by Ian Brady
Ironically, in some instances the psychiatrist himself evinces a serious personality disorder. So it should not be surprising that, according to official statistics, psychiatrists as a group have the highest suicide rate. Obviously a schizoid hazard of the profession, perhaps mainly due to patients injecting persuasive, relativistic philosophy into the field of inevitably limited psychodiagnostics and upsetting professional mental equilibrium.72
Seen sympathetically, his most passionate perspective, his understanding of what he is, through the pimping newspaper, the pedophile and lovelorn opinions and vigilante options for fucking decades now, must be as worthless to him as a listener as it obviously is to the fucking people he keeps fucking talking to.
Regarding your prominent review of my book, The Gates of Janus, by Dr. Theodore Dalrymple, a prison doctor (“Inside the mind of a monster,” Review, December 2): as Dr. Dalrymple generalises about prisoners, I, in the third year of this daily force-fed by nasal tube hunger strike, will reciprocate in kind.
Prison doctors are generally those who lacked the talent to start private practices and obtain posts in real hospitals. Their main function is to lend respectability to the archaic failed penal system and dispense ad lib psychiatric labels upon, and embalming drugs to, prisoners of the state.
In days of capital punishment they were “deathwatch” physicians, satirically examining the condemned as healthy and fit to hang. Many are alcoholics due to their low status in medical circles, and frequently project their own moral defects and negative characteristics on to the prisoners.
Their draconian authority over prisoners doesn’t quite compensate for the national lack of self-esteem they experience serving in a prehistoric, regressive penal system. They are mostly servile and subservient to the prison wardens’ culture of brutality.
Dr. Dalrymple may be the exception to the general rule that the collective eclectic intelligence and knowledge of penal officials would not cover the back of a postage stamp, which further explains the 98 per cent failure rate in the UK penal system.
Significantly, Dr. Dalrymple fails to inform the reader that I wrote Janus four years ago under a pseudonym, thus explaining my disguised style and lack of reference, remorse etc. to my own case; he compounds this omission by drawing erroneous clinical conclusions from it.
He proclaims me as unreformed after 37 years’ imprisonment but fails to accept his concomitant responsibility and part in a penal system that obviously does not work to reform, rather to exacerbate or create criminal behaviour by penal staff example.
While charging me with adopting a tone of moral superiority, he adopts it himself in referring to prisoners throughout his review.
For 20 years in maximum-security prisons, I daily transcribed books into Braille on my own initiative for schools for the blind. I also offered to donate a kidney. What altruistic act has Dr. Dalrymple ever performed?
Finally, he sarcastically comments that he meets my kind every day; I in turn have met his kind daily these past 37 years in prison. Quid pro quo.
Quite frankly, the review wasn’t at all bad—for a prison doctor.73
Dr. Grounds expressed his assessment of the present situation as regards a persisting mental illness. He said that in his view over the last decade evidence of abnormal experiences is very much less, more occasional. The clinical picture has changed, he said, and not in a way that one would expect if this was a chronic paranoid schizophrenic illness. If anything one would expect the condition to continue and to be associated with the development of negative symptoms. He said that if one takes a longitudinal view of the records and the difference between his condition in the 1980s and that recorded over the last ten to 15 years, there is a quite a marked difference. The records do not show evidence of chronic active psychosis consistently through the years. He said that typically a chronic schizophrenic illness is associated with deterioration in personality and by the prominence of negative symptoms. There is no evidence of such deterioration in his mental condition over a period of time. He accepted that there are possible indications of psychotic symptoms in the form of occasional episodes of behaviour suggesting he might be hallucinating. They are not clear and not associated with other features of schizophrenia. He pointed out that essentially they only occur in a specific context, in his room and there are no indications of such behaviour when interacting with others on the ward. This is not something that is frequent or prominent or interfering with his daily life and demeanor and interactions. It is very equivocal and does not reach a threshold of seriousness or severity which warrants treatment. He expressed the opinion that Mr. Brady is very similar to the way he was in the 1960s and if he were now being considered for admission to hospital he would not be sectioned. The description does not fit the way Mr. Brady is. The diagnostic guidelines for schizophrenia do not currently apply in his case.
