3/22/16

Renato Nunez
Delirium
Everyone from Albert Einstein to Benjamin Franklin has been attributed for the definition
of insanity, that is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result. Perhaps
philosophically this is true, but in modern psychology the pop culture understanding of insanity
actually fills about 620 pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM). In fact, insanity is not one of the hundreds of mental disorders in the manual. Instead,
insanity refers to a legal defense within the American Justice system. To put that into
perspective, there are about 450 mental disorders that a criminal could use to evade justice,
and about nine different psychological perspectives that can be used to approach each mental
disorder. Add the fact that our understanding of human psychology changes on a daily basis,
and that American law is based on a rigid structure of precedents; the potential for a failure of
the justice system is inevitable. Mental illness will always blur the line between the victims and
the guilty. Although mental illness should be used as a lens through which we view an illness
driven crime, we cannot allow mental illness to exist as an excuse because of its medical and
legal ambiguity.

No matter the victim or crime the judge and jury are tasked with finding justice, if they
discover a mental disorder in their search they should take it into account but cannot stop their
search there. If anything, their search for justice should be even more rigorous as they must
now determine if illness was a factor in the crime. Here is where many juries, and even judges,
stumble; one cannot assume that a criminals disorder is the reasoning behind their crimes, in
fact the American Psychological Association (APA) has found less than 10 percent were directly
related to symptoms of mental illness (Source G). Translating their study to the whole
population suggests that we would find over 90% of mentally ill criminals are 100% guilty of their

crimes. Does this mean that we can ignore insanity as a defense? No, because 7.5% of these
criminals are driven by their symptoms because our system failed to deliver the treatment that
they needed (Source C&G). The question is not whether the mentally ill deserve treatment,
sending them to prison without providing for their health is inhumane, guilty or not. The question
is whether they should be amongst others who consciously committed crimes or amongst those
who were forced by their disorder. Still the answer is not that simple, perhaps a bipolar 18 year
old broke into someone's house and is facing a long time in prison because he did not
experience a symptom during the crime, does he deserve the cruelty of prison where he is 20%
more likely to be assaulted than healthy inmates? (Source A) That is up to the judge and jury to
decide. However, it should be mandatory for any case concerning the mentally ill, that the jury
be educated on what insanity means so that they may determine for themselves what the
criminal deserves.

Psychology is a relatively new science that has very few facts that can't be debated and
redefines itself virtually every generation, American law is founded on a history of precedents
that are, for the most part, rigid (at least until the supreme court gets a hold of them.) There will
likely never be a precedent for each of the 450 known mental disorders in the eyes of the law,
instead our legal system has forced a single label for them all: insanity. This label has allowed
for both sides of the law to abuse the idea of insanity; affluenza, for example, is fueled by the
pop culture surrounding insanity. Affluenza is not a mental disorder, more likely it is just a
synonym for ignorance, Judge Jean Boyd allowed the idea of affluenza to influence her into
allowing a spoiled teen who was at fault for the death of four people to walk free (Source B).
While in Texas four families were robbed of justice because a rich kid suffered from affluenza,
Blacks find themselves at increased danger of being misdiagnosed (Source B&H). The defense
of insanity is perhaps just a branch of an even greater underlying problem with our legal system:
the fact that it is geared against minorities (Source B). Like in the case of the Affluenza teen, a

wealthy man can employ an expert lawyer to prove that his mental health is at fault (even when
his disorder is affluenza), while a more disadvantaged American, with an actual mental illness,
leaves his fate to an overwhelmed public defender who is distracted by a dozen other cases.
Psychology is a science of perspectives; Freud might say that a criminal committed a crime
because of repressed childhood trauma, while Merton suggests it was because he lacked
another option to achieve his goals (Source D). With that said, while the APA does not endorse
affluenza, another administrative body might, with data to support their claim. Freud, the father
of psychology, is controversial because of his fixation on sex and aggression, and yet much of
his ideas are still being debated. So how can we then dictate the future of an individual based
on hypotheticals that might be disproved within the year. When the next DSM is published with
50 more mental disorders, or 50 less, how many innocents went to jail because no one believed
they were insane? How many criminals walked free because everyone thought that they were
crazy? How long until we become the Freuds of history?

The insanity defense is a paradox, rarely will a jury recognize the scope of the word
insanity, and yet they will be asked to determine the guiltiness of a possibly insane person.
The moment human psych is brought to the table, the trial becomes a question that not even
expert psychologists can answer: why? Because of genetics? Maybe. Because of trauma?
Perhaps. Because of personality? Possibly. Yet we cannot simply ignore psychology during trial.
The simple solution to the elusive nature of psychology in the pretext of law, is that we change
the connotation of insanity from innocent to disadvantaged to allow our juries to be more
objective when a charismatic lawyer pulls one of 450 mental disorders out of his/her pocket.