Mad enough to lead: the insanity of politicians and the politics of insanity.

• Author: Steigerwald, Lucy
• Position: 'A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness' and 'The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry' - Book review

A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness, by Nassir Ghaemi, Penguin Press, 352 pages, $27.95

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The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry, by Jon Ronson, Riverhead Books, 272 pages, $25.95

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CLOSE FOLLOWERS of politics, and perhaps of the current election cycle in particular, must occasionally entertain the notion that a commitment to life in the political realm requires some degree of madness. The title of A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness offers a fleeting hope that author Nassir Ghaemi, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, will explore that theme. Sadly, he passes up the opportunity.

Instead Ghaemi cooks up a thesis that is deceptively simple and semi-convincing: Not only did some leaders suffer from mental illness, but mental illness helped them perform well during crises. Balancing this optimistic take on the political uses of insanity is a new book by British journalist Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A journey Through the Madness Industry, which takes more seriously the dark side of mental illness among powerful men.

A sane president is fine when times are easy, Ghaemi posits, but when the South is seceding or Hitler is on the prowl, you need a Gem William Tecumseh Sherman, not a Gen. George McClellan; a Winston Churchill, not a Neville Chamberlain.

Sherman was a disaster at business and pre-war life, Ghaemi writes, while nearly everything came easy to McClellan. But the manic daring of Sherman and his total-war tactics against the South, as opposed to McClellan's stale Napoleonic maneuvers, were what the North needed to win. By 1938 Churchill was allegedly past his prime and Chamberlain was well established as a respected politician, but it was the moody, manic Churchill who saved the world by recognizing and confronting Hitler's monstrosity.

The key to these successes is supposedly a stew of qualities that often overlap with the symptoms of mental illness: empathy, creativity, and the stark realism associated with depression. Hider, unsurprisingly, had a bit too much craziness to be useful and then turned dangerously unhinged. Intriguingly, Ghaemi hints that the 1930s Hider, though cruel and twisted, might not have become the world destroyer of the '40s without massive doses of methamphetamine administered over several years by his doctor, which most likely greatly aggravated his rage...