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Speaker 2: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 2: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 2: written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker BTK
Speaker 2: Every week, another fascinating author talking about the most shocking
Speaker 2: and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with
Speaker 2: your host, journalist and author Dan Zupanski, Good Evening.
Speaker 4: Find out what truly creates and defines a psychopath from
Speaker 4: the leading expert who helped to create Killing Eves Villanel.
Speaker 4: Doctor Mark Freestone has worked on some of the most interesting, infamous,
Speaker 4: and disturbing cases of psychopathology in recent years. His expertise
Speaker 4: has led to a consultant role on several TV series,
Speaker 4: helping them accurately portray their fictional villains. Now he shares
Speaker 4: his phenomenal insight into the minds of some of the
Speaker 4: world's most violent real life criminals. Angela the Remorseless, a
Speaker 4: rare female psychopath casually confessed to murder on national television
Speaker 4: without a hint of regret. Danny the Borderline switched from
Speaker 4: grandiosity to rage to despair within minutes and killed his
Speaker 4: defenseless friend without explanation. Tony de Khanman preferred charm, intimidation
Speaker 4: and sexual abuse over physical violence, and once tried to
Speaker 4: dupe someone into buying the Eiffel Tower. Jason the Lyar
Speaker 4: had a fantasy life that led to vicious murders around
Speaker 4: Europe and preyed on those who see the good in people.
Speaker 4: Case by fascinating case, get to know seven of the
Speaker 4: most dangerous minds that doctor Freestone has encountered over the
Speaker 4: last fifteen years. These are up close accounts of some
Speaker 4: of them psychopathic criminals and of what can happen if
Speaker 4: you fall victim to their supreme powers of manipulation. Exploring
Speaker 4: the many factors that make a psychopath, the complexities and
Speaker 4: contradictions of their emotions and behavior, as well as an
Speaker 4: examination of how the lives of psychopaths develop inside and
Speaker 4: outside the institutions that are supposed to contain them. Making
Speaker 4: a psychopath opens up a window into the world of
Speaker 4: those who operate in a void of human emotion and
Speaker 4: what can be done to control them. The book that
Speaker 4: we're featuring this evening is Making a Psychopath My Journey
Speaker 4: into Seven Dangerous Minds with my special guest author, doctor
Speaker 4: Mark Freestone. Welcome to the program, and thank you very
Speaker 4: much for this interview, Doctor Mark Freestone, closed to be here.
Speaker 4: Thank you so much, our pleasure. Now you start off
Speaker 4: the introduction in this book, you state that you're not
Speaker 4: a psychiatrist and you're not a forensic psychologist. So tell
Speaker 4: us about your training and also tell us about biopsychosocial
Speaker 4: understanding of mental illness a mental disorder. Espone me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, of course, Dan, A good way to start out,
Speaker 3: so you sort of know where I'm coming from now.
Speaker 3: So I was a sociologist. I trained in sociology, and
Speaker 3: I think that maybe sociology, although it does include elements
Speaker 3: of psychology in its trading pathway, and certainly I did
Speaker 3: a lot of psychology as a young student, I think
Speaker 3: sociology tends to look for more group based, social level,
Speaker 3: societal level explanations for behavior and for consequences of people's behavior.
Speaker 3: So my PhD was actually based on anti globalization protests,
Speaker 3: which sounds a long way away from mental health and psychopathy.
Speaker 3: But what I was specifically looking at was how groups
Speaker 3: of people form around particular protests organizations, and I found it, actually,
Speaker 3: curiously enough, although I was looking at anti globalization protests,
Speaker 3: there was a big shift around nine eleven actually, which
Speaker 3: took place in the middle of my PhD study, away
Speaker 3: from that sort of anti capitalist, anti globalization moments into
Speaker 3: an anti war movement. But what I found was quite
Speaker 3: interesting was it was the same people who were organizing
Speaker 3: process who are sort of they become almost like professionalized
Speaker 3: protesters or professionalized protest organizers. And as I was reaching
Speaker 3: the end of the PhD, my supervisor said, well, the
Speaker 3: methodological approach that you used, the way that you come
Speaker 3: to understand and work with these groups of protesters would
Speaker 3: be really interesting. In a secure hospital, Now, a secure
Speaker 3: hospital is not something that exists in quite that form
Speaker 3: in the United States. They have these in Canada, but
Speaker 3: essentially they're hospitals that exist to house people who are
Speaker 3: already convicted criminals, or who are or would be convicted
Speaker 3: criminals if they weren't found not guilty by reason of
Speaker 3: insanity as we say right in the UK, or in
Speaker 3: other words, they're not culpable for their crime because they
Speaker 3: were suffering from a mental disorder at the time they
Speaker 3: committed it. And one of these have been set up
Speaker 3: at a high security hospital just up the road from
Speaker 3: the university where I was working at Rampton Hospital in
Speaker 3: the UK, one of our three maxim security hostrils and
Speaker 3: it was called the Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder UNI
Speaker 3: and essentially the role of this was to try and
Speaker 3: treat psychopaths or people with a level of personality pathology,
Speaker 3: so difficulties in relating to other people, difficulties and understanding
Speaker 3: and dealing with emotion equivalent to those of somebody who
Speaker 3: was a psychopath. This was a very bold move. Nobody
Speaker 3: else really tried this before that. In the Netherlands, the
Speaker 3: Dutch have a system kind of analogois called the turber
Speaker 3: Shicking Stelling system, but it doesn't explicitly work with psychopaths
Speaker 3: in quite the same way. So this was very innovative,
Speaker 3: very cutting edge and sort of very exciting place to be.
Speaker 3: But as I rapidly discovered, it's not as simple as
Speaker 3: that to suddenly overturn fifty years of failed attempts to
Speaker 3: treat psychopathy, and things tended to go a little bit
Speaker 3: badly wrong in those units But what I think you
Speaker 3: touched on with your question about the biopsychosocial approach is
Speaker 3: that a lot of the thinking around mental disorder in
Speaker 3: the UK for a long time. I think it's probably
Speaker 3: true of the US and Canada as well, it's based
Speaker 3: around a biomedical model. So this is the idea that
Speaker 3: mental disorders are necessarily biological illnesses that are based in
Speaker 3: some kind of biological problem. It could be something about
Speaker 3: the neurological wiring, it could be a problem that's based
Speaker 3: in the sort of a genetic coding that leads you
Speaker 3: to lack the emotions that other people would have. And
Speaker 3: the biopsychosocial model just sort of critiques that biomedical understanding
Speaker 3: and says, well, what about the societies that people grow
Speaker 3: up in, what about the influence of child what about
Speaker 3: the influence of attachment in the way that people develop,
Speaker 3: and trying to sort of recast mental disorders like psychopathy
Speaker 3: and personality disorder as problems that are not just medical.
Speaker 3: They involve the input from a lot of other kind
Speaker 3: of professional disciplines social work, probation officers, prison officers, potentially nurses,
Speaker 3: and maybe even wacky sociologists like me to try and
Speaker 3: understand them and cast them in a way that says,
Speaker 3: these are problems that can't just be solved by medicine.
Speaker 3: And that's particularly true of psychopathy. Of course, because we
Speaker 3: don't have a drug to treat psychopathy. We don't even
Speaker 3: have drugs to treat the symptoms. We have to approach
Speaker 3: it in a biopside a social way in order to
Speaker 3: manage people with a diagnosis of psychopathy.
