Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

The Psychological Assessment 317
Table 12.1. The psychological vulnerability of people with mental illness, learning
disability and personality disorder
Mental illness Learning disability Personality disorder
Faulty reality Impaired intellectual Lies readily.
monitoring. capacity. Manipulative.
Distorted Poor memory capacity. Poor self-esteem.
perceptions Poor understanding of legal Need for notoriety.
and beliefs. rights. Tendency towards
Proneness to Heightened suggestibility confabulation.
feelings of guilt. and acquiescence. Lack of concern about
Failure to appreciate consequences of giving
the implications and an untrue statement.
consequences of answers
given.
� mental disorder;
� abnormal mental state;
� cognitive functioning and
� personality traits.
Each type of mental disorder is associated with different kinds of psychological
vulnerability as shown in Table 12.1. These are relevant irrespective of whether
the person is interviewed as a witness, victim or a suspect.
Mental Disorder
The term ‘mental disorder’ means that the person suffers from a diagnosable
psychiatric problem, including mental illness (e.g. schizophrenia, depressive
illness), learning disability or personality disorder.
Where there is mental illness, perceptions, cognitions, emotions, judgement
and self-control may be adversely affected, and these may result in misleading
information being provided to the police during an interview. Breakdown in
‘reality monitoring’ is an important symptom of mental illness and when
present it impairs the patient’s ability to differentiate facts from fantasy. In
some circumstances this can result in people believing that they have committed
crimes of which they are totally innocent (see Chapter 9). Breakdown in reality
monitoring does not require the presence of mental illness (see Chapter 18).
It occurs in everyday life in relation to the memory of thoughts, feelings and
events (e.g. it is common for people to not be able to differentiate between what
one intended to do and what one has done). However, mental illness makes the
breakdown in reality monitoring more extensive and frequent (Bentall, Baker &
Havers, 1991).
Depressive illness does cause some people to ruminate and implicate themselves
falsely in criminal activity as a way of relieving strong feelings of freefloating
guilt (Gudjonsson, 1999a). As discussed in Chapter 8 such attempts
only relieve the feelings of guilt temporarily.