The Mind of a Murderer: A glimpse into the darkest corners of the human psyche, from a leading forensic psychiatrist

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To explain violence, we must contextualise the physiology with psychological abstractions, such as impulses, urges and motives. She displayed disturbed behaviour at school, dropped out of education and progressed through recreational illicit drug use to heroin addiction. Perhaps the behaviour of Charles Whitman, a man convicted of murdering 16 people in Texas in 1966, was driven by a similar brain anomaly.

The prosecution charged her with murder and she was facing a life sentence, and her mental state had to be unpicked. It all came to a head in the most tragic of ways, with Georgina killing her five-month-old, a little girl named Louisa. To get to the underlying mechanisms that explain why Seb was experiencing symptoms, we needed to listen in detail to exactly what he was saying. His tone became more earnest as he spoke about the offence, but he did not become overtly emotional. I have seen so many cases of criminal neglect leading to death and deliberate lethal abuse, but a couple of examples linger in my memory.And I think my decision to take up the post at Holloway may have been influenced by this family story, a sort of curiosity. Before even having a chance to check whether he was any more communicative, I could see a change in his appearance. Michelle Ward heads to death row to find out whether Willie Trottie committed a crime of passion or acted in self-defense when he gunned down his ex-girlfriend and her brother. Their nervous systems are different from others in the sense that they don’t get a thrill from some of the things that normal people would. For most of us, even a flickering awareness of the consequences of our imagined aggression triggers negative feelings that prevent us from going through with a violent act.

And let's say they're in a relapse with delusional beliefs and it may be that a relative living with them may be the one that's challenging them about their behaviour or is the one that gets caught up in their delusional beliefs. I needed to come to a view on whether he could properly engage in the criminal proceedings; in other words, was he fit to plead?As his condition deteriorated, he was rushed to hospital where brain scans revealed a massive tumour in his forebrain. Ward also hosts the series "Stalked: Someone's Watching," which profiles stories of stalking victims and the psychology of their perpetrators. And applying these narratives involves inhibiting the very thing that we condemn violent offenders for failing to show: empathy. And then the hallucinations, so voices, somebody may be commenting on their actions, or commands, telling them to do things. He completed post-graduate training at the Bethlem and Maudsley hospitals and then took up a post as Consultant Forensic Psychiatrist.