Speaker 4: You talk about the masks of psychopathology or psychopathy pardon me,
Speaker 4: and you also have you talk about the gold standard
Speaker 4: or research being Hervey Kleckley from nineteen forty one, The
Speaker 4: Mask of Sanity, and then you say later with Robert
Speaker 4: Hare the Psychopathic Checklist, and then with his second edition
Speaker 4: of the Psychopathic Checklist, tell us just briefly about the
Speaker 4: effect that it has on psychopathic research or research about psychopathy,
Speaker 4: and then your criticism with the second edition of Robert
Speaker 4: Hare's Psychopathic Checklist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, of course. So I think I talk about the
Speaker 3: idea of masks of psychopathy in the book, and that
Speaker 3: comes from Cleckley's work on what you called the Mask
Speaker 3: of sanity, the idea that psychopaths put on a mask
Speaker 3: of appearing to be normal to anyone who anyone who
Speaker 3: meets a psychopaths for five minutes wouldn't know they'd met
Speaker 3: a psychopath. In fact, quite the opposite. They might have
Speaker 3: thought modern, charming and sort of urbane, interesting individual. So
Speaker 3: this is what Cleckley means. Psychopaths have the ability to
Speaker 3: pass themselves off quite competently as a normal, adjusted, functioning,
Speaker 3: empathic human being over short spaces of time. So that's
Speaker 3: the idea of that the sort of the mask that
Speaker 3: psychopaths were, and beneath that mask is a sort of
Speaker 3: a very sort of a seeding mass of very confused
Speaker 3: morality and a real absence of a connection to other
Speaker 3: human beings, which looks like insanity in many ways, because
Speaker 3: it's impossible for us without being psychopaths, I think to
Speaker 3: understand the sort of the absence of a moral code
Speaker 3: on moral compass that psychopaths have. And I think that's
Speaker 3: one of the reasons why psychopaths in fiction are so compelling,
Speaker 3: because it's really really difficult to think, what would my
Speaker 3: world be like if I simply didn't care about other people?
Speaker 3: And then Bob Hair, the Cladian forensic psychologist, sort of
Speaker 3: realizes her Cleckley's vision into a number of testable traits
Speaker 3: that psychopaths have. There's twenty traits and psychopathy checklists, and
Speaker 3: it very quickly becomes, particularly the PCRs. The secondition that
Speaker 3: you mentioned, the Psychothy Checklist revised that was probabished in
Speaker 3: ninety eight, that quickly becomes sort of the only accepted
Speaker 3: way of identifying and clinically assessing for psychopathy in just
Speaker 3: about any developed country. It's been translated into i think
Speaker 3: eighteen languages, and there's a youth version as well, and
Speaker 3: a screening tool that sometimes use so many many different versions,
Speaker 3: many many different languages. So the exclusion of anything else,
Speaker 3: and I think that the issue that I have is
Speaker 3: that nothing that's what is it now twenty four years old,
Speaker 3: is ever going to represent the state of the art
Speaker 3: in research. It just isn't. And I think, just to
Speaker 3: take an example, something that coleckly noticed was that psychopaths
Speaker 3: tend to have much much lower thresholds of anxiety than
Speaker 3: people who weren't psychopaths in a usual way. And Bob
Speaker 3: has always been very resistant to including anxiety in any
Speaker 3: shape or form in the Psychopathy checklist. But actually the
Speaker 3: latest research suggests that people's levels of anxiety of what
Speaker 3: we call, I guess just sort of general dissatisfaction with
Speaker 3: the world. That are a pretty good way of distinguishing,
Speaker 3: certainly primary psychopaths from secondary psychopaths, which might learn too later,
Speaker 3: but would be a really good trait to add. But
Speaker 3: bop Air isn't interested, I think, in changing it now
Speaker 3: because it's adopted by most of our legal systems and
Speaker 3: we use it in the courts very very regularly, so
Speaker 3: why change it. But I'm not sure that that's the
Speaker 3: best way of thinking about it, And there's been a
Speaker 3: lot of alternative assessments put forward. There was a sort
Speaker 3: of a cross atlantic one called the CAP the Comprehensive
Speaker 3: Assessment of Psychopathic Personality that was proposed by Stephen Hart
Speaker 3: in Canada and Caroline Logan and David Cook in the UK,
Speaker 3: which looked at psychopathy without the forensic element. So if
Speaker 3: you take away the antisocial features of the Psychopathy Checklist,
Speaker 3: you're left with an assessment that could accurately predict psychopathy
Speaker 3: in people who weren't criminals. Whereas a weakness of the
Speaker 3: Psychopathy Checklist, in my opinion, is that it contains a
Speaker 3: very large number of items that relate simply to antisocial
Speaker 3: or offending behavior. So this wonderfully fascinating idea of a
Speaker 3: sort of successful or non criminal psychopath is not something
Speaker 3: we can add ass for using the pcl art. So
Speaker 3: lots of other reasons that I won't go into now,
Speaker 3: but I think it's maybe time for us to rethink
Speaker 3: the way that we measure psychopathy.
Speaker 4: In that vein you t give an example in the
Speaker 4: book of Games, Fallon tell us about this in extraordinary example.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, a professor of neuropsychology at Stanford University, James Fallen,
Speaker 3: conducts a very interesting experiment to look at differential emotional
Speaker 3: responses within the brain, so neuropsychological responses to disturbing stimuli.
Speaker 3: And he does this using an approach called contrast tomography,
Speaker 3: So I sort of scanned the activation of electrical impulses
Speaker 3: in the brain. And he recruits two groups of people.
Speaker 3: He recruits people who have either been pre screened as
Speaker 3: having psychopathy or are currently offenders on parole, and then
Speaker 3: he recruits a control group are just people on the
Speaker 3: street or his grad students. And he realizes that he's
Speaker 3: not been putting enough effort into recruiting the control room.
Speaker 3: And I can totally relate to this because it's so
Speaker 3: time consuming difficult to recruit offenders and psychopaths into any study.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of ethical loopholes you have to go through,
Speaker 3: a lot of people don't understand it, so you put
Speaker 3: a lot of effort into that, and then it's like, well,
Speaker 3: where's your control group? And oh god, I've got to
Speaker 3: find some people to come do my research stump. So
Speaker 3: he scans himself just to sort of fill in, and
Speaker 3: then he's looking through the slides and he's pretty much,
Speaker 3: you know, it's actually a really interesting and influential study.
