The Dark Side of the Mind: True Stories from My Life as a Forensic Psychologist

by Kerry Daynes

I realized that if I was going to make it in this career – if I was ever going to find the best solutions to the problems that my patients present – I needed to learn to override my own emotional responses. I needed to manage my own healthy, automatic revulsion at such disturbing behaviour and carry on regardless. I’d have to push the eyeball to one side, and keep drinking the soup.

As the Nobel Prize- winning poet Joseph Brodsky put it: ‘Prison is essentially a shortage of space made up for by a surplus of time; to an inmate, both are palpable.’

sanity is a spectrum, each of us differentiated by a matter of degrees.

Sometimes you just have to sit with a person, validate what they are feeling and not be afraid of their pain and grief.

‘All of this shit is pain…just pain is all,’

When Marcus killed Raymond, he was at rock bottom, seeing himself as the lowest of the low. Maybe this was why he was particularly susceptible to obeying, rather than questioning, challenging and resisting, the commands from the voices.

In order for someone to feel strong enough to move on, they need to be able to picture a better life for themselves, one that is achievable, that is better than the one they’re living. As their therapeutic ally, the psychologist can only really show them what that life might look like. You shine the light, and hobble with them to the end of the tunnel, but you can’t make them step out. For some the light is blinding.

Previously known as having multiple personalities, people attracting the DID diagnosis in fact have only one personality, but they experience it as distinct and separate parts. The switch between the different parts of their personality can be very subtle,

I know that the balance between cool, objective reasoning with respect for the rights of others – what Paul Bloom refers to in his book Against Empathy as ‘rational compassion’ – is difficult to achieve. But achieve it we must.