Criminal Responsibility And Dissociative Identity Disorder

Why do we find multiple personality disorder (MPD) so fascinating? Perhaps because each of us is aware of a dividedness within ourselves: we often feel as if we are one person on the job, another with our families, another with our friends and lovers. We may fantasize that these inner discrepancies will someday break free, that within us lie other personalities - genius, lover, criminal - that will take us over and render us strangers to our very selves. What happens when such a transformation literally occurs, when an alter personality surfaces and commits some heinous deed?

This ground-breaking book examines the role of crime in the lives of people with Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder, a condition which appears to be caused by prolonged trauma in infancy and childhood. This trauma may be linked with crimes committed against them, crimes they have witnessed, and crimes they have committed under duress. This collection of essays by a range of distinguished international contributors explores the complex legal, ethical, moral, and clinical questions which face psychotherapists and other professionals working with people suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder. Contributors to this book are drawn from a wide range of professions including psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, counselling, psychology, medicine, law, police, and social work.

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a rare disease for what general practitioners have “no code.” It however has a heavy weight in forensic research. Experts are divided on whether DID warrants an acquittal for "not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity" (NGRI) defense. Over the past century, DID has been raised to defend a variety of offenses, from a parking ticket to the first degree murder, or to manipulate with the civil suits for monetary relief. Applying traditional rules of criminal culpability or civil liability to these cases poses a significant challenge. The concepts of personhood and identity create a havoc in determining the insanity. Diagnostic exclusions are scarce, with exceptions of the explicit memory transfer to be the key to deny the dissociated identity, whereas the absence of implicit memory transfer helps to think of personality dissociation. Retrograde amnesia comes to be a central symptom and with its variations it helps to differentiate the alters of identity from the alters of personality. There is currently no consensus within the USA legal system as to the extent to which individuals with DID can or should be held responsible for their actions. Courts that are receptive to the DID diagnostic construct have used one of three approaches to assess criminal responsibility in such cases: "alter-in-control approach," "each-alter approach," and "host-approach." Amidst the above complexity, the legal system must also deal with potentially conflicting mental health testimony, especially given enduring controversies about the DID diagnosis. DID challenges the Model Penal Code hierarchy of mens rea (purpose, knowledge, recklessness, negligence), the concept of evidence, material facts, and estoppel of duress.From the Frye test, witness categories (educating, reporting, interpreting), types of evidence (bolstering, attacking, rehabilitating), malinger and credibility of testimony, to the outcomes of adjudications, this book presents a value-adding comprehensive guide on the court-visited criminal and civil cases when one of the parties claim for suffering a DID.Equipped with 153 references, it also provides with an exhaustive analysis of 21 adjudications, inclusive for their legal rules and limits, precedents, first impressions, overrides, dicta, certiorari, dispositions, verdicts, remedies, holdings and reasoning, pursuant to the Constitutional or statute enactments in the United States and District of Columbia.Presented cases are located via LexisNexis,™ BlueBook, and Bloomberg Law. All published cases are free for public access under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act (HIPAA), 14th Amendment Due Process Clause, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1. heterogeneities of self in everyday life 2. a language of successive selves 3. multiplicity through dissociation 4. succession and recurrence outside dissociative disorder 5. From abnormal psychology to metaphysics: a methodological preamble 6. memory, responsibility, and contrition 7. purposes and discourses of responsibility ascription 8. multiplicity and legal culpability 9. paternalistic intervention 10. responsibilities over oneself in the future of one's future selves 11. a mataphysics of successive selves 12. the normative tug of individualism 13. therapeutic goals for a liberal culture 14. continuity sufficient for individualism 15. the divided minds of mental disorder 16. the grammar of disownership.

Resource added for the Paralegal program 101101.

This book contains new evidence and more ideas for treatment and management of dissociative identity disorder (DID). It is written from the standpoint of an expert in the field for other professionals that deal with or are interested in DID. Chapters are divided into 4 parts. Part 1 acts as an introduction to understanding dissociative identity disorder, such its history, the different types of the disorder, and its portrayal in popular culture. The chapters in this part cover multiple personality disorder, theories, and epidemiology of the disease. Part 2 discusses the pathology and neuroscience of the disease. The comorbidities related to the disorder will be explained, such as PTSD, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and more. This part concludes with the potential causes of dissociative identity disorder, which ties into the previously mentioned comorbidities throughout this part. Supplementing the aforementioned topics, Part 3 discusses management of the disease. The chapters will cover modern psychiatry, diagnosis, and treatment options. Drug treatment and psychotherapy are some examples of the treatment options available. The authors share their experiences and perspectives of managing DID, including clinical trials and recovery. Finally, Part 4 discusses the sociology of DID, such as potential drug abuse, social media presence, and the difficulties that psychiatrists face in diagnosing the disease. This part provides advice for clinicians and healthcare providers by sharing different perspectives from psychiatrists that encounter the disease. Written by experts in the field, Dissociative Identity Disorder serves as a valuable resource for psychiatrists and clinicians seeking to understand, treat, and manage the disease.

A sleepwalking, homicidal nursemaid; a "morally vacant" juvenile poisoner; a man driven to arson by a "lesion of the will"; an articulate and poised man on trial for assault who, while conducting his own defense, undergoes a profound personality change and becomes a wild and delusional "alter." These people are not characters from a mystery novelist's vivid imagination, but rather defendants who were tried at the Old Bailey, London's central criminal court, in the mid-nineteenth century. In Unconscious Crime, Joel Peter Eigen explores these and other cases in which defendants did not conform to any of the Victorian legal system's existing definitions of insanity yet displayed convincing evidence of mental aberration. Instead, they were—or claimed to be—"missing," "absent," or "unconscious": lucid, though unaware of their actions. Based on extensive research in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (verbatim courtroom narratives taken down in shorthand during the trial and sold on the street the following day), Eigen's book reveals a growing estrangement between law and medicine over the legal concept of the Person as a rational and purposeful actor with a clear understanding of consequences. The McNaughtan Rules of l843 had formalized the Victorian insanity plea, guiding the courts in cases of alleged delusion and derangement. But as Eigen makes clear in the cases he discovered, even though defense attorneys attempted to broaden the definition of insanity to include mental absence, the courts and physicians who testified as experts were wary of these novel challenges to the idea of human agency and responsibility. Combining the colorful intrigue of courtroom drama and the keen insights of social history, Unconscious Crime depicts Victorian England's legal and medical cultures confronting a new understanding of human behavior, and provocatively suggests these trials represent the earliest incarnation of double consciousness and multiple personality disorder.