Speaker 3: He notices that the activation of the amygdala, which is
Speaker 3: a lobe in the middle of the brain just above
Speaker 3: the limbic system, so just above where the brain stem
Speaker 3: meets the gray matter of the brain itself, is much
Speaker 3: much much lower in one of his controls, and he thinks, oh,
Speaker 3: that's on. This looks like a psychopath. What am I
Speaker 3: going to do with this one? So he says, well,
Speaker 3: I'd better find out who it is so I can
Speaker 3: call them and tell them there a psychopath. And he
Speaker 3: cross matches it to his master key list of participants
Speaker 3: and realizes this is his own brainscat well, and he's
Speaker 3: very He describes this beautifully and his Ted talk and
Speaker 3: his book. He says, I just sort of, you know,
Speaker 3: I had this Eureka moment where all of these these
Speaker 3: difficulties and this lack of understanding I've faced when dealing
Speaker 3: with other people in my life suddenly made sense. It's
Speaker 3: not because I was going about it wrong, where there
Speaker 3: was anything wrong with them. It was something about the
Speaker 3: way that I am that made it very difficult for
Speaker 3: me to relate to other people. And this is a
Speaker 3: successful man with a you know, a very high profile
Speaker 3: career at a you know, an Ivy League university in
Speaker 3: the USA, with a family, and this is something else
Speaker 3: that's very odd for a psychopath. They tend to have
Speaker 3: marital type relationships, so they can become very intimate with people,
Speaker 3: but only over a short space of time. After about
Speaker 3: sort of six to twelve months, they tend to break
Speaker 3: up with their partners, usually due to infidelity or simply
Speaker 3: boredom on the part of the psychopath, and move on.
Speaker 3: And Jim has you know, three kids, successful family life,
Speaker 3: and he sort of, you know, he thinks to back
Speaker 3: all the times where he's had people over to entertain
Speaker 3: them for dinner and he just sits around, sits at
Speaker 3: the table. They throw all these people around eating my
Speaker 3: food in my house, just gets on and he thinks
Speaker 3: that a well that you know, that's the psychopath in
Speaker 3: me talking. But at the same time, it doesn't inhibit
Speaker 3: him from having a you know, fulfilling family life right right.
Speaker 4: In this book, you describe composites of people that you've
Speaker 4: dealt with in the fifteen years and beyond, and some
Speaker 4: of them are ones that you personally dealt with and
Speaker 4: others publicly visible ones. So let's start with one of
Speaker 4: the examples that you have is Paul the hit man,
Speaker 4: and what this illustrates.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Paul was actually probably the most directly scary of
Speaker 3: all the psychopaths. I think, you know, there are a
Speaker 3: lot of other people in the book you aren't necessarily
Speaker 3: I think looking into their history, they might have very
Speaker 3: scary crimes, or they might be difficult to deal with,
Speaker 3: which I'm sure touch on later. But I think Paul
Speaker 3: just interpersonally had an ability to command a room of people.
Speaker 3: And the context is important here because this is in
Speaker 3: the context of a prison where prisoners have virtually no
Speaker 3: power at all. They're completely beholden to the staff, the
Speaker 3: prison officers and the governors, and to an extent, psychologists
Speaker 3: and people like me who sort of work in clinical roles.
Speaker 3: And yet virtually every meeting I went to in the
Speaker 3: prison he was able to sort of control the room,
Speaker 3: and you always thought, well, who among the prisoners does
Speaker 3: he have something on that he can basically recruit them
Speaker 3: to his cause and get them to devote his way
Speaker 3: on any issue that may come up. And his offending
Speaker 3: history was, you know, he just sort of enforced nasty
Speaker 3: debts for drug dealers. So sure, if you've ever seen
Speaker 3: a British crime film Lockstop and Two Smoking Barrels, but
Speaker 3: there's a hit man. They're played by Vinnie Jones, who's
Speaker 3: actually known in British culture as a bit of a
Speaker 3: scary character. He was a footballer, but he was known
Speaker 3: for sort of instance on the pitch, so he was
Speaker 3: sort of the kind of enforce who go around break
Speaker 3: people's kneecaps, tie them up and torture them or in
Speaker 3: some cases kill them. But all was such an effective
Speaker 3: psychopath that rather than having to often having to kill
Speaker 3: people directly, he would just get other people to do it.
Speaker 3: People who are owned money or people who he hadn't
Speaker 3: under his thrall, and you could just just sort of
Speaker 3: sitting in a room with him and having him hold
Speaker 3: court and you know, sort of manipulate people into answering questions.
Speaker 3: You had a real sense of like, if this man
Speaker 3: asked you to do something in the community, what would
Speaker 3: you feel your options were to say no? And this
Speaker 3: isn't sort of thinking about is he going to be violent?
Speaker 3: This is just his sort of personal gravitass is sort
Speaker 3: of feeling that the way he woulded his sentences and
Speaker 3: the way he spoke, and the way he'd look at
Speaker 3: you when he was sort of suggesting that you do
Speaker 3: something kindly for him, which he did quite a lot.
Speaker 3: To me, I think because I was new, really carried
Speaker 3: a lot of weight and it was difficult to sort
Speaker 3: of think how you could get out of doing things
Speaker 3: for him. But over the course of working with him,
Speaker 3: it transpired. You know, he'd actually embedded himself more sinisterly
Speaker 3: into the culture of the prison that there were a
Speaker 3: lot of people doing favors for him, including some of
Speaker 3: the staff, and it actually caused quite a major scandal,
Speaker 3: which I detail in the book.
Speaker 4: Yes You talk about that there was a woman named
Speaker 4: Louise running the orientation group, and so to again, as
Speaker 4: you have alluded to, that power extended into her compromising
Speaker 4: her job, her career, her life for the I guess
Speaker 4: the favor of this part of the hit Man.
Speaker 3: Yes, So this is there's a lot of stuff about
Speaker 3: psychopathy that we probably know but haven't actually written up
Speaker 3: and published because it's clinical material. But we have this
Speaker 3: idea of something called boundary violation where when you're working
Speaker 3: with people with severe personality disorder or particularly psychopathy, because
Speaker 3: you know, one of the constituent parts of the psychopathy
Speaker 3: checklist is manipulation, so the ability to con and manipulate
Speaker 3: people into getting your own way, and it's actually there's
Speaker 3: a constant pressure to give way to people like Paul's,
Speaker 3: you know, attempts to sort of manipulate you, to control you,
Speaker 3: to get you to do what they ask. And I
Speaker 3: think in this case, Louise the prison officer had fallen
Speaker 3: into a sort of a state where she was able
Speaker 3: to actually enter into an sexual relationship with Paul on
Speaker 3: the wing, which is absolutely taboo in every single sense.
Speaker 3: And I think, you know, if you think about this,
Speaker 3: just interpersonally, you can easily think, well, you know that
Speaker 3: that could happen. He could sort of corner you in
Speaker 3: a room and then make a sort of inappropriate proposal,
Speaker 3: and you know, something could happen, but then you probably
Speaker 3: go and report it. But what seemed to have happened
Speaker 3: in this particular case was that there were quite a
Speaker 3: few staff who were aware that this was going on.
