The Dark Side of the Mind

by Kerry Daynes

  So while Alison was clearly a battered woman, I knew this description wouldn’t be considered valid in court. Under British law there are a limited number of defences available to someone who stands accused of murder with hopes of having that charge reduced to manslaughter. A ‘sudden and temporary loss of control’ (what used to be termed ‘provocation’) is the most commonly used. It’s a controversial defence that doesn’t tend to offer much hope for abused women.

  These days courts accept that ongoing abuse is provocation and that its effects might cause someone to react instantly and with violence to what may seem to others like an innocuous trigger. But herein lies the issue: having that instant violent reaction, without simultaneously putting yourself in even greater danger, requires you to be at least as strong as, and ideally more physically dominant than the person provoking you. Not something many abused women can claim to be. An abused woman rarely has the option of a ‘sudden and temporary loss of control’ while she is being assaulted or threatened, as abusive men are generally bigger and stronger and more terrifying than the women they pick on. An abused woman knows that losing her cool in the heat of the moment may well get her killed.

  In effect, the law deems anger, and heated physical actions made in the moment – overwhelmingly the privilege of men in these situations – a real-life get-out- of-jail-free card. It favours those who have their own strength, in immediate supply, to rely on. But, as you might expect, the majority of cases involving women who have killed their abusers feature the use of weapons, most commonly knives, poison or fire.

  The case of Sara Thornton brought this issue into the spotlight in 1989. Thornton, from Warwickshire, received a life sentence for the murder of her violent husband after he threatened that she and her ten-year-old daughter would soon be ‘dead meat’. The prosecution successfully argued that, because she had taken an estimated 60 seconds to walk into the kitchen and pick up a knife before returning to stab him, her behaviour was premeditated. It was, therefore, outside the ‘sudden and temporary’ requirement of the loss of control defence. The judge who passed sentence advised that, if she feared for her life, she could have gone outside or upstairs instead. Thornton became the reluctant poster girl for women’s justice groups, who felt her case illustrated a deep-set gender bias in the defence options surrounding domestic homicide. That loss of control was a defence for men, written by men, used by men.

  Thornton was eventually allowed to appeal and in 1996 had her conviction reduced to manslaughter, with her prison sentence suspended in lieu of the time she’d already served. A victory, of sorts. But Thornton’s legal team had argued the appeal by saying that she had a ‘personality disorder’, and claimed the defence of diminished responsibility. In short, she ‘won’ her case for leniency only by acknowledging that she was ‘sick’.

  It was clear to me that Alison had been in an altered state at the time she had killed Paul. Her distress had been building for months. But triggered by his all-too- familiar demand to fetch him a drink, her innate fight-or-flight instincts had kicked in. Powered by the limbic system, the part of the brain that controls our most primitive drives, she turned this time to fight. Her brain sounded an alarm, flooding her with adrenaline and other hormones, sending her sympathetic nervous system into overdrive, mobilizing her body into defensive action.

  I wrote a detailed report for Alison, including a ‘psychological formulation’. This is a summary for the court of the events of her life, their meaning and relationship to each other. For Alison this was a journey from her childhood, when her mother’s criticism had embedded a deep sense of her own low self-worth and guilt, eventually making her easy prey for a controlling man who – over many years – repeatedly beat, raped and humiliated her. On the cusp of yet another assault, her fear was so intense that, for the first time, she fought back.

  But to the court a psychological formulation is too broad in its reach. I am required to give my opinion in the specific and accepted language of psychiatry. I wrote that, in my opinion, it was more likely than not that Alison did have an abnormality of mind at the time she killed Paul. Specifically, that she reported symptoms that met the criteria for at least three diagnostic labels: ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, ‘obsessive compulsive disorder’ and ‘depression’. Although I felt then, and still do, that reducing individual stories to diagnostic ‘disorders’ like this is like trying to capture the Mona Lisa smile with only a painting-by-numbers set at my disposal.