Brady’s paid experts were as easily reasoned as carefully dismissed within the Judge’s conclusions. It seems that it wasn’t necessarily important that Brady’s arguments be considered, just that his appearance toward reasonable would be enough. Brady wants to win but trusts he has rights he simply doesn’t. More than win, he wants to sell. And may have gotten used to selling over winning. Customers rarely settle for a single purveyor. Middlemen have a hard time keeping customers happy and stupid. He believed that his book would be a best seller, checking the sales figures and top tens, and then said he knew the lists were rigged. It is a legitimate worry over whether or not all these trained health care professionals and his lousy legal and medical defenses ever had an effect on his own thinking rather than his options. His links and delusions could have been thought through to a harder reality over an immediate decision to manipulate. It would make sense that he knew that certain people within the hospital setting would take joy in refusing him anything he ever said he wanted. He’d almost have to refuse to admit anything at all.
Those employees arguing for Brady and his tired lawyers took the side that supported view (review) against evidence that it was to Brady’s benefit for them to argue the strengths of going against what is considered typical. This is the way he’d like to be read; offering the daring new against the exhausted old. Fucks up in the present. And context was impossible to ignore as both sides were forced to list symptoms and clauses for and against precedent.
Dr. Collins then addressed the general diagnostic criteria for a personality disorder. He pointed out that there was no evidence of Mr. Brady exhibiting paranoia before he was sent to prison. He contrasted this with the indications in childhood of narcissism and antisocial personality disorder. Furthermore, his ability to maintain a relationship with Myra Hindley and to maintain work and the relationships which that would have required did not accord with such a diagnosis. He accepted that there can be a paranoid edge to people who have antisocial or narcissistic personality disorders but not of the chronic type seen in Mr. Brady. He compared Mr. Brady’s behaviour to that of patients known to have narcissistic or antisocial personality disorders and said that Mr. Brady does not present as a typical person with personality disorders. He contrasted Mr. Brady with them and concluded that there was something which overrides his narcissism and that is schizophrenia. In a lot of his behaviours, one sees the combination of the two: his contempt for other patients, his anger and his paranoia.
Someone easily led. Someone who shapes his arguments to disappointing idiots after he discovered himself slightly above their rigid line. Bloody sharp with it. He’s closer to an artist than a criminal. Vague, rambling, incoherent to those demanding attention and favor from simplicity. Makes sense then that a lazy artist would suggest himself a dangerous boss. Sounding like the cheesiest rock chintz actually believing that it was either rock n’ roll stardom or jail. When really it’s either a large paying audience of the lowest common denominator or a mid-level engineering job. He’s closer to a child-molesting uncle than a serial killer. Or a bush-hiding, cunt-drooling child molester. I would love to call him vicious and determined.
Focused. What with my tastes. But so many of his designs toward youngsters and, even, girls, seem to have started after getting sick of fat women and the gullible men who wanted them. There’s photographs of children playing in schoolyards, taken from the street, within his collection of homemade pornography and murder sites. To kindly suggest otherwise. And a fear of attack is not unnatural now nor unexpected should he be returned to proper prison. How exciting it would be to suggest that Brady wants to move to a jail so that someone would attack him. And leave him to die bloody. Follows that he wouldn’t, honestly, above all, want a drawled slob like that to have the slashing glory. But really might not give a fuck. It being an exciting renege in its own promise of existential experience. The entirety of Gates of Janus is Brady interacting with the world as he wishes to see himself teaching. Just as in the interviews he gave Fred Harrison during the time before his transfer to a hospital, Brady formed an improvisation cue to talk character through study. Cunning Brady working his Brady puppet, he tells you. Came up with the green face of death for Harrison. Later told Cowley it was spin. Tribunal got method acting. Once he was saying that he had a sickness. Here’s the list to prove it. Now he was saying he tied everything together as any old man looking back on his life would do. Who’d fall back on clean lists when finding mess. And he wants to go back to where it was less shit than this has become.
