Forensic Psychology For Dummies (19 page)

Investigating Mental Disorder and Crime

Having a
mental disorder
is about how a person feels, thinks or acts that reflects some abnormal distress or disability that’s not part of normal development or usual within any given culture. (
Personality
describes a normal range of ways of dealing with the world. I talk about personality characteristics typical of many criminals in the section ‘Getting personal with the personality of many criminals’.)

There are two main forms of mental disorder. The first is a mental illness in which the person’s thoughts and feelings are deeply disturbed and the person may be out of contact with reality. The second form of mental disorder is subtler, and known as
personality disorder.
Having a personality disorder means having an extreme type of personality that marks out a person as not dealing with others in the way most people think of as normal or acceptable.

Here are a few examples to highlight the differences between the two forms of mental disorders:

A person who thinks that external issues, such as upbringing, have shaped his life isn’t in any way ‘disordered’; he’s just exhibiting an aspect of his
personality
, like being an extrovert or a neurotic (see the section ‘Getting personal with the personality of many criminals’).

A person (like Daniel McNaughton who I mention in Chapter 1) who thinks that the Tories want to destroy him and so tries to kill a leading member of the Tory party is suffering a
mental illness,
and is likely to be regarded by the courts as insane and therefore ‘Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity’.

Possibly the first person to be found ‘Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity’ was James Hadfield who tried to assassinate King George III at the Drury Lane Theatre in London in 1800. The claim made was that Hadfield was suffering from the delusional belief that he, Hadfield, had to die at the hands of others. Trying to kill the king, he thought, was a sure way of getting himself killed.

A person who’s totally unable to empathise or relate to other people in an acceptable way is described as having a
personality disorder
. One widely discussed personality disorder is
psychopathy
, which I describe briefly in the next paragraph. But there are also other personality disorders listed in Chapter 10.

Note that
psychopathy
is a term applied to people who are impulsive and lack empathy or self-control; some may jump quickly to violence or be superficially charming and ready to take advantage of another’s weaknesses. I discuss the term in more detail in Chapter 10 when I look at how psychopathy can be measured.

I have a problem with the idea that someone’s personality can be ‘disordered’. I find it difficult to understand how what a person is can be broken in some way, because being disordered suggests seeking some ideal, probably God-given, personality that people simply don’t match up to. But that’s you, me and everyone, isn’t it?

However, labels such as ‘sadism’, ‘narcissism’ and ‘borderline personality disorder’ are used in court to explain why a person was unable to help doing what he did, as if he has a disease or a psychosis.

Having a personality disorder doesn’t label someone as a potential criminal, but a higher proportion of people with a personality disorder are likely to get into trouble than people whose personalities aren’t thought to be ‘disordered’.

In Chapter 10 I discuss how experts measure psychopathy and its implications for understanding criminality and also the different types of personality disorders. For now, my aim is to help you get your head around some of the major terms that come into play in this area. Also, try to clear your mind of the single-minded killer of the movies, who’s completely devoid of any emotions and just wants to wander around killing people, more or less for the sake of it.

Enjoying the urge to hurt: Sadism

Sadism is a sexual preference in which consenting adults enjoy inflicting pain on one another. One party, a
masochist,
enjoys being hurt, and the other, a
sadist,
enjoys doing the hurting, hence the activity of sado-masochism. Although not my idea of fun, the activity is legal and practised with the opportunity for the masochist to say ‘enough is enough’ and the other party, the sadist, to stop.

You have to be careful using the term
sadism
in a criminal sense. Consensual sado-masochism is rather different from the personality disorder clinically described as
sadism,
in which being cruel and demeaning to another person, humiliating them and causing them suffering gives pleasure to the sadist. A person with sadistic personality disorder is likely to be fascinated by weapons and violence and find aggression to others amusing. Although the term comes from the writings of the Marquis de Sade (who put forward the abuse of others as a philosophical argument, for which he was appropriately imprisoned), people with sadistic personality disorder don’t dress their liking in such abstract clothing.

Sadism arises when investigating the causes of serial killing. A serial killing often involves sexual attacks as well as killing, and the victim is killed so that she can’t be a witness. These are different serial killers from those who are sadists in the true sense and enjoy hurting others.

Loving yourself: Narcissism

You may remember the Greek myth in which the beautiful youth Narcissus falls deeply in love with his own reflection in a pool and after hopelessly trying time and again to get hold of his image, eventually pines away. The idea that someone so in love with his own image that he shuns all other relationships became known as narcissism, and such a person
narcissistic.

Experts have taken this useful, mildly disparaging word, and turned it into a nasty clinical condition.
Narcissism
is now a recognised personality disorder that describes someone wholly preoccupied with success, hypersensitive to criticism, self-important and who feels entitled to admiration. At the extreme, a person who’s narcissistic can be so furious with being ignored or his desires not being satisfied that he attacks or rapes to get what he thinks is his due.

If you know someone like that and want a peaceful life, best not tell him he has a personality disorder called ‘narcissism’!

Sitting on the fence: Borderline personality disorder

A
borderline personality disorder
is the label given to someone who has unstable moods, difficulty forming relationships, gets intensely angry without any obvious reason and fears abandonment
.
A person with
borderline personality disorder isn’t obviously mentally ill. He often can cope reasonably well on a day-to-day basis, but is likely to be often unhappy because those around him aren’t relating to him as he wants. Because of this he may drift in and out of various criminal activities, violent and non-violent, as a way of trying to cope with his emotional confusions.