My criminology professors took great pains to differentiate mental illnessfrom a medical standpoint, and insanity from the perspective of a court of law.  This distinction is good and necessary.  We cannot – and should not – assume that mental illness causes crime. If that were the case, we could expect criminal behavior from almost everyone with severe clinical depression or Schizophrenia, but that simply does not hold true.  On the contrary, mentally ill individuals are more likely to fall victim to crime. 

Legal Insanity

Courts in different states use different rules to determine legal insanity:

• M’Naughten Rule: Defendants admit they committed the act, but claim that they did not understand the act was wrong, or that they did not understand what they were doing at the time the act was committed.  
• Durham Rule: Defendants must show that their actions directly resulted from mental illness. Therein lies the rub, because causality is tricky business. Can anyone really claim that mental illnesses cause particular actions?  
• Irresistible Impulse: Defendants may have known right from wrong, but they could not resist the impulse to commit the crime. and therefore they cannot be held responsible. Maybe a father discovers the babysitter beating his toddler, and cannot stop himself from beating her senseless. 

Forensic scientists lend their expertise by determining to a degree of medical certainty whether a defendant meets the insanity standard. Of course, the degree of certainty often comes into question, with battles of the experts on both sides of a case: insane, not insane, maybe insane but in control, etc. 

Writer as Forensic Psychiatrist

How often do writers play “forensic psychiatrist,” perhaps without even realizing it?  I have been thinking about this lately as I write about the death of one of my siblings – a death that blew up like a tripped land mine, shooting shrapnel through my heart. When I think back to the allegations against him, and the source of those allegations, I find it impossible to understand to any degree of certainty why he acted as he did. More importantly, I do not know whether or how to hold him responsible.

I mean this less in the legal sense than in an emotional one: To what degree do I hold him responsible? Can I – should I? – forgive him because of his own troubled frame of mind?  Is it possible to forgive if I do not hold him responsible?  Is it possible to hold him responsible if I forgive?  

Of course, in a strict legal context, the question of forgiveness never comes into play, but it does in the court of public opinion, where people feel empathy and sympathy for the father who attacks an abusive babysitter, or the mother with severe PPD psychosis who drowns her baby in the bathtub.  That is a kind of forgiveness, however different in quality from the one I mean. 

More importantly, I wonder if I have the capacity to make such a determination about my own sibling – if this is something I should even take on in the first place. And what standard would I apply?