In physics, we use the same laws to explain why airplanes fly, and why they crash. In psychiatry, we use one set of laws to explain sane behaviour, which we attribute to reasons (choices), and another set of laws to explain insane behaviour, which we attribute to causes (diseases). God, man's idea of moral perfection, judges human deeds without distinguishing between sane persons responsible fo...

Three categories of crime-scene behaviors (violence, interpersonal involvement, and criminal sophistication) among a group of 22 serial and 22 single-victim rapists were studied. Findings indicate that serial rapists were more likely to display a higher level of criminally sophisticated behaviors to avoid detection, whereas single-victim rapists were more likely to behave violently and engage i...

Critics of psychiatry (or “anti-psychiatrists”) such as philosopher Michel Foucault, sociologist Erving Goffman and physician Ronald David Laing tend to view a form social control, one the state institutions oppression. The concept “norm” in relation mental health is understood culturally conditioned. Psychiatry used isolate “stigmatise” carriers non-normative rationality, individuals with diff...

Alex Sarch’s recent book, Criminally Ignorant: Why the Law Pretends We Know What Don’t is a wonderfully rich work.1 Sarch provides and defends an explanatorily powerful theory of criminal culpab...

Abstract In this ‘Interlude’ between Parts I and II of the book, we reproduce a few verbatim excerpts from thousands clinical files patients diagnosed with forms pellagrous insanity at Venetian insane asylums San Servolo (men) Clemente (women) during latter half nineteenth century. They are as close can come to patients’ own harrowing experience illness, though course mediated by asylum doctors.