Yikes!
Last month, I started reading a book by a British psychiatrist, Dr. Gwen Adshead, "The Devil You Know: Encounters in Forensic Psychiatry. An alternative subtitle for this work is , Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion. From the blurb on Goodreads.com:
In eleven vivid narratives based on decades of providing therapy to people in prisons and secure hospitals, an internationally renowned forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist demonstrates the remarkable human capacity for radical empathy, change, and redemption.
What drives someone to commit an act of terrible violence?... Through a collaboration with coauthor Eileen Horne, Dr. Adshead brings her extraordinary career to life in a series of unflinching portraits.
Alongside doctor and patient, we discover what human cruelty, ranging from serial homicide to stalking, arson or sexual offending, means to perpetrators, experiencing first-hand how minds can change when the people some might label as “evil” are able to take responsibility for their life stories and get to know their own minds.
With outcomes ranging from hope to despair, from denial to recovery, these men and women are revealed in all their complexity and shared humanity.
My intent was to understand (empathize) with the patients and with the doctor, enough to allow me to write characters in fictional stories I haven't yet written.
However, reading about Adshead's patient "Sam, (not his real name)" I was drawn into empathetic understanding of a remarkably earthshattering tragedy, as we've come to know Nick Reiner, who is in jail in California awaiting trial for allegedly (apparently) murdering both of his parents. Sam is the 10th of 11 case studies described in Adshead's book.
From NEWS coverage of a certain POTUS over the last decade, I (we) have become somewhat familiar with some of that fellow's personality flaws. Various mental health practitioners have tried to exercise their Duty to Warn, including in a documentary film, #UNFIT about Trump's first term. I'm confident Jeff Bezos will not get rich by you paying $.99 to watch the film on Amazon Prime if you should choose to do so.
