Feigned insanity in nineteenth-century America: Tactics, trials, and truth (original) (raw)

Feigned symptoms among defendants claiming psychiatric problems: Survey of 45 Malingerers

Iranian journal of psychiatry, 2013

In many jurisdictions, psychiatric problems are intended for commutation. Therefore, a forensic psychiatrist has an important role in detection of malingering. While several studies evaluate diagnostic tests, it is less known what symptoms are more likely to be imitated by malingerers. In a prospective study 45 malingerers, who were diagnosed according to interviews by two forensic psychiatrists, from defendants with a judicial order for evaluation of mental status and criminal responsibility during a period of eighteen months were examined in legal medicine center of Tehran. Participants were assessed in another interview to determine symptoms. Dichotomous symptoms in felony and misdemeanor groups were analyzed using fisher's exact test. The level of statistical significance was set at P < 0.05. Thirty-eight malingerers were charged with misdemeanors and seven with felonies. Behavioral symptoms were most frequently faked by 35 participants (77.8%). Participants charged with ...

Dis)articulating Morality and Myth An Ideological History of the Insanity Defense

2014

Both law and medicine are interpretive practices, and both systems have historically worked in tandem, however ineffectively or tumultuously. The law is, by social mandate, imagined as a "fixed" system of social control, made up of rules and procedures grounded in a reality that is independent of language; although we know that law is both revised and interpreted every day in courtroom practice, to imagine the law, the system that keeps bad people behind bars and good people safe, as indeterminate or, worse, fallible, produces social anxieties that upend our cultural assumptions about fairness that predate our judicial system. This imaginary stability, then, is ultimately what prevents the legal system from evolving in consonance with developments in the mental health professions, as inadequate as that discursive system may be for describing and categorizing the infinite possibilities of mental illness, specifically where it is relevant to the commission of a crime. Ultimately, the insanity plea raises the specter of the endless interpretability of the law and mental illness and, therefore, the frailty of the justice system, which makes each insanity defense trial emblematic of larger social anxieties about social control, fairness, and susceptibility to mental illness or the actions of mentally ill people.

Public Perceptions of Moral Insanity in the 19th Century

The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 2019

The diagnosis of moral insanity was primarily used through the best part of the 19th century to define and justify the psychiatric treatment of a particular type of conduct in which the patient seemed otherwise rational but displayed certain inexplicable and undesirable behaviors deemed socially perverse or “unfit.” This article traces the history of this highly contested concept, which mirrors a historical arc in which psychiatry emerges as a discipline and stakes territorial claims on defining and regulating moral behavior. As illustration, I focus on the Hinchman Conspiracy Trial of 1849 as a less known case of wrongful confinement that hinged on proving the diagnosis of moral insanity in court. Moral insanity is a case study of the efforts to medicalize human ethical conduct, an effort starkly resisted by both the courts and the public. Some of the legacies of the term are the contemporary use of insanity as a legal defense, and the ability of patients to dispute psychiatric ward confinement orders in court.

Historical profiles of criminal insanity

International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 2002

relatively little is known about the lives of the criminally insane themselves. Apart from their official depictions in court documents and published legal judgments, forensic populations of the past remain a near-invisible constituency in the historiography of psychiatric and judicial systems. As Eigen (1995, p. 163) writes, ''[o]ne looks in vain for a sustained treatment of the patient's thought-world.'' For the most part, in the historical pursuit of the medicolegal subject, we are restricted to a scattering of early surveys of hospital inpatients (

“A Fool For His Client:” Religion, Law, and Insanity in Nineteenth-Century America

2021

When Charles Guiteau killed U.S. President James Garfield, he claimed that God had ordered him to do so. During his trial, Guiteau’s lawyers plead not guilty by reason of insanity, and the question of Guiteau’s innocence or guilt quickly became a question about the very nature of insanity itself. In late nineteenth-century America, the concept of insanity was the subject of constant academic debate, with early psychiatrists arguing whether it was caused by physical disease, moral weakness, or even radical forms of Christianity. I use the trial of Charles Guiteau as a case study of the evolving conceptualizations of mental illness in the Gilded Age. I also examine the role that the insanity debate played in shaping nineteenth-century American psychiatry, and the implications that it had on the role of the insanity defense in American law.

The Rorschach Test and Forensic Psychological Evaluation: Psychosis and the Insanity Defense

2016

No area of the legal system and mental health law is more controversial than the question of criminal responsibility and the insanity defense. Societies have wrestled with how to hold individuals responsible for actions who have committed crimes when they were “out of their mind.” The commission of a criminal act, particularly a heinous crime that outrages the sensibilities of the community, generates demands for retribution. Nevertheless, legal systems since antiquity have made allowances for individuals who were “insane,” by whatever definition was culturally relevant and current at the time. Because the majority of criminal defendants acquitted by reason of insanity are diagnosed as psychotic (Melton, Petrila, Poythress, & Slobogin, 1997), the chief focus here is on “psychosis.” It needs to be emphasized that psychosis is not simply tantamount to insanity, as will be seen in the discussion of criteria for the insanity defense. This chapter reviews fundamental legal constructs con...