Speaker 3: I must have sort of had that, you know, we
Speaker 3: call a false consensus, that everybody thought this was okay,
Speaker 3: because you know, it was only Paul and he's very charming,
Speaker 3: good looking, and you know, Louise must know what she's
Speaker 3: doing or something like that, and that the worst part
Speaker 3: of this is that I was away from the prison
Speaker 3: to visit another hospital at the time, and I missed
Speaker 3: sort of the playing out of this. But eventually, the
Speaker 3: reason that the affair is discovered is not because somebody
Speaker 3: sees them, you know, having you know, an intimate moment
Speaker 3: somewhere in the prison, but rather that Louise tries to
Speaker 3: challenge some other officers with bad behavior elsewhere in the wing,
Speaker 3: and that the officers threatened to reveal her affair with
Speaker 3: the prisoner, which they were already aware of so a
Speaker 3: large proportion of the staff in the wing already knew
Speaker 3: about this affair and it only came to light when
Speaker 3: she challenged them, and another officer who wasn't aware of
Speaker 3: it walking past her what was going and reported it
Speaker 3: to a governor. So it just shows you how deeply
Speaker 3: the sort of the roots of the psychopaths minipulative power
Speaker 3: can extend into a structure like a prison, however tight
Speaker 3: and tightly controlled, and this is what we call this
Speaker 3: is what we call a category. A prison in the
Speaker 3: UK was you know, you couldn't go anywhere without having
Speaker 3: helicopter wire above your head in case somebody tried to
Speaker 3: airlift a high risk prisoner at so it was one
Speaker 3: of the most secure places in the country and actually
Speaker 3: quite a well respected jail as well, so with a
Speaker 3: good reputation for security. But nevertheless this happened. And my
Speaker 3: contention is it wouldn't have happened if Paul hadn't been
Speaker 3: such an effective psychopath.
Speaker 4: Let's talk about Danny the borderline, because you say that
Speaker 4: you learned so much from all of these cases, but
Speaker 4: you learned much more from this case. Tell us about
Speaker 4: this borderline. Danny the borderline.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, so in order to be admitted into
Speaker 3: this is another patient as part of the Dangerous and
Speaker 3: Severe Personality Disorder program. There, in order to be admitted
Speaker 3: into this program, you had to be a psychopath, or
Speaker 3: you had to have, as I said, personality pathology equivalent
Speaker 3: to that of a psychopath. So that would mean very
Speaker 3: severe personality sort of features from the anti social borderline categories.
Speaker 3: So Danny had a peace of asker that would have
Speaker 3: made him a psychopath. But when I say I learned
Speaker 3: more from him than anyone else, I don't know. I
Speaker 3: necessarily learnt a great deal about psychopathy because I was
Speaker 3: really confused by the idea that this man was a psychopath.
Speaker 3: I think I just learned more about working with people
Speaker 3: with very disordered personalities and about myself as well, actually,
Speaker 3: because I think that plays a major part of it.
Speaker 3: Whenever you work with people with severe personality disorders, you
Speaker 3: start to think about, well, what is it that what
Speaker 3: is my emotional makeup? What is it that makes me
Speaker 3: function with other people in a way that these people,
Speaker 3: these men and women can't. You know, what is it
Speaker 3: that makes us people with functional personality as opposed to
Speaker 3: dysfunctional ones? And they also have an and I think
Speaker 3: this is where Danny is really an in in case.
Speaker 3: It's the ability to get under your skin, to say
Speaker 3: things or to do things that pull you into directions
Speaker 3: at once. And one of those directions is to sort
Speaker 3: of think, oh, you know, you need help. You're a
Speaker 3: person who's suffering and you need my help and care,
Speaker 3: and at the same time do something that's utterly revolting
Speaker 3: in many ways, and that could be violence towards other people,
Speaker 3: it could be valanced towards themselves, and I think Danny's
Speaker 3: will Danny had been other people in his past, certainly,
Speaker 3: and he had a very unpleasant index offense of stabbing
Speaker 3: somebody who trusted him in the back. He is the
Speaker 3: main reason that it was so difficult to work with
Speaker 3: him was that his force of aggression was direct in
Speaker 3: tire it himself. So he used to just do the
Speaker 3: most awful acts of self harm to himself. The way
Speaker 3: exceed anything I'd ever seen in any prison or hospital
Speaker 3: before or after. And I've been around, so yeah, I
Speaker 3: do tell a little bit more on the book. I
Speaker 3: don't know if it's something that we want to go
Speaker 3: into too much detail, but I think what you learn
Speaker 3: from that is how to sort of sort out a
Speaker 3: genuine concern from a sort of feeling of I guess,
Speaker 3: a sort of natural response to care and to provide
Speaker 3: your care in a way that never colludes with the
Speaker 3: person's their disorder, if you like. So, if somebody has
Speaker 3: a diagnosive borderline personality disorder, for example, part of their
Speaker 3: issue is that they are constantly looking for ways to
Speaker 3: find an identity that makes sense to them. And I
Speaker 3: think with Danny what he was looking for was some
Speaker 3: sort of core part of his being, probably a spiritual
Speaker 3: one that made sense to him, and what he would
Speaker 3: often do is try to associate with people who had
Speaker 3: a spiritual background. So there was a chaplain in the
Speaker 3: hospital who was very attached to and we became a
Speaker 3: little bit worried because of course his index offense was
Speaker 3: against somebody from the clergy as well, and that relationship
Speaker 3: had to be monitored very carefully. But then halfway through
Speaker 3: that he decided he wanted to affiliate with Wicker Sorry,
Speaker 3: which is a much more pagan religion in the UK,
Speaker 3: and the chaplain was trying to support him with that.
Speaker 3: But this constant flitting between spiritual identities between sexual identities
Speaker 3: between gender identities was something that really defined Danny in
Speaker 3: quite a sort of a I think the word I'm
Speaker 3: looking forward. It's like vitiginous, Like the shifting was so
Speaker 3: quick and so unexplained that it made you feel a
Speaker 3: little bit of vertigo, Like you're like, well, you were
Speaker 3: a Christian yesterday and you're a Wickan today. Now, how
Speaker 3: does that work? Because those things are opposed in my mind?
Speaker 3: And what it does is that sort of throws your
Speaker 3: logical train of thought, and it throws your natural human
Speaker 3: responses like empathy, into a sort of spiral where you're
Speaker 3: not sure whether you are zentful of this person for
Speaker 3: deceiving you, or whether you feel more empathy for them
Speaker 3: because they clearly need more help than you thought, or
Speaker 3: whether you should just reject them because this is so much,
Speaker 3: so much to take in and absorb at once, that it's
Speaker 3: just impossible and you should give up now. And that
Speaker 3: huge combination of emotions, which can shift very quickly within
Speaker 3: the course of avice a week, is a lot to deal.
Speaker 3: And I think that's why I say I learned the
Speaker 3: most from that case, simply because it learnt It taught
Speaker 3: me a great deal about trying to manage my expectations
Speaker 3: and my own emotional states whenever I go into work
Speaker 3: with people in these kind of these kind of settings,
Speaker 3: and with this diagnosis.
Speaker 4: You say in the book that it's a paper thin
Speaker 4: line between insanity and psycho bathy. So let's use this
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Speaker 4: com promo code true murder. Now, Mark, we were talking
Speaker 4: about the thin line between insanity and psychopathy, and we
Speaker 4: were going to have another example, ironically of that with
Speaker 4: one of the book chapters. You call Angela the Remorseless. Okay,
Speaker 4: let's talk about Angela the Remorseless.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So this was this actually comes from my work
Speaker 3: with the Phoebe wonder Bridge on Killing Eve, which was
Speaker 3: the BBC America TV program that I think it actually
Speaker 3: I think it's just wrapped in the UK and it
Speaker 3: probably has in the US. So the series finale was
Speaker 3: last Tuesday, and I'd been asked by the production team
Speaker 3: to give some insight into how to write a psychopath.