  I didn’t attend the proceedings in court, but a few weeks later the story came up while I was at home, watching the evening news. There was Alison looking utterly shell-shocked walking out of court, being practically held up by someone who I assumed was her father. The reporter standing outside the Crown Court said Alison had been found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. The court had heard that she had ‘killed her husband because she was suffering from three different mental illnesses’. The judge had suspended a custodial sentence on condition that she received psychiatric treatment.

  I was genuinely surprised Alison hadn’t been sent to prison, bearing in mind she had ended a man’s life. She shouldn’t have killed Paul, but she shouldn’t have had to live that way, either. I was satisfied that she would at least get the right help now.

  But switching off the television that evening I couldn’t shift a niggling feeling of unease. Did Alison really have an abnormality of mind? How abnormal is it to react the way she did? Extreme, undoubtedly. But is it abnormal to react in an extreme way to extreme circumstances? Under different circumstances, if the outcome wasn’t so deadly, wouldn’t her body’s reaction to such a well-established threat be viewed as a normal, useful survival response?

  I told myself that it was just a matter of semantics, and tried to put aside the thought that I had been complicit in medicalizing Alison’s trauma. As I got into bed and dimmed my bedroom light, I remembered how Paul made Alison believe that the authorities would take her away if they ever found out just how mad she was. The truth was that her reality – the life she lived and all the layers of adversity that she had suffered that ultimately led to her attack on Paul – had been effectively written out of her story. We had conspired to tell the world she had not one, but three mental illnesses. Wasn’t this another form of victim blaming?

  It was a mental snag that never quite left me, but that I wasn’t yet willing to confront.

  CHAPTER 4

  FAKING IT

  All living things contain a measure of madness that moves

  them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways.

  Yann Martel, The Life of Pi

  I held my palms open and showed Travis the 50 pence coin that was sitting in my right hand for a couple of seconds, then clenched my hands shut. I asked him to close his eyes, count backwards from ten and then, ‘open your eyes and point to the hand you remember the coin to be in’.

  He closed his eyes, his forehead wrinkling in concentration. ‘Ten, nine, five, seven.’

  I helped him. ‘Six, five, four…’

  Travis opened his eyes and brought his forefinger up to touch my left hand, then shook his head as I revealed it to be empty. We did this ten times, five with the coin in my right hand and five in the left. He answered wrongly on eight of them.

  Inside my mind I allowed myself a little smirk: I knew I was fooling him, even though he thought he was fooling me. I consciously relaxed the muscles in my face, maintaining what I hoped was a concerned and open expression. But I swore I saw a shutter-speed glimpse of a smile – a ‘micro-expression’ – flash across Travis’s face. And then it was gone. There we were, both experiencing our own dose of ‘duping delight’: the intrinsic pleasure derived from hoodwinking another person, often manifested by the briefest involuntary grin.

  This was the coin-in-the-hand test, a so-called ‘bedside test’, meaning it doesn’t need any special equipment or preplanning. It’s a short and simple screening exercise designed to help you est
ablish whether a person is feigning memory problems. Very few people can perform badly at this test. It’s ridiculously simple. But because it’s presented by you – the psychologist – as a difficult task, someone who is faking it will almost always take the opportunity to perform badly, to prove their poor recollection.

  Travis had already obtained an exceptionally low score on his IQ test – a standard assessment I do with most of my clients – and yet he was also regularly trouncing members of staff at backgammon, a game which requires considerably more mental agility than his test scores suggested he was capable of. My interest in this curious person was roused and I made a note to keep my eye on him.

  I had come across Travis in a medium-secure hospital a few weeks before. He had arrived fresh from prison, in an adapted Leyland DAF van, handcuffed to one of his two escorts. He had been apprehended, several weeks earlier, importing and exporting cheap electronics, a gig which was suspected to be cover for a considerably more lucrative drugs racket. The details were hazy, as Travis claimed to have little recollection of the days leading up to his arrest, or of any of the time he had spent remanded in custody awaiting a trial date.

