The Mind of a Murderer: A glimpse into the darkest corners of the human psyche, from a leading forensic psychiatrist

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This book was fantastic. I've read a lot of psychology/crime books but none as full as this covering all kinds of murderers, their reasons, their mental issues in detail, the victim, what brought them to it, the legal and court side, the verdict, the sentence, the consequences for the murderer and society. Amazing! I worked on profiling Ipswich prostitute murderer Steve Wright and have profiled rapists and stalkers, too. It is essential that I monitor my reaction or 'counter-transference' to patients. If a patient makes me irritated, exasperated or angry, I have to make use of what this tells me rather than react to it blindly.

Dr. Michelle Wards tries to get inside the mind of death row inmate Travis Runnels who slit his supervisor's throat while behind bars. View Details Sana Qadar: Jonathan's victim was his mother, and sadly that's a fairly typical scenario in psychotic homicides. Participants were divided into three groups: 203 individuals who were convicted of or self-reported a homicide or homicide attempt; 475 individuals who had committed aggravated battery/assault, armed robbery or other violent crimes; and 130 individuals involved in non-violent or minimally violent crimes. Richard Taylor: I only really fully learned the story whilst writing this book and family members were opening up about it. And obviously, I got their permission to say as much as I have said in the book, that this was a psychosis, this was a postpartum psychosis where she essentially lost touch with reality, although, like the case of Stella North that we talked about, it wasn't totally straightforward, but she ended up initially in prison custody at a women's prison, Holloway, where I later ended up working. And I think my decision to take up the post at Holloway may have been influenced by this family story, a sort of curiosity. Again, it wasn't something I was consciously thinking about when I took up that job. But she ended up in psychiatric hospital and had a range of treatments. She ended up having psychosurgery, which is pretty extreme and no longer used. And so her story helps illustrate the whole issue of infanticide, but it also tells us a little bit about the history of psychiatry and how treatments have changed.In his twenty-six years in the field, Richard Taylor has worked on well over a hundred murder cases, with victims and perpetrators from all walks of life. In this fascinating memoir, Taylor draws on some of the most tragic, horrific and illuminating of these cases - as well as dark secrets from his own family's past - to explore some of the questions he grapples with every Harold’s story is not entirely true, but a similar case took place in the US with a man’s offensive behaviour subsiding after a brain tumour was removed – twice. Sana Qadar: In the end, Lee Watson was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 25 years. Stalking is another issue that Dr Charles works on, particularly profiling the type of people most likely to commit this offence.

In the UK, over the last 10 years, an average of 80 women a year were killed by their partner or ex-partner. Almost all of them victims of domestic abuse. Only 2% of men died at the hands of their partners, almost all of them abusers of the women. Other women were killed during or after rape or other sexual violence. Most murders are committed by men, except for infanticide of a baby under one year old - then it is most often the mothers. (Out of 79,514 prisoners in the UK in 2020, only 4% were women). The author has discussed this in the introduction, and I am hoping that he is going to go into much more detail in the body of the book. A dark, fascinating and often surprising glimpse into the minds of those who kill, from a forensic psychiatrist who's seen it all' Rob Williams, writer of BBC's The Victim

I’ve had to narrow my list of subjects down but the really interesting elements that people want to know are still there.” In addition to Decety and Kiehl, other researchers on the study include first author Ashly Sajous-Turner, a University of New Mexico post-baccalaureate scholar; and Michael Koenigs of the University of Wisconsin. Unlike other NF I’ve read of a similar calibre, this doesn’t focus too much on the scientific side of things. Of course it explains the inner workings of the brain but there is a much heavier focus on the cases rather than the causes.

Sana Qadar: Yeah, I was going to end with you write in the book, you know, it's all about murder, but you hope the overall message is one of understanding and humanity. Seb’s problem was not prosopagnosia. He could recognise the form of his mother’s face. It was her identity that he questioned. Before the definable paranoid beliefs took hold, his perception of the world was accompanied by a general sense of doubt. He emphasised feelings of unreality; he was sure of nothing. Seb could not grasp a clear meaning, but there was an undertone of danger. After the days of Phineas Gage, scientists began systematic investigations of structural brain changes in criminal psychology. Most findings fit well with the traits of antisocial and criminal behaviour. doing house-to-house enquiries and seizing CCTV evidence. After a twenty-four-hour search, the cold, dead body of her newborn was found in the large communal waste disposal bin at the bottom of a rubbish chute, which originated outside the door of her flat. failures of social services and seemed to ignore the culpability of the parents (another example of our contemporary blame culture). I have seen so many cases of criminal neglect leading to death and deliberate lethal abuse, but a couple of examples linger in my memory.

Dr. Michelle Ward goes behind prison walls to find out why Karl Knapp gunned down his estranged girlfriend and two other people during a drug-fueled spree. View Details And then, of course, the other group are the psychotic homicides, so these account for roughly 8% to 10% of all murders in most industrialised countries. And these are either people with established serious mental illness who unfortunately perhaps drop out of treatment and end up psychotic, or about a third are first-onset cases. So, people who are not known to have a mental illness, who tragically present for the first time with homicide, and in fact the biggest study on that by Olav Nielssen who's a psychiatrist based in Sydney, who surveyed epidemiology all around the world, and he made that crucial finding. But actually stranger homicide by somebody with mental illness is actually pretty rare.