In cross-examination, he said that he attributed the paranoia and much of his mistrust consequent upon that to his mental illness. The primary elements of his personality are his narcissism and antisocial characteristics. He agreed that Mr. Brady is at the extreme end of severe personality disorder but he said that his presentation is quite unlike other men with severe personality disorders. Although one sees aggression in people with an antisocial personality disorder, with age it tends to reduce but Mr. Brady’s continued hostility to a whole range of people repeatedly is very unusual. On the subject of conflict and extreme difficulty getting on with people, he said it is a feature of antisocial personality disorder and it manifests itself in the way in which they interact with one another; they fall out. Mr. Brady is different in that he also stops interacting with other people. He withdraws which is a feature found where there is depression or a phobia but he thinks that in relation to Mr. Brady it is a reflection of paranoia. His interpretation of Mr. Brady’s lack of socializing is because he is paranoid. It is on a different scale. Narcissism does not mean that a person with that disorder will isolate himself to the extent which Mr. Brady does.
She addressed the issue of Mr. Brady’s alleged belief that there was bugging of his conversations. She accepted that the more a suspicion has a rational basis the more it may be thought to be on the suspicious rather than the paranoid end of the spectrum. There may be types of paranoia which look more like mental illness or personality disorder. Mr. Brady’s claim that the Home Office were manipulating him through voices is a kind of delusional paranoia bordering on the bizarre and strongly indicative of mental illness. Sometimes it is necessary to see a matter in context. Then it is useful to be able to discuss it with the person. The absence of explanation for Mr. Brady creates an ambiguous situation which invited multiple explanations. She agreed that paranoia can be a feature of both conditions.
His refusal to cooperate may make him less reliable to those who are working against him. Suspicious enough to denote or claim a relapse. This time I’ve made myself explicit. Still, not to an audience who shouldn’t ask to have this explained to them. Two examples of left-wing reporting are telling in light of Brady’s supposed paranoia. While appearing in reputation to be the more reliable and judicial side of the press, read liberal, The Guardian still displayed enough prejudice to fit snugly within the tabloid public’s wont. Petty. The Guardian asked Alan Bennett for his reaction on watching Brady give live testimony to the Tribunal and received it. Published under the headline “The victims do not matter to Ian Brady and neither do their families”:
Before the hearing I was not sure if Ian Brady would be speaking or not, and it did not really matter to me then. I just wanted the truth to come out. I have to say now that I am glad Brady did have his say: he tied his own defence team in knots, never gave a definitive answer under cross-examination and went on to show anybody interested that he is nothing more than a self-pitying liar.
No doubt Brady will feel even more hard done by now because, I believe, his request for a public hearing has backfired on him. Should he be granted his wish to leave Ashworth hospital and be sent to prison? I am happiest knowing Brady will be at his unhappiest. I know he hates Ashworth and I cannot be sure he would feel the same about any other place he may be sent to. Besides that, I do not think he should be allowed to move just because he wants to.
It is a good feeling to know that the truth is out now and the public knows Brady’s “hunger strike” is nothing more than another publicity stunt. He does eat normally and the nasal tube should now be seen for what it really—an empty, meaningless symbol of his supposed protest at his “mistreatment” and also an empty symbol of his act of defiance towards the system. Furthermore, his claims of wanting the right to starve himself to death is also nothing more than a further self-pitying PR. He has never intended to do as he has claimed he wants to. That also came out in the tribunal hearing, although I have never believed either stunt had any real meaning or intention. I also hope the “hunger strike” will never be reported on again and, if it is, it will continue to be exposed as yet another falsehood of Brady’s.