  He was delivered to us under Section 48 of the Mental Health Act, which provides the legal framework for someone to be moved from prison to hospital if their mental health deteriorates to the point that they require a level of care that can’t be provided in prison. Travis would have been assessed by two doctors, who would both have been persuaded that he was in such a dire state of mental anguish that he could not remain in prison in the interest of his own wellbeing and safety.

  In 1999, this was no mean feat. The information Travis had arrived with was scant but he must have been causing some major concerns at the prison in terms of his behaviour and its management. It is never easy to get a transfer out of prison, except to another prison. Even today, as political interest in mental health issues has grown and a more complex system of funding and service provision makes it mildly more achievable to have severe mental distress recognized, the strategy and protocols set up for the movement of mentally unwell prisoners to secure hospitals are cumbersome and run into long delays. Travis had managed to jump to the front of a queue that others can fester in indefinitely.

  This was a relatively new-build extension to an existing hospital and, as is often the case, it was located in the most remote part of the site, away from public gaze. It was a series of low, flat-roofed buildings in bright municipal brick, with decorative external metalwork painted in cheerful primary colours, and small patches of lawn and trees. It could have passed for a leisure centre – one with rather limited facilities – were it not for the six-metre mesh perimeter fence surrounding it.

  Like any secure psychiatric facility – places also referred to as forensic hospitals or locked rehabilitation units – many of the people held here had been charged with or convicted of a crime and were deemed too mentally unwell to be in prison. But there were also those who hadn’t come into contact with the criminal justice system but whose behaviour was nevertheless considered problematic and too risky for mainstream mental health services.

  There were three thirteen-bed wards here and a six-bed long-stay unit for older men, each ward named after an English poet. Most of the men living on Chaucer ward, where I spent most of my working day, were experiencing some form of psychosis: they heard voices or saw things the rest of us didn’t. The cast of characters wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a Chaucer poem. One man was convinced that I could hear his thoughts and regularly apologized to me for whatever indecorous idea he believed I’d heard pass through his mind. Another patient was adamant that he was here on business; he wore a smart suit every day and kept his room key on a lanyard round his neck. He looked exceptionally convincing, better turned out than any of the real employees, and would welcome visitors to the ward with a firm handshake, introducing himself as the hospital director. Like a plot straight out of a sitcom, several times an unsuspecting hopeful showed up for a job interview that he had somehow managed to arrange while out on his walks in the town, even while being escorted by two members of staff. A third man, a Croatian refugee, believed he was being held by paramilitary forces and was certain that if he could only prove to us his political neutrality he’d be allowed to go home.

  Travis didn’t exhibit any of these peculiarities, not at first. He settled in quickly and made himself quietly at home. He clearly preferred to make conversation with the female nurses and staff members, in a different setting I may even have described him as a ladies’ man. He was immaculately groomed, with a well-trimmed beard, and always smelt fresh, like he’d just spritzed himself with cologne. It was a blazing hot June, and I often saw him sunbathing outside, tapping his foot in beat to the music on his personal stereo, looking for all the world like a student whose exams had just finished.

  *

  I’d come to work here after finding myself teetering on the verge of unemployment. After hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons and having my contract at the secure hospital where I’d been working as a trainee ‘discontinued’, I found myself with less than a month’s pay in the bank and only a few weeks left before being out on my ear. I was staring at an uncertain future and wasn’t sure what to do with my options, which seemed fairly limited, given that I wasn’t yet qualified. Despairing at the prospect of having to return home a failure, and determined not to let my career slip through my fingers, I’d borrowed a copy of the Forensic Directory from work and hit the phone, channelling my inner power poser as I began to make calls.

