The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry

by Gwen Adshead

suggests that the devils we know are less risky than the ones we don’t.

His past was ‘another country’, one that he might never want to revisit.

‘thinking is hard, that’s why most people judge’.

this recovery process is about ‘getting on with it, not getting over it’.

He described how a patient moves from ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ to ‘It wasn’t me’ to ‘It was me, but I was mentally ill at the time’ to ‘I did it when I was mentally ill,’ until they finally land on ‘I did it.’