Speaker 3: And obviously they have a lot of experience of working
Speaker 3: with male psychopaths, but not a great deal of working
Speaker 3: with women, for reasons that I actually describe a bit
Speaker 3: in the book. But the closest I've sort of come
Speaker 3: to that work is we had a sister prison, a
Speaker 3: sister jail next to us in the jail I was
Speaker 3: working in at the time, and they were a female prison.
Speaker 3: They had female prisoners only. They also had a smaller
Speaker 3: dspd wink for women. It was actually intended to be
Speaker 3: for forty women, but they only managed to find twelve
Speaker 3: women to fill it because there simply weren't that many
Speaker 3: diagnosable psychopaths in the UK female prison population, which was
Speaker 3: interesting in itself, I think, but one of the particular
Speaker 3: cases was causing them a lot of managerial problems because
Speaker 3: this is somebody who had a lot of experience of
Speaker 3: mental disorder. They were practicing mental health professional and they'd
Speaker 3: become I think they developed what we call morbid jealousy
Speaker 3: which is where jealousy becomes so powerful and so overparent
Speaker 3: that takes over sort of your emotional response and all
Speaker 3: of your energy becomes directed in this one one sort
Speaker 3: of jealous fascination with their i think ex partner who'd
Speaker 3: become who'd set up with another partner, And their crime
Speaker 3: was actually against a bystander who got in the middle
Speaker 3: of this, and they killed the bystander by by actually
Speaker 3: thinking they were going to shoot the new partner. And
Speaker 3: they needed some help from us in terms of how
Speaker 3: to accommodate somebody who had a very intimate knowledge of
Speaker 3: the mental health techniques they were using, and also the
Speaker 3: structure of mental health services within prison, things like that.
Speaker 3: But when the producers of killing were developing the character
Speaker 3: they'd actually found this case of Angela Simpson, who was
Speaker 3: a woman who was a resident of the southern United States,
Speaker 3: who'd she committed a really it's one of those really
Speaker 3: sort of stomach turning crimes where they targeted somebody quite
Speaker 3: vulnerable and they manipulated them in a very psychopathic way
Speaker 3: into a situation where they were even more vulnerable. So
Speaker 3: what angel Simpson had done, she targeted somebody she actually
Speaker 3: knew socially a little bit and knew that this person
Speaker 3: was attracted to her, so it invited him into to
Speaker 3: sort of spend an evening of Netflix and chill, if
Speaker 3: I can put it that way, for want of a
Speaker 3: better expression expression, and then during the course of that
Speaker 3: evening confronted them with some allegations that it seems were
Speaker 3: entirely fabricated about being a snitch for the police force.
Speaker 3: I think what had happened was the victim had actually
Speaker 3: said whilst they were in prison some years before to
Speaker 3: somebody else that they'd informed on another offender at some point.
Speaker 3: But this was ancient history and somehow it had come
Speaker 3: through the chain up to Angela. So when she'd got
Speaker 3: this man, who was actually quite disabled. He was he
Speaker 3: could walk, but he mostly used a wheelchair, so he
Speaker 3: wasn't really able to fight back, but she tied him
Speaker 3: to his chair and tortured him over the course of
Speaker 3: almost a twelve hour period, eotentially sort of driving nails
Speaker 3: into his skull, another sort of really just unnecessarily gratuitous
Speaker 3: things to do to another person, all in the sort
Speaker 3: of the vein being a vigilante to sort of exterminate
Speaker 3: snitches and pedophiles from the world, which there was really
Speaker 3: no supporting evidence for. I mean, it's almost like she
Speaker 3: could have picked anyone and found a reason to torture
Speaker 3: them horribly. And that was all pretty pretty spectacularly dreadful.
Speaker 3: But what was so interesting was that at the end
Speaker 3: of this process she goes to court, she's tried, and
Speaker 3: she's found guilty and sent to prison in the United
Speaker 3: States for I think a life sentence without parole, and
Speaker 3: then gives a number of interviews about it, where she
Speaker 3: absolutely I mean when I talk about sort of the
Speaker 3: characteristics of the psychopathy checklists, if I could get somebody
Speaker 3: on camera acting out as characteristics, it would be actually
Speaker 3: not a man, but Angela Simpson. Because she's so remorseless.
Speaker 3: I think there's at one point the interviewers is thing like, well,
Speaker 3: you know, this was a terrible thing to do. Would
Speaker 3: would you ever consider doing something again? She's just absolutely
Speaker 3: you know, why not fewer niches in the world. That's great, Yeah,
Speaker 3: as if this sort of that the crime has had
Speaker 3: no impact and no, she's made no attempt to establish
Speaker 3: embathy or remorse or what she's done at all. And
Speaker 3: it's actually so that there's a lot of this on YouTube. Actually,
Speaker 3: everyone's welcome to look it up. It's really fascinating to
Speaker 3: watch it. For a little bit difficult at times. She
Speaker 3: actually uses this to kind of control and manipulate the interviewer,
Speaker 3: to sort of wrongfoot the interviewer at times and make
Speaker 3: them think that maybe they're asking the wrong thing, or
Speaker 3: maybe that they haven't really properly understood the person that
Speaker 3: they're talking to, just to sort of intimidate, control, manipulate,
Speaker 3: all the sort of classic psychopathic things. And I think
Speaker 3: what's most interesting about this is that typically we've researchers
Speaker 3: always assumed that female psychopaths would be quite different to men.
Speaker 3: And when I was talking to the Killing writing team,
Speaker 3: one of the things was, well, how do they differ?
Speaker 3: And one of the sort of central assumptions is that
Speaker 3: female psychopaths, often in fiction and from the limited number
Speaker 3: of case studies that we have, tend to use other
Speaker 3: people to do the dirty work, do the vince. So
Speaker 3: they're very good at emotional manipulation and emotional aggression. They're
Speaker 3: not so much at the physical stuff. And Simpson, this
Speaker 3: has sort of turned on its head. She is, to
Speaker 3: all intents and purposes, are very high scoring male psychopath
Speaker 3: and the absolute classic sense of the term. And I
Speaker 3: think that was that was very influential with Villanel because
Speaker 3: we felt it gave us license to present a character
Speaker 3: who was female, glamorous and attractive, but was also able
Speaker 3: to portray very very male psychopathic characteristics, which is just
Speaker 3: really interesting case that sort of I think took us
Speaker 3: on a little bit off guard, and yet illustrates that
Speaker 3: psychopathy isn't always a variant or certainly a personality type.
Speaker 3: It doesn't really vary that much between men and women,
Speaker 3: right often that sort of the real interpersonal and emotional
Speaker 3: characteristic psychopathy are constant across both men and women.
Speaker 4: Let's talk about some of the things you say about
Speaker 4: adverse childhood experiences, and of course you had to look
Speaker 4: at the background, and you did touch on when a
Speaker 4: child's identity is fractured. So talk about a little bit
Speaker 4: about how important the childhood background environment is and the
Speaker 4: raw genetics plays in this as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I should I should be balanced in my I
Speaker 3: should be bounced in my cant Here there is a
Speaker 3: good basis for the genetic heritability of what we call
Speaker 3: callous and unemotional traits, and this was done by my
Speaker 3: colleagues abiding at University College London, and she found she
Speaker 3: studied people aged children age seven and nine, and she
Speaker 3: looked at what I call callous on emotional traits, which
Speaker 3: basically refers to very early indicators of what might be
Speaker 3: psychopathic behavior. Now it's really important to say that these
Speaker 3: aren't traits that will necessarily mean that these children will
Speaker 3: be become psychopathic. But they sound like, you know, the
Speaker 3: adult definition, so cruelty to animals, cruelty to other children, lying, stealing,
Speaker 3: a lack of remorse of bad things that you've done,
Speaker 3: telling lies repeatedly to other people. Things like that, so
Speaker 3: much more serious than just being a little bit uncontrolled
Speaker 3: or difficult. That the heritability of that is pretty good.
