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

by Kerry Daynes

Sexual sadists experience intense sexual thrills in response to the pain, humiliation, distress or general torment of another living thing. This is not to be confused with some experimental spanking or even the more toe-curlingly creative antics mutually entered into by latex-clad submissives and dominants. Sexual sadism is only considered a disorder – and there is a disorder for pretty much everything – if the individual acts on their urges with someone non- consenting.

People don’t always come with a warning sign. The truth is that the outfit might be different, they might be behind bars, they might be patrolling the streets. They might have families and careers, hold positions of authority and trust. They might be someone you know.

There is no them and us, it is just us.

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.’

Men are, generally speaking, more likely to deal with distress by doing something: overworking, sex, drinking, drugs, aggression, violence, suicide.

Listen hard enough and even the quietest prisons are booming with the deafening sound of men not talking.

The just-world hypothesis: The widespread but false belief that the world is essentially fair, so that the good are rewarded and the bad punished. One consequence of this belief is that people who suffer misfortunes are assumed to deserve their fates…even the victims often blame themselves. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology

95 per cent of our killers are male, regardless of relationship, if any, between victim and perpetrator.

Violent men put a woman in hospital in Britain every three hours.

If you’re considered mad, all your behaviour is construed as madness. (Likewise, if you are considered bad, all your behaviour is construed as bad.)

he was standing in the classic de-escalation pose: one arm loosely across his body and the other hand under his chin like The Thinker. The idea is that you look concerned and attentive, but your hands are in a convenient position if you need to spring into action – either through fending off an attack while protecting your face and torso, or taking hold of someone’s arm or head in a physical restraint.

what used to be known as ‘control and restraint’ is now referred to as ‘care and responsibility’.

Sometimes you just have to sit with a person, validate what they

are feeling and not be afraid of their pain and grief.

psychological distress, in whatever form it is exhibited/plays out, is frequently a plausible reaction to the slings and arrows that life throws at us.

Between half and three-quarters of people receiving mental health care report having been either physically or sexually abused as children.

UK criminologists estimate that a maximum of four serial killers are operating in this country at any given time (which is fairly good news or utterly terrifying, depending on your point of view).

had asked to see his medical records, but the prison had nothing on file. When he had arrived at reception in his first prison, Gary hadn’t been able to tell them which GP he was registered with, and it looked as though the matter had been left at that. No one knew his medical history, so anything that had happened before prison had essentially been forgotten. (This isn’t an unusual scenario by any means – it’s not how it should be, but it is how it is. Our creaking, overburdened public services don’t always succeed at the fabled joined-up thinking.) He’d gone through the standard quick screen for mental health issues – nine questions in all – on three occasions and he hadn’t reported anything significant on each. There were a few notes from visits to the prison GP but they were in connection to his vague complaints about his legs and minor injuries.

Reductionism, the idea that our behaviour is determined by nothing more than the biochemical processes of our brains,

It’s a compelling notion – that there is ultimately no such thing as free will.

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

Online abuse of women is widespread, with one in five women suffering some kind of harassment, much of it sexually or physically threatening.

over half of those surveyed reporting increased anxiety, panic attacks and stress as a result of the ‘virtual’ abuse, as well as other psychological consequences like loss of self-esteem and a sense of powerlessness. Amnesty’s ‘troll patrol’ counted over a million abusive tweets alone sent to the women in the study over the course of 2017 — that’s one every 30 seconds.

‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you’.

a predatory stalker. These are men who follow and collect information about their victim, typically a female and a stranger to them, as an elaborate precursor to a violent or sexual assault. For this stalker type, the sense of excitement and anticipation that comes from covertly watching an unsuspecting victim is as gratifying as the ultimate attack. Far more typical than predatory or other types is the rejected stalker, someone who is either attempting to reconcile with a former intimate partner, or seeking revenge for the rejection they have suffered when the relationship ended or they were rebuffed. Other types include the incompetent suitor who targets strangers or acquaintances, and is driven by a combination of lust and loneliness, going entirely the wrong way about trying to lure their victim into a brief encounter such as a date or a short-term sexual liaison. The intimacy- seeking stalker is fuelled by delusional beliefs that they are already in an intense relationship with the victim. And the resentful stalker blazes with the conviction that they have been mistreated or humiliated by their target, and wants to settle the score. While useful as guideline indicators of behaviour, what drives a stalker’s behaviour is often complex and shifting. He or she won’t necessarily behave within the strict confines of one ‘type’ forever. *

Ex-offenders who live in step-down services are more often than not managed by a MAPPA (multi-agency public protection arrangement) team.

The Psychopathy Checklist, also known as the PCL-R, or as Jon Ronson described it in his bestselling book, ‘The Psychopath Test’. Ronson’s paraphrasing title is a misnomer though, because strictly speaking the PCL-R isn’t really a test at all.

It’s a personality profiling process, developed in 1991 by Canadian researcher Dr Robert Hare. It identifies the extent to which a person demonstrates the 20 qualities of a psychopath and provides a sliding scale of psychopathy that all but the most virtuous of us are likely to fall on somewhere.

The PCL-R groups the defining characteristics of a psychopath under two broad themes: personality traits and lifestyle factors. The former includes grandiosity, manipulativeness, indications of recklessness and a lack of concern for others.

The lifestyle characteristics of the PCL-R address a person’s track record for non-conformity, their propensity for breaking rules, commitments and the occasional heart.

Misogyny – an ingrained prejudice against and contempt for women and girls – is one of the few human conditions that hasn’t yet been declared a mental illness.

The National Crime Agency estimates there are up to 80,000 people in the UK who ‘present some kind of sexual threat’ to children online.

Less than half of child abductions are the work of strangers – 42 per cent according to a report, based on police data collected

in 2011/12, by the charity Action Against Abduction.