Evaluation Of Criminal Responsibility In Multiple Personality And The Related Dissociative Disorders

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.

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.

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).

How responsible are mentally disordered offenders for their crimes? Aimed specifically at understanding the social context of the serious criminal offender who is deemed to be mentally abnormal, this new edition of Offenders, Deviants or Patients? takes into account the many changes in legal practice, methods of treatment and attitudes since the first edition was published in 1980. Herschel Prins examines the relationship between mental abnormality and criminal behaviour, the extent to which this relationship is used (or misused) in the criminal courts and the various facilities that are currently available for treatment. Unique in its multidisciplinary approach Offenders, Deviants or Patients? will be invaluable to all those who come into contact with serious offenders.

Multiple personality syndrome is being diagnosed and treated in the United States in ever increasing numbers. Indeed, it is alleged that the incidence of this bizarre and striking disorder has reached epidemic proportions. Clinician/researchers report each seeing individually more than 100 patients whose minds have split into as many as 60 alter egos. Their case histories are typified by sexual and physical abuse in childhood and some have reached notoriety; in films, like Eve and Sybil and in criminal records, like Bianchi, 'the Hillside Strangler'. But does 'multiple personality' exist? This monograph takes as its point of departure the virtual absence of such patients anywhere except the U.S.A. and even then it is a relatively small number of psychologists and psychiatrists who report the overwhelming majority of cases. The book provides the first comprehensive review of the burgeoning literature from the beginning of the century to the present and covers more than 300 articles and books. It should prove of interest to psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists and social workers and is an invaluable reference for students on courses in clinical and abnormal psychology as well as to practising clinicians and social workers. Following an introduction to a selection of the more notable cases, a number of critical issues are examined in ensuing chapters. These are devoted to problems of definition and differential diagnosis; aetiology; psychophysiological, psychometric and experimental studies; attempts at theoretical explanation and the relationship between MPS, hypnosis and dissociation. The author, a practising clinical psychologist and lecturer in psychopathology, gradually develops the hypothesis that MPS is best explained under the rubric of social role theory. It is argued that MPS is a culture-bound variant of hysterical psychosis occurring in individuals with high 'hypnotisability'. The tentative conclusion is that even if one accepts the reality of MPS it is unhelpful to regard it as a discrete clinical entity, and it is being grossly overdiagnosed.