Dr Duncan Harding (2024) The Criminal Mind.

Most authors of what is called non-fiction, but used to be called factual (before the advent of fake news) let the reader know who they are and why they’re qualified to write the book, you’re reading. It’s very much in the same way author’s query agents or publishers. On the cover of the book, it tells us potential readers who he is and what he does: ‘The Extraordinary Life and Career of Britain’s Leading Forensic Psychiatrist’.

Dr Duncan tells us he’s working class, his mum suffered from childhood polio (we forget how debilitating these diseases were, note the reaction to Covid as a fake disease) caught an infection from a public swimming pool and lost the use of her legs. At school, bullies described her as a ‘spaz’. His dad beat him and he hated him and blamed him for his debilitating headaches, only to find it was his mum who was at fault. Her fears of the medical establishment had led her NOT to take him to the doctor but to keep him off school for a year—a year in which he learned how to play the guitar and fell in love with music—but gave him encephalitis. Unlike his middle-class colleagues, he claims his environment was of ‘cruelty, abuse and poverty’.  

His backstory is worked into tales of the mad, the bad, and the sad. A forensic psychiatrist’s job is to write reports for the procurator fiscal and appear as an expert witness in criminal cases. Usually, the defence will hire their own forensic psychiatrist, as will the prosecutor’s office. The latter’s role follows the usual tramlines of trying to convince the jury that the defendant is not mad, but a sad case of the accused trying to be classified as legally insane at the time of the offence, so he or she will be tried for manslaughter and not murder and more likely to be treated for an ongoing health condition that can be treated and far more likely to be let out earlier.   

Most of us will be familiar with the wisecracking Randle P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  Not mad. Certainly not sad. And bad enough to be human and endearing.

He accepts that many leaders of industry or of the American nation don’t directly kill people or torture animals or have a criminal record, but they have psychopathic traits. His interest is in a smaller cohort that is more newsworthy and has committed notorious offences. He has worked with both adult and child offenders. A follow-up question he asks is about prevention. Narcissistic psychopaths, like the moron’s moron Trump, are adult and untreatable. Empathy is as foreign to them as any form of aid. His question in treating the untreatable is whether it would have made any difference if he’d got them young enough to make a difference.  

A working example occurs in a unit he doesn’t name, other than a London, ‘high-security hospital’, I’ll  call Broodmoor. A nurse. Picture her as female. Beautiful. Hugely empathetic. Working with people she believes she can help. She is respected and liked in return. A patient fashions a knife out of some door parts. Sneaks up behind her when she’s watching afternoon telly with other patients and stabs her in the eye. He doesn’t need a reason. He’s a psychopath. I get that. In a different setting, he’d be called evil and treated as such. I get that too, but would be hugely sympathetic to those that would place such monsters on a burning pyre. Hand me a taper.

In the neo-Nazi handbook, Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche warns readers ‘He who fights with monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.’  

   Offering solutions is simple when employing a divisive ‘us versus them’ approach. My anger—a positive attribute, since good writing must evoke reader’s investment in characters—stemmed less from the psychopath’s eye-stabbing of the beautiful, committed nurse (would I have cared less if she was ugly or a guy or less dedicated?—yes, probably) but was more geared towards the impatient patient that got in the way and demanded his medication because that was his due, even though someone was writhing round the floor, maimed. Someone to the unmedicated psychopath has no purpose other to get in the way of his needs. This is unmedicated Trump land with compassion a foreign element to be stamped on.

‘So, Dr Harding, it seems that a person can kill at random, leaving bereavement and mayhem in their wake, and be interviewed by you, say they hear voices and…lo and behold! They are no longer culpable.’

‘…Mention a few voices and it’s a game changer!’

Harding has to explain to the jury why that’s not the case. Having lived with someone who suffered from such a condition, I need no convincing. Some things cannot be faked. Some people are absolutely fucking bonkers. That does not necessarily mean they want to maim or murder or hurt themselves. For the few defendants that do they may be guilty of horrendous crimes, but where MOTIVE is a blank space or therein madness lies.

Harding gives examples. Layla the convicted paedophile is wholly innocent, but as neurodiverse doesn’t seem to really understand the crime she readily admitted to. She was being held in a secure children’s unit. Harding reminds us, ‘Sexual offences are carried out by very young children more often than you think.’ She’s aged twelve but looks ten. She loves ponies. A little-girl habit. She became obsessed with them and joined a Chatroom to talk about ponies with other little girls. She got loads of messages into her Dropbox. One was from Sadie3245. She loved ponies too and had two. She sent pictures. They weren’t of ponies, but ‘weird stuff.’

Layla did what she always did and organised the pictures and categorised them. ‘Stuff with dogs and ladies and little kids.’ She wasn’t sure why she did that. When a second drop arrived, she did the same thing. Then, the police arrived. And she readily admitted she was a paedophile. Harding’s job was to convince a jury she wasn’t. He failed.

He also failed in another case, which seemed straightforward. Jonathan Bowyer had strangled his wife, put her body in a bag in the cupboard and left his stepdaughter clinging to her mother and he’d gone on holiday to Spain.

Hardie claimed he was a psychopath that had a history of strangling his partners. He was guilty of murder, not manslaughter. He knew what he was doing. He’d done it before. Seven of them were waiting to be called as witnesses. The judge thought their evidence might sway the jury and so they were not called. His defence lawyer painted Bowyer’s attempt to attack the procurator as further evidence he was mentally ill. The jury found him guilty of manslaughter, not murder. Nobody with any sense could behave in that way.

An understandable mistake we all make. Looking for evidence that confirms what we already suspect or know. Harding’s job is to look beneath appearance and to bring coherence to that which is not apparent. His job as a forensic psychiatrist is akin to Val McDermid’s  The Wire in the Blood. Read on.

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