Questioning the Insanity Defense
by TChris
Asking mental health professionals whether a delusional woman who drowned her children knew the difference between right and wrong invites speculation.
My own belief is that no forensic psychiatrist can objectively answer the law's narrow question yes or no. There is no "truth" of the matter. Our science cannot yet map the psychotic experience of reality or measure its correspondence to the reality of the law's simplifying assumptions. The narrow right-from-wrong question may seem clear and obvious, but it is premised on assumptions that neither science nor philosophy can verify.
In a commentary published in the Psychiatric Times, Dr. Alan Stone argues that this common touchstone of the “insanity defense” asks the wrong question -- and suggests that no “right question” can easily be formulated.
I believe that the law's effort to formulate the right question about criminal responsibility and psychiatry's efforts to answer it are equally misguided. After centuries of efforts on the part of great legal scholars, jurists and philosophers to define the precise question they want answered, might it be time to acknowledge that such a definition is beyond the reach of legal reason? And if the legal question is unaskable, psychiatrists, even the best trained forensic psychiatrists, should recognize that it may be unanswerable.
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