Speaker 3: If you look at twin studies, you find that around
Speaker 3: about there's around about a seventy percent heritability of these
Speaker 3: callous on emotional traits in children, even at quite a
Speaker 3: young age. So they there's clearly a genetic component to
Speaker 3: the sort of precursors of psychopathy. But I think what,
Speaker 3: first of all, with these twin studies, never one hundred percent,
Speaker 3: which seems weird if we're saying there's a genetic causal
Speaker 3: mechanism and play here right, there should be there should
Speaker 3: be one hundred percent or ninety nine percent with a
Speaker 3: little bit of gray area. So clearly there's something more
Speaker 3: going on. And I think that what my experience certainly
Speaker 3: is that nobody I've worked with, nobody i've worked with
Speaker 3: in prison or in hospital who's been diagnosable as a psychopath,
Speaker 3: has had what I would call anywhere an easy ride
Speaker 3: through their childhood. They've often been adopted, they've been abused, neglected,
Speaker 3: and even the people from reasonably middle class backgrounds, like
Speaker 3: Tony in the book, for example, there's been something very
Speaker 3: odd going on. And I think in the United States
Speaker 3: you have, for I think it's ed Ed guyin who's
Speaker 3: a very charming, very charming guy, apparently normal family background,
Speaker 3: but within this is this terribly controlling, almost demonic figure
Speaker 3: in his background. And it makes you think of Tony
Speaker 3: has this this father and his grandfather who have a
Speaker 3: history of manipulating other people. Is said, they're calling basically
Speaker 3: they are convent and those what they do, and they
Speaker 3: hand this down in a sort of an authoritarian paternalistic
Speaker 3: way to each other and then eventually to Tony. So
Speaker 3: he becomes a common as well, because what is the
Speaker 3: family calling? You know, what else are you going to do?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 3: So there's always something dark in their backgrounds. I don't
Speaker 3: think I've ever found or ever encountered a psychopath with
Speaker 3: an entirely normal family upbringing. And it sort of led
Speaker 3: me to think a little bit more about the difference
Speaker 3: between and this is collectly actually comments on this, and
Speaker 3: this is the basis of the original distinction between a psychopath,
Speaker 3: who was somebody who was character logically morally insane, so
Speaker 3: somebody who just from birth was going to be manipulative
Speaker 3: and lack empathy, and what was called a sociopath. And
Speaker 3: that's not a term we really use anymore, but the
Speaker 3: idea of a sociopath was somebody who society had made
Speaker 3: morally insane, so they become anti social through neglect, abuse,
Speaker 3: bad luck, you know, repeated social failure, things like that.
Speaker 3: And I think it's more complicated than that, because I
Speaker 3: think that sociopaths actually can be functionally identical to psychopaths
Speaker 3: in many ways. They can have that sort of callous
Speaker 3: and emotionality, they can be manipulative, they can be liars,
Speaker 3: but the cause of it is different. Because these are
Speaker 3: people who'se sort of psychopathic presentation comes from neglects and
Speaker 3: abuse and sort of trying to just find a way
Speaker 3: to survive in a very aversive environment, whereas the sort
Speaker 3: of more primary psychopaths, the character logical psychopaths are inheriting
Speaker 3: something that's been passed down. But I think the differentiation
Speaker 3: that's important here is that the character sorry the secondary
Speaker 3: psychopaths are it's a defense basically against a nasty situation
Speaker 3: that they've acquired in childhood and can't let go of,
Speaker 3: because it's so difficult to drop your guard if you
Speaker 3: like to start feeling emotions when you know that you've
Speaker 3: been abused, you know that you've abused other people, and
Speaker 3: now your life is basically about violence. It's so difficult
Speaker 3: to let go of that. So it functionally looks the
Speaker 3: same as primary psychopathy. But I also think there's a
Speaker 3: little bit more, a little bit more hope for people
Speaker 3: who've acquired these sort of psychopathic characteristics, as I try
Speaker 3: to draw out in the final chapter of the book
Speaker 3: on Eddie.
Speaker 4: Let's use as a as an opportunity to stop for
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Speaker 4: Let's talk about as you alluded to, Eddie the redeem
Speaker 4: as you title it.
Speaker 3: So Eddie was somebody I've only met. I met a
Speaker 3: few times, very briefly, when I was working in one
Speaker 3: of the lowest security hospitals. And he was somebody who's
Speaker 3: reaching the end of his, if you like, criminal journey.
Speaker 3: So he'd been convicted and said to prison many times.
Speaker 3: He'd been to mental hospital twice as well, and yet
Speaker 3: somehow in his last sentence and something that essentially offered
Speaker 3: him a chance of redemption. And in this case, it
Speaker 3: was a very a very experienced psychoanalyst, not me, but
Speaker 3: my supervisor, doctor C, who was I guess, somebody who
Speaker 3: had decades of experiences and analysts, but also a real,
Speaker 3: you know, sort of anti psychopathic empathy for people, regardless
Speaker 3: of how unpleasant or how sadistic, or how a manipulative
Speaker 3: or how aggressive they may appear. She was always able
Speaker 3: to find something within people that was worth holding onto,
Speaker 3: worth sort of treasuring and trying to encourage. I think
Speaker 3: with Eddie what she'd identified with somebody who had exactly
Speaker 3: as actually I was just explaining, developed this kind of
Speaker 3: psychopathic defense. So his defense against the terrible experiences he'd
Speaker 3: had of being abused by his stepfather, of growing up
Speaker 3: in a childhood in East London. Which it's a different
Speaker 3: world nowadays because I actually live in East London, but
Speaker 3: back in the sort of nineteen fifties and sixties, just
Speaker 3: after the Second World War, a lot of the older
Speaker 3: industries in Eastunmon had left, particularly around the docks, so
Speaker 3: the shipping and fishing industries were really dying out, and
Speaker 3: it became a very poor and a very aggressive, violent
Speaker 3: place to be. And this is where the sort of
Speaker 3: classic the London the classic guide of the London gangster
Speaker 3: comes in the Kray Twins. The sort of the older
Speaker 3: guy Ritchie move is that it was a very boor
Speaker 3: and a very very crime ridden area. This was the
Speaker 3: area that Eddie grew up in. And I think that
Speaker 3: the combination sort of the abuse in the family and
Speaker 3: particularly the really terrible abuse against his mother, who he
Speaker 3: thinks was raped at least twice by his stepfather, led
Speaker 3: him to develop a sort of very callous, very psychopathic
Speaker 3: type personality, and that then drew him into behaving in
Speaker 3: a very psychopathic way. I mean, he's in a way,
Speaker 3: he's very very unlucky. And you know that one of
Speaker 3: his first defenses he actually kills somebody in what looks
Speaker 3: like and I know, look, I've worked in forensics for
Speaker 3: twenty two years now, I know that this sounds unlikely.
