Daynes - The dark side of the mind: true stories from my life as a forensic psychologist

To Mum, Dad and Big Sis

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The stories you read here are based on my recollections, experiences and life as a forensic psychologist. Names and certain identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the innocent, and the bang-to- rights guilty. And, moreover, to protect myself. I spend enough time in court as it is.

If thou gaze long into an abyss,

the abyss will also gaze into thee.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sometimes you help your patients see things more clearly, sometimes they help you.

Maurice was in his 80s, his long, thin frame so twisted with arthritis that from a distance he looked like a gnarled old hawthorn tree. One that was dressed up like Simon Cowell, all high-waisted trousers and tight white T-shirts. He had a glass eye too, giving him an off-centre gaze that added to his general asymmetry.

He wasnt on my caseload, but was one of the long-term residents at a hospital secure unit where Id recently started a new job as a soon-to-be-qualified psychologist. The hospital was on the edge of a sprawling and impoverished council estate on the outskirts of a depressed northern town you could say it was gritty.

Unless youve personally been detained in a secure unit under the Mental Health Act, it can be hard to understand the difference between these places and plain old prison. The two settings treat their guests very differently. In the prison service the approach is ordered and dominated by the need to provide security and protection for the public. In secure hospitals, such as this one, the approach is to have as few restrictions as possible to be more collaborative; not only containing, but actively caring. Like prisoners, the people here arent at liberty; they are considered to pose a danger to themselves or, more likely, to others. But because many of these environments are divided into smaller, almost homely, units with shared communal living areas, its not that unusual to find members of staff eating lunch alongside their patients.

So it was that I would find myself on most Tuesdays and Thursdays popping over to the small annexe where Maurice lived, to spend my lunch break with the occupants of Milton Ward.

Maurices psychiatric reports made repeated mention of his suffering from a sexual sadism disorder. The irony of the word suffering wasnt lost on me. 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. Which raises the question: who is really suffering here?

For Maurice, this meant that he liked to lurk in isolated spots and whip out what should have been his private parts at unsuspecting girls and women. The shock and horror on their faces was a source of exquisite personal and sexual pleasure for him. His penchant for this cheapest of thrills had briefly landed him in prison as a young man, but unsurprisingly this didnt curb him. After his release he graduated to the point at which two women were found dead in his home, each with multiple stab wounds of varying depths, predominantly centred around their breasts. The precise explorations of a torturer. Now an established resident at the secure unit, Maurice wasnt going anywhere. Ever.

One Tuesday, while I was having my lunch at the annexe soup and a bread roll Maurice approached me from behind and in the blink, quite literally, of an eye, popped his ocular prosthesis straight out of his face and into my Heinz Cream of Tomato. Before I could process what was happening, I was covered in blood-red spatters and my soup was gazing back at me.

Still somewhat green around the edges at 24, I momentarily lost self-control and gave Maurice exactly the reaction he was hoping for. I shrieked, physically leapt out of my seat, my Celtic complexion turning an even whiter shade of pale. Who wouldnt balk when faced with an eyeball in their soup?

Id been aware of Maurices glass eye beforehand, but it turns out that when you see one doing backstroke in your soup your brain instinctively tells you its an actual eyeball. A jellied part of someone elses body. The rational explanation that its really nothing more than a giant marble kicks in a while later, once youve screamed the place down.

I got a quick look at his face a sunken crevice where his eyeball had been, the healthy eye looking intently at me, studying my reaction and caught a hint of a smirk as he was ushered off by a male nurse. I began to kick myself. This old man had just got the better of me.

This was an example of offence paralleling when a person behaves in a pattern that resembles or serves the same function as his criminal behaviour. For Maurice, the sense of mastery at producing fear and disgust on the face of the nearest woman, via the sudden exposure of this particular body part, was as good as it was going to get in the limiting confines of the hospital environment.

I felt enormous embarrassment for walking into Maurices trap that day. But the encounter helped me understand a great deal about the profession I had chosen to enter. Because how do you solve a problem like Maurice? The conundrum of this man, and the way I reacted to him, is the challenge at the heart of the forensic psychology I practise every day.

Dealing with Maurice might seem obvious to some surely you just take away the false eyeball? But Im not the sadist in this story. Its not my remit or desire to punish or humiliate the people I work with. And simply taking it away wouldnt address the root problem his need to shock and the sexual gratification he took from it. If we removed the glass eyeball, his drives would find another way to manifest themselves. And lets not forget that removing a persons body parts, even prosthetic ones, tends to raise some pretty awkward human rights questions.

There will be those who argue that eating lunch in the same room as Maurice was asking for trouble. Who in their right mind has lunch with a convicted sex offender and doesnt expect to catch his eye, figuratively at least? But this puts the onus on the victim (in this case, me) to alter my behaviour to find somewhere else to eat my lunch. And its my job to help men like Maurice change their behaviour. Besides, starving his problem of the oxygen it needs (for Maurice, simply access to women) doesnt necessarily kill it. It can just make it more desperate to survive.

Sticks or stones may break my bones, but an eye in my lunch is, at worst, nothing more than a choking hazard. As I was reminded the hard way on that day, an effective approach to extinguishing any kind of unpleasant behaviour in this environment, where it is safe to do so, is simply to ignore it. Any parent of toddlers can verify this its the most basic of behaviourist techniques. (Behaviourists are firmly on one side of the nature vs. nurture debate. They assert that were all born blank slates and only do anything because we have learned it from other people, and then persist with this behaviour depending upon the degree to which it is rewarded or punished.) And as any parent of toddlers will also confirm, not providing the sought-after reaction to a behaviour is often one of the hardest approaches to implement.