  It was a trick I’d learned as a youngster. I was part of the St Winifred’s School Choir, which in 1980 somehow managed to have a Christmas number one with a song called ‘There’s No-one Quite Like Grandma’. It even kept seasonal favourite ‘Stop the Cavalry’ by Jona Lewie from reaching the top spot. At the height of our popularity, we made a Christmas special for TV, with another 1980s group, The Nolan Sisters. There’s a video of it on YouTube, all of us singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ while it snows synthetic snow.

  It was the longest day of my then eight-year-old existence and you can see we’re all bored, yawning, swaying out of tempo. Somewhere at the front I’m there, slouched over, hands clenched, like a garden gnome that has lost its fishing rod. Just when we thought this interminable day was finally coming to an end, they told us we still had to record a separate soundtrack. Few of us could even speak coherently by that stage, let alone sing, we were out of tune and out of time, more like a funeral than Christmas.

  But our headmistress, Sister Aquinas, saved the day. She said: ‘Choir, we might not be filming, but you must sing like you are giving the performance of your life. Stand up straight, hold your heads up, put your shoulders back and smile! All the way through this song you must smile!’ We all smiled our little faces off and we straight away got the perfect recording.

  We had mastered a variant of what Harvard University social psychologist Amy Cuddy would later define as ‘power posing’. In her now-famous 2012 TED Talk, she described the art of improving performance via the subtle shifts in brain chemistry and physiology when your mind registers and responds to your body language. The technique has been dismissed as pseudoscience by many, but whether it’s a genuine biological lifehack or just the placebo effect, the idea of striking a pose – creating confidence simply by physically affecting it – retains a certain currency. In show business circles they call it ‘tits and teeth’ (although Sister Aquinas did not call it that) but it all comes down to the same general idea: fake it until you make it. Whether she knew it or not, Sister Aquinas taught me a valuable life lesson that day.

  With the Forensic Directory in front of me I started calling the psychiatric hospitals and secure units, beginning with A. Before I’d got even halfway through the alphabet, I had an interview in the diary. I’d asked the hospital manager at this particular medium-secure unit if they had any forensic psychologists on their therapy staff. He said no. I s
uggested, chancing my arm, that they should have one. He asked me if I was a forensic psychologist and I mumbled something about almost – he told me to hold the line, I heard a muffled exchange, and the following week I was jumping off a train, preparing to grab hold of what looked like the lifeline I needed.

  A few weeks and a couple of interviews later, I had a new job – completing my training as a forensic psychologist, and with a pay rise to boot. The hospital manager gave me an old desk and an even older computer, which I could use to finish my master’s degree at home in the evenings. I will be forever grateful for that computer, a Macintosh Performa 6200, I’d never have written up my thesis without it. He even had it delivered to my house. I’d rented the nearest place I could find to the hospital, a small, pebble-dashed bungalow with an avocado bathroom suite and an overgrown garden. I had little in the way of possessions back then and the whole place was sparse. But I lived for work, my mind had no space for fripperies or furniture, although I had acquired a cat, a white and tabby rescue given to me by one of the nurses. In the day I would be responsible for setting up the new psychology services, working with my new supervisor, a clinical psychologist who I soon realized was even more keen than I was to build this shiny new department. Even though I said so myself, I had turned things around in spectacular fashion. Sister Aquinas would have been proud.

  *

  It was my job to carry out the standard assessments on all new patients like Travis, including the IQ assessment, which ideally everyone who was able cooperated with, so that we could rule out any underlying learning disability. I used the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the gold-standard measure that’s been used around the world since it was first created in 1955. It’s an essential, and extremely cumbersome, piece of kit comprising a briefcase full of forms, a stopwatch and various props. Intelligence has been defined in many different ways, but Wechsler interprets it as a person’s capacity to ‘act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his/her environment’. Attempting to capture that, sitting at a table, you ask your client a mixture of questions designed to assess knowledge and memory. There are also some practical performance tests, using pictures, jigsaws and coloured blocks, which help the tester understand a person’s capacity for abstract problem-solving.