As a criminal psychologist, my academic work focuses on memory, interviewing techniques, and crime patterns, while Dr Adshead works directly with individuals in a clinical setting. She meets people who have perpetrated violent acts in a therapeutic setting, helping them make sense of their violence and reducing their risk of future harm.
“The community is far more dangerous than any prison or any secure psychiatric hospital could ever be” she told me. “I would much rather be in a high security psychiatric hospital than walking down some places in London. For example, if you’re in an environment where you’ve got lots of young men who are drunk, that is an environment in which violence is very likely to happen”.
“The fundamental myth here is that people think that because you've done a violent thing, that must mean you’re violent through and through... as if you never think about anything else but being violent” she said. “But this is just nonsense. The vast majority of violence perpetrators use their violence for a very particular purpose and have no interest in being violent or threatening towards me. Whereas in the outside world, you have no idea about the state of mind of the people you meet in the street.” This undermines the stereotype, often fed to us by films, that secure psychiatric hospitals are frightening places.
Dr Adshead’s approach also calls into question the rigid separation of victims and perpetrators. “I’m concerned that when we talk about violence, we tend to talk about victims and perpetrators as if they occupy completely different worlds,” she told me. “I think this is fundamentally untrue.”
People who kill have complex psychological needs. Dr Adshead explained that she tries to help them understand the drivers of their crimes, why they resorted to violence in the first place? And for many people this involves working through previous trauma as well as dealing with denial, guilt over the crimes they committed.