Speaker 3: But somebody actually falls on him while he's holding a
Speaker 3: knife in self defense, and there are witness statements support
Speaker 3: you know it's not and he was convicted of manage homicide.
Speaker 3: But whether so what you call murder two or murder
Speaker 3: three in the USA, there's no intent to kill, simply
Speaker 3: a sort of a bad accident. And so he goes
Speaker 3: to prison and then in prison, I think he's given
Speaker 3: some space to think about his life for the first time,
Speaker 3: and it simply becomes too much for him, and he
Speaker 3: starts to have really terrifying hallucinations about sort of things
Speaker 3: growing in his skin classical symptoms of actually psychosis, so
Speaker 3: schizophrenia not psychopathy. Rather than seeking help, which he doesn't
Speaker 3: feel able to do because he thinks if he seeks
Speaker 3: help then he'll be exploited again. He becomes aggressive and
Speaker 3: difficult and realizes that actually being aggressive in prison, certainly
Speaker 3: in the nineteen seventies and eighties, gets him a better
Speaker 3: response and more is more effective for him than trying
Speaker 3: to sort of try to understand his problems and seeking
Speaker 3: help for them. So he goes through prison many, many times.
Speaker 3: He's often sectioned, and often, you know, his mental health
Speaker 3: problems are addressed in various ways by drugs and other things,
Speaker 3: but never really never really resolved. And I think he's
Speaker 3: released for one final time, and he's a very charming guy,
Speaker 3: Eddie really really or he was. Unfortunately, he passed away
Speaker 3: a couple of years ago now, which was very sad
Speaker 3: because we had hoped to celebrate the book launch together
Speaker 3: and we never quite got to do that because of COVID.
Speaker 3: But he's released in prisoner i think the third time,
Speaker 3: and then he commits another offense. He assaults a woman
Speaker 3: in a very sort of kind of pathetic way, and
Speaker 3: disagreeing with something she's saying, he throws a bucket of
Speaker 3: water over her. She calls the police, which she was
Speaker 3: completely in her beautiplet correct to do, and I think
Speaker 3: something inside him sort of wilts a bit and says, yeah,
Speaker 3: I just at that point, I just realized I didn't
Speaker 3: want to fight it anymore. So he hands himself into
Speaker 3: the police very very calmly, and he serves his time,
Speaker 3: and then at the end of that he decides to
Speaker 3: go into treatment. He goes into a treatment unit for
Speaker 3: men with personality, just sort of meets doctor See and
Speaker 3: I think she sees or she rather helps him to
Speaker 3: lay out. This choice is that you can either go
Speaker 3: through the rest of your life fighting system, being broken
Speaker 3: by it, somethering more pain, coming back into prison again again,
Speaker 3: or you have a chance to this different with your life.
Speaker 3: And he really pounces on this in a way that
Speaker 3: you'd never expect a psychopath to do, because I think
Speaker 3: part of psychopathy is it's sort of very it hasn't change,
Speaker 3: it's chronic, it never goes away. Some of the sort
Speaker 3: of more antisocial things burn out. But to develop empathy
Speaker 3: and to develop a sort of curiosity about yourself so
Speaker 3: late in life was really quite unique for Eddie, and
Speaker 3: I think he may be the exception, but I think
Speaker 3: it gives me the sense that there might be hope
Speaker 3: for all psychopaths if we can just find the right way,
Speaker 3: the right time to approach them about maybe changing their lives.
Speaker 3: So it was really I mean, it was absolute pleasure
Speaker 3: to work with the guy. He really is. I think
Speaker 3: he's become charming in a sort of an authentic way,
Speaker 3: not in a psychopathic way that you could.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: We used to sit and sort of eat Danish pastries
Speaker 3: and drink coffee in his house in East London, and
Speaker 3: he had two little poodles that sort of ran around
Speaker 3: our legs, yapping at us and sort of licking us,
Speaker 3: and then we'd have to go outside for him to
Speaker 3: have a smoke and things like that. It was a
Speaker 3: really sort of enriching experience for me to work with
Speaker 3: some like that, and sort of the other funny thing was,
Speaker 3: at the same time one of his relatives was still
Speaker 3: obviously involved in criminal activity to quite some degree. So
Speaker 3: we occasionally get these phone calls of them being intercepted
Speaker 3: by the police and you have to sort of give
Speaker 3: legal advice and tell them not to pay the drug
Speaker 3: dealer or pay the drug deal or whatever it was
Speaker 3: they were doing at the same time. So the criminal
Speaker 3: world was so still there trying to get in, but
Speaker 3: he was very good at holding that boundary, you know,
Speaker 3: with this is a space that we don't We're not
Speaker 3: criminal here. You may be come up there and I'm
Speaker 3: going to tell you how to deal with that, but
Speaker 3: we're not criminal here, so don't bring it to my
Speaker 3: doorset And that's just sort of that for me, that
Speaker 3: really showed that he learned the lessons of his life.
Speaker 4: I think you're right that this is an example of
Speaker 4: the field making that first bold offer, and you talk
Speaker 4: about what that kind of treatment might look like in
Speaker 4: if you had your way, So tell us about what
Speaker 4: you think your vision is for some of that treatment,
Speaker 4: what that would include and that approach.
Speaker 3: One of the things about Eddie that was really great
Speaker 3: was towards the end of his life he was increasingly
Speaker 3: becoming involved with treating other offenders. He was working as
Speaker 3: a facilitator of what we call a mentalization based therapy group,
Speaker 3: so this would involve him taking the lead in just
Speaker 3: working through the mentalization process with other offenders. Mentalization is
Speaker 3: fairly new concepts in the UK. It's twenty years old,
Speaker 3: but you know, these concepts take a while to be developed.
Speaker 3: It's developed by Anti Bateman and Peter Foneghie, who are psychoanalysts,
Speaker 3: two the bigger universities in the UK, and essentially it
Speaker 3: targets what the core element of psychopathy is, which is
Speaker 3: the inability to recognize and deal with emotions. The only
Speaker 3: difference I guess between you know, the psychopathic realization of
Speaker 3: mentalization mentalizations that this mentalization is about both yourself and
Speaker 3: other people. It's about realizing, recognizing and dealing with mental
Speaker 3: states that you may have at the same time as
Speaker 3: recognizing dealing with them in other people. And I think
Speaker 3: one of the you know, the really sort of striking
Speaker 3: things about working with people with personality disorder and psychopathy
Speaker 3: is that their ability to recognize emotional states and certainly
Speaker 3: in other people is so limited that it's almost like,
Speaker 3: I remember, I'm not sure if this is rather thant,
Speaker 3: but it's always struck me as the same idea. When
Speaker 3: I was working in the prison, we had offender who
Speaker 3: was probably in his mid forties and he kept ringing
Speaker 3: his cell door bell and the officers would come very often.
