Forensic Psychology For Dummies (20 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
Suffering psychosis
People who know that they’re doing something wrong and are clearly in touch with reality, are described in law as being
mens rea
(you can find more on
‘mens rea’
in Chapter 1). When committing a crime, the criminal is fully aware that his action is wrong. (Some professionals are unsure whether a person with a personality disorder does have
mens rea
, but that’s something to be sorted out in court.)
The general public sometimes assumes that a person who commits a horrific crime for no obvious reason, and which is therefore ‘mindless’ or ‘pointless’, must be out of touch with reality, insane, mad or suffering from a mental illness.
Yet, the most inexplicable of criminals – such as ‘serial killers’ who appear to wander around killing people more or less at random for no obvious reason – are rarely regarded in court as mentally ill and therefore unfit to face a trial. This situation is difficult to understand until you realise that the courts’ definition of mental illness is rather different and more specific than what the term means in everyday life. For most courts (as with the anecdote about Daniel McNaughton in Chapter 1), the 150-year-old idea that the person has to exhibit a ‘disease of the mind’ to be declared criminally insane still exists. This section discusses what does count as ‘insane’ in court.
Psychosis
is the legally accepted mental illness that goes beyond the person feeling anxious and sad and beyond what is called functioning psychopaths. Broadly, the psychotic person must have at least one of the following symptoms:
Intense paranoia:
Believing that others, sometimes unknown and invisible, are seeking to hurt him and disturb him, possibly even controlling his mind.
Seeing or hearing things that don’t exist and believing that they’re present.
A belief in some unlikely set of circumstances, most notably that he’s the Prime Minister or Napoleon (although the latter is unlikely as he’s been dead a long time).
Although a person may experience some of the symptoms of psychosis some of the time, the symptoms are only considered significant and part of an underlying illness when they become extreme and/or deeply disturbing, such as having schizophrenia. (Check out the sidebar ‘Sorting out Jekyll from Hyde’).
Sorting out Jekyll from Hyde
The term schizophrenia is widely misused in day-to-day conversation to suggest a ‘split personality’; the pleasant civilised Dr Jekyll by day and dangerous, destructive Mr Hyde at night.
Schizophrenia
is a psychosis, which can be paranoid, hallucinatory, delusional, or any combination. Neither is schizophrenia
bi-polar disorder
, in which the person has extreme mood swings, which used to be called
manic-depressive psychosis
. The mood can swing from deep depression to hyperactive, irrationally optimistic behaviour.Multiple personality –
in which a person behaves as a completely different person from one occasion to the next, each character apparently being unaware of the other – is extremely rare. Its exotic and potentially dramatic nature, however, caused the few recorded occurrences to take on mythical properties, giving rise to books and films. Many experts are deeply suspicious of the phenomenon of multiple personality as a mental illness, especially when used as a defence in court.
Extreme depression can also be a psychotic state, and is far more than just feeling very sad. Severe depression can be associated with intense feelings of despair and lack of self-worth, and even lead to being suicidal.
A form of mental illness that courts sometimes do accept is called
automatism
. Here the person acts automatically without being aware of what he’s doing, such as what’s commonly called ‘sleep walking’. Automatism has been allowed as a defence in some challenging cases.
An ex-soldier claimed that he saw a man hurting a child and that caused him to relive an experience in battle, so that he moved into involuntary automatic mode and killed the man.
A person who commits a crime and the courts deem the person to be psychotic and not responsible for his actions may send the person to a special institution that can manage, and possibly treat the condition, rather than sending the person to prison. In general, psychoses such as schizophrenia aren’t a major cause of crime. The mass media are ready to point out that a killer is schizophrenic, implying that’s why he acted violently, but the media ignore the fact that the vast majority of people with a psychosis are much more a danger to themselves than anyone else. So although many people in prison have some form of mental illness, only a small percentage are suffering from a psychosis. That number may be higher than in the population at large, but who’s to say that this isn’t because of how people with psychosis are treated by the rest of society instead of psychosis being a direct cause of crime.
Understanding Why Not Everyone Is a Criminal
Although
Forensic Psychology For Dummies
talks mainly about criminals, most of the population shuns a life of crime. Even in some social subgroups where criminals are widespread – and accepting that social and psychological factors may increase the risk of criminality – the great majority of people (including those from the most underprivileged communities), don’t commit serious crimes. In this section, I take a look at why there aren’t more criminals in society.