Forensic Psychology For Dummies (103 page)

Getting Controversial: Examining Syndromes in Court

One controversial area of psychological guidance to the courts revolves around giving expert testimony on why the actions of key individuals, usually victims or defendants, aren’t what would normally be expected. Unusual or difficult to comprehend behaviour is problematical for the courts to digest, partly because judges believe that they know a lot about human beings and that juries should be allowed to draw on their own experience to make sense of what they’re told.

Consequently, if a standardised test can be used to support a psychological conclusion, it adds an extra level of expertise beyond that available to the court from personal experience. Similarly, if a particular behaviour can be presented as a sort of medical diagnosis, it may also be more acceptable and carry more ‘weight’ than mere ‘professional opinion’.

For this reason, a burgeoning number of psychological ‘syndromes’ to explain behaviour have found their way into legal proceedings. In medical terms, a
syndrome
is a cluster of symptoms that occur together in some meaningful way and are usually kick-started by an identifiable event.

Many lawyers and psychologists are uncomfortable with presenting patterns of behaviour in this way, as if they were some sort of distinct disease like measles or tuberculosis with little or no individual variation, when in fact large differences exist between people in how they behave.

But this reluctance hasn’t stopped such behavioural syndromes from becoming part of the vocabulary of forensic psychologists.

Post-traumatic stress disorder

The most common psychological syndrome to be used in evidence is
post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). This syndrome has a long and chequered history, with its origins residing partly in the ‘shell-shock’ recognised during the First World War and what was called ‘battle fatigue’ during the Second World War. (A similar phenomenon was identified in the American Civil War called ‘soldier’s heart’.) As a distinct clinical diagnosis, it gained strength after the Vietnam war when the difficulties so many veterans had in returning to civilian life were recognised.

Initially, all these extreme reactions to the experience of battle were dismissed by those in authority as cowardice or a weak personality. During the First World War, some soldiers were even shot for cowardice or desertion who’d now be recognised as suffering from PTSD. Indeed many of them have been posthumously exonerated. Today’s clinical understanding of the effects of severe trauma has helped to produce a more enlightened understanding of what people experience in the heat of war, but this work has also provided a framework for evaluating the psychological impact of many other traumatic situations.

Some estimates suggest that as many as one in ten of the population suffer PTSD during their lives. For example, if you’re involved in a driving accident and thereafter are reluctant to drive again and are hyper-cautious when on the roads (responding with a sudden surge of anxiety whenever you become aware of squealing tyres), you have the basis of at least a mild form of PTSD. If these symptoms last for two or three weeks, they may well be labelled
acute stress disorder.

The diagnosis of PTSD requires a number of distinct components:

A clear cause of a traumatic event that can be regarded as beyond normal human experience, particularly if it involves intense fear, helplessness or horror.

Psychological consequences of the trauma shown to have lasted for longer than a month and to include upsetting memories or flashbacks or distressing dreams, or some mixture of these symptoms.

The need to avoid anything associated with the trauma, such as places or people, or even with some of the memories.

An increased sensitivity to potential threats, especially from anything linked to the cause of the trauma, with associated anxiety and anguish, often indicated through sleep disturbance.

If some aspects of each of these four constituents are present, PTSD is diagnosed. The number, intensity and longevity of the symptoms are drawn on to indicate the severity of the disorder.

PTSD has been accepted in US courts as a form of mental illness and thus can be used as mitigating circumstances for a violent attack.

The New Jersey Superior Court accepted that a violent attack by a war veteran on a police officer was a product of a flashback in which the police officer was mistaken for an enemy combatant.