Speaker 3: He just wanted someone to talk to and that's not
Speaker 3: what the cell door bell is about it. But if
Speaker 3: there's an emergency, wing the bell and somebody will come
Speaker 3: to you. And this is quite an enlightened prison wing
Speaker 3: because we had lots of psychologists who were trying to
Speaker 3: help the prison officers to work in a sort of
Speaker 3: an engaging and psychological way. But one of the prison
Speaker 3: officers in particular got quite irritated, and I think on
Speaker 3: the fifth bell the night he opened, all said, there's
Speaker 3: anyone ever told you the story of Peter and the Wolf?
Speaker 3: And he said, no, what's that? And of course Peter
Speaker 3: and RP isn't that we you know, we all learn
Speaker 3: when we're sort of five six years old. In the UK,
Speaker 3: probably in the USA as well, it says if you
Speaker 3: keep asking for help when you don't need it, when
Speaker 3: you actually do need help for help, nobody's going to
Speaker 3: listen to you. And the fact that this man had never,
Speaker 3: in forty seven years of life ever heard this story,
Speaker 3: nobody ever taken the time to explain it. Sort of.
Speaker 3: It's interesting, sort of fuel to my idea that sometimes
Speaker 3: psychopathy has actually learned rather than simply hand it down,
Speaker 3: and sometimes there's a way back from that as well.
Speaker 3: So I think the learning point for me is that
Speaker 3: the best people to teach psychopaths to live a better life,
Speaker 3: to manage themselves better, to learn how to process emotions
Speaker 3: are other psychopaths who somehow made it through this journey.
Speaker 3: And that's true in a lot of cases in prison.
Speaker 3: I think, why should you listen to me in the UK,
Speaker 3: I'm somebody from it, probably a different class background. I'm
Speaker 3: very middle class, or that's where i'd be seen in
Speaker 3: the UK. I have a very privileged education. I probably
Speaker 3: have virtually no touching points to my childhood to most
Speaker 3: of the men that I work with. I have what
Speaker 3: I think, what I think is a lot of knowledge
Speaker 3: about these disorders, but that doesn't necessarily give me the
Speaker 3: sort of epistemic privilege to say this is what you
Speaker 3: should do to make your life better, whereas if it
Speaker 3: comes from somebody who is like you, has the same
Speaker 3: experiences who's been to prison as a prisoner rather than
Speaker 3: as a psychologist who's suffered at the hands of the
Speaker 3: system and thought it at the same time as well.
Speaker 3: That's going to come across as much more authentic, I think,
Speaker 3: And so places in the UK like Grendon Prison, which
Speaker 3: is a therapeutic community where the treatment is non hierarchical,
Speaker 3: it's driven jointly by prisons and staff, I think is
Speaker 3: much more promising. The reason I don't immediately recommend Grendan
Speaker 3: for other prisons is because they have a policy of
Speaker 3: not taking high scoring psychopaths, so a lot of the
Speaker 3: men that I worked with wouldn't have been eligible for it.
Speaker 3: But I think that might be something that could be
Speaker 3: looked at again. And I also would like to see
Speaker 3: mentalization based therapy have a much bigger base, particularly in
Speaker 3: prison and forensic services in the UK, and maybe start
Speaker 3: to make the jump into the USA as well. I
Speaker 3: think it's a very interesting idea. Another great thing about
Speaker 3: it is it's mostly open source, so if you're interested
Speaker 3: in mentalization, you can actually google it and download the
Speaker 3: training package. It's a pretty hefty slide pack, but at
Speaker 3: the end of it you get a pretty good idea
Speaker 3: about what it is and how to tell thefference between
Speaker 3: what we call pseudo mentalizing, where somebody seems to be
Speaker 3: getting the idea about calling the emotions of other people,
Speaker 3: but is doing it from the wrong standpoint, doing it
Speaker 3: from maybe an intellectual standpoint, therefore making the wrong cause.
Speaker 3: So there's lots of really interesting resources about it on
Speaker 3: the web as well, and I'd really like to see
Speaker 3: that have more more of a standing I think in
Speaker 3: as a treatment for psychopathy.
Speaker 4: You're right in the end of your book the reasons
Speaker 4: that someone commits a serious crime or a unique, complex
Speaker 4: and difficult on earth. And that's why the best crime
Speaker 4: thrillers are almost always like archaeologies of the perpetrator's mind,
Speaker 4: peeling back layers of experience and emotion. It only makes
Speaker 4: sense and relationship to each other. And this is what
Speaker 4: makes a psychopath truly not a diagnosis made by a
Speaker 4: test in a common on So.
Speaker 3: I'm you know, most of my work, my research work
Speaker 3: is not psychopathis on dance preventions. As part of that,
Speaker 3: what I've been trying to do is sort of build
Speaker 3: up causal relationships and saying what causes a crime to happen?
Speaker 3: What are the specific triggers that people have, what is
Speaker 3: their upbringings, what are the you know, the dynamic risk factors,
Speaker 3: So whether they use drugs where they have previous experience
Speaker 3: of violence, poor relationship, Psychopathy is not really that good
Speaker 3: a causal risk factor for violence. It doesn't explain why
Speaker 3: people are violent. So what I'm sort of trying to
Speaker 3: say there is that, first of all, we can't really
Speaker 3: think psychopathy doesn't explain why people are horrible to other people.
Speaker 3: You have First of all, I guess the example of
Speaker 3: James Fallon, who you know, you have to see the
Speaker 3: brain scam, but this guy has an identical brain scan
Speaker 3: to that of a psychopath. They're exposed to a very
Speaker 3: disturbing stimulus, usually something like a baby's crying, and he
Speaker 3: shows absolutely no emotional response whatsoever. And yet he has
Speaker 3: children who would have been babies themselves. And yet he
Speaker 3: has a stable relationship, stable loving relationship with his wife,
Speaker 3: and he does have other people around to dinner. He
Speaker 3: may hate their guts for it, but hey, they come
Speaker 3: around and they drink his wine and eat his meat
Speaker 3: loaf and things like that. So why is he so
Speaker 3: different to a psychopath in prison who scores highly on
Speaker 3: the PCLR even have you know, regrets or concerns. Some
Speaker 3: regret some concerns. So I'm against this idea of psychopathy
Speaker 3: becoming a sort of a way of explaining why crime
Speaker 3: happens and trying to put people to think a little
Speaker 3: bit more imaginatively, and not just you know, people who
Speaker 3: are interested in true crime, but particularly people who write
Speaker 3: about crime, people who write about write criminal characters, to
Speaker 3: think that the psychopathy isn't just it's not the end
Speaker 3: of the explanation. It's a factor, sure, and it's a
Speaker 3: factor about how people reason emotionally and explain themselves. But
Speaker 3: if you want to understand why people are murderers, serial killers,
Speaker 3: rapists commit terrible crimes, you need to go into more
Speaker 3: detail in the backgrounds. You need to start that archaeological
Speaker 3: process of thinking what does this crime represent for that person?
Speaker 3: And the idea comes from psychoanalysis, sure, but I don't
Speaker 3: think it needs to be wrapped up in psychoanalystic terms
Speaker 3: to still make sense or be a worthwhile journey.
Speaker 4: I want to thank you very much, doctor Mark Freestar
Speaker 4: for coming on and joking about your incredible making a
Speaker 4: psychopath my journey into seven Dangerous Mind. It's been a
Speaker 4: fascinating interview, my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, doctor
Speaker 4: Mark Freestone, you have a great evening.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Dan, you too, thank you.
Speaker 4: Good night.