Brady never got the full audience he, no doubt, had hoped for. The public gallery was never full and, on most days, there were no more than ten people attending. So there was not much public interest in actually being able to attend the hearing; people preferred to rely on the media coverage. Brady’s action in wanting a public hearing was nothing more than a point-scoring exercise against Ashworth, as his actions in Ashworth seem to be.
Does he really want to go to prison? I believe that if he does it is solely in the hope that he will be transferred to a segregation unit to be with people like himself. He has often spoken or written about his time in prison with more than a touch of nostalgia. His days of being able to play chess with other notorious prisoners and so on. He never saw them as “maggots,” as he does the staff and other patients at Ashworth. He believes he is superior to everybody at Ashworth and the human race in general. He is nothing more than a serial killer of children, a paedophile, a coward and a self-pitying liar.
He sees his crimes as nothing more than a “recreational” activity, and an “existential experience.”
I was informed before the tribunal that the hearing was not about my brother Keith or Brady’s crimes and he would not be asked about the details of his crimes, so it was no surprise that did not happen. The victims do not matter to Brady and neither do their families. The only people that matter to Brady are himself and the people he can manipulate, and there are too many people willing to be manipulated by him.74
On the same day, June 28, 2013, The Guardian’s Helen Pidd contributed the following in her article, “Ian Brady: what we have learned about the Moors murderer”:
He has almost exactly the same hairstyle, now grey and out of time. His face is less lined than most other 75-year-olds’, his cataract-plagued eyes now almost always shielded by a pair of tinted aviator-style glasses. His Scottish accent is intact, though his voice is gruff, perhaps as a result of decades of smoking the strong tobacco he has often complained has not killed him.
He remains slim, save for a slight double chin and paunch which were a mystery to those watching the video relay of the tribunal—until his nurse revealed that the “hunger strike” he claims to have been observing for the past 14 years involved him snacking daily on toast and soup, supplemented by the feeding tube hanging out of his right nostril.
Still present is his superior attitude to everyone around him. Giving evidence on Tuesday, he was keen to demonstrate an advanced grasp of language and learning. Expl
aining why he sometimes listened to “white noise” while taking his daily feeds through a nasal tube, he said it was simply to block out the racket his fellow patients were making. It was better than listening to “nattering disc jockeys.” To do so was, he said, pragmatic—something which would be “axiomatic to anybody with sense.”
When faced with a question about the future, particularly when asked why he wanted to be transferred to prison and whether he planned to kill himself there, he frequently said: “I’m not omnipotent.” He was keen to boast of the battles he had won with the authorities. He talked of setting up a prison Braille unit to make children’s books, against the Home Office’s wishes—he even claimed he made a deal so that “whatever the prison I went to, I would take the Braille machine with me.” He bragged of using “simple syllogistic argument” to win legal cases “with no solicitors, no lawyers.” One of his earlier hunger strikes, in 1975, prompted questions in “both houses of parliament,” he said. Ashworth, he argued at one point, traded on his reputation, as their “most high-profile prisoner.” It was best known, he said, as “Brady’s hospital.”
Claiming to have feigned psychosis for 18 months in order to be transferred from prison to Ashworth, he said he practised Stanislavski system of acting, expressing contempt when asked by Dr. Cameron Boyd, a forensic psychiatrist sitting on the tribunal panel, to explain what he meant. “I would have thought any informed person would grasp the meaning immediately,” Brady scoffed. He used to memorise pages of Plato and Shakespeare, he crowed, and said he once discussed Russian literature in his cell with James Callaghan when the Labour MP was home secretary. Dostoyevsky was a particular favourite, it seemed, and he once compared his situation to a scenario in The Brothers Karamazov. When challenged about his claim that he killed five children for the “existential experience,” instead of answering he said: “The definition of existentialism takes up two whole pages in the Oxford Companion to Literature.”