosing other people with broad-brush categorisations can be dangerous. Equally, unqualified self-diagnosis risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy if we allow a label to define what we believe ourselves capable of. He is not dismissing ADHD, social anxiety, agoraphobia, or any other condition, but recommends that anyone who believes they may have such a condition seeks professional advice before allowing an amateur diagnosis to become a life limitation.
Despite his clinical assessment by a world-renowned expert, Anderson's wife still thinks he is a psychopath. He jokes that she is obviously suffering from Spousal Infallibility Disorder, a condition he diagnosed himself.
