Christopher John Heginbotham

This title was first published in 2000: Personality disorder/Psychopathy has long troubled philosophers, lawyers and mental health practitioners. This book is highly topical in tackling the interface of applied philosophy and psychiatry at a time when government and clinicians are giving careful consideration to new forms of treatment of people with psychopathic disorder. The book brings together contributions from lawyers, philosophers, psychiatrists and clinical managers to explore the inter-related conceptual and political implications of Psychopathy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Third Way: Social Disability and Person-Centered AssessmentChristopher Heginbotham (bio)Keywordsimpaired functioning, psychopathic, personality disorder, neurological damage, psychotherapyJohn Sadler’s Fascinating Paper identifies a significant problem with existing diagnostic classifications. But in doing so he raises further unresolved philosophical, nosological, and practical problems. Although he is undoubtedly right in showing that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-IV (and International Classification of Diseases [ICD]-10) do not provide an adequate categorization, he is I believe wrong to use the term “vice” to describe the cluster of wrongful acts.“Vice” conjures up images of Miami, drugbusting police, prostitution, and other activities that are characterized by one thing—by and large, these are actions undertaken knowingly, usually for financial gain. These are not the actions of people with impaired mental functioning as a result of mental disorder or neurological damage. It is of course true that human trafficking and enforced prostitution may mean women forced into prostitution against their will, but rarely are these women considered mentally disordered solely as a result of their prostitution. Yet it is capacitated, premeditated wrongdoing that is normally considered to be “vice.”By contrast, all the cases cited in the paper describe conditions that are almost certainly the result of some form of impaired functioning, either owing to early childhood experiences (Case A), familial culture and conditioning (Case B), or neurological damage (Case C). The common thread in these cases is impaired capacity—in Case A this could be described as due to psychopathic or personality disorder (I distinguish the two separately rather than describe the phenomenon as “psychopathic personality disorder”) as a result of multiple childhood traumas. Their presentation is not unexpected given the person’s history and, although the condition may have become refractory, it might be amenable to treatment with psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, given sufficient time and a nurturing environment (Bateman and Fonagy 2006, 2008; Cordess and Cox 1996; Levy 2008).The description of Case B leaves a lot of room for doubt and uncertainties. Did Ms A really try to smother her child? She confessed to one occasion, but was this under duress? Did she feel that if she agreed she would be treated more leniently? And if she was guilty, does it suggest “vice,” a premeditated act, or is there another explanation—attention [End Page 31] seeking because of low self-esteem or a personality disorder as a result of some abuse that had not been identified? Almost certainly from the description given this would not count, for me at any rate, as vice. Her actions may be odd, bizarre, or dangerous, but did they demonstrate a mens rea? Was Ms A making adequate evaluative judgments of her situation and that of her child? We know from clinical work with very damaged women in forensic mental health services that early physical, emotional, or sexual abuse leads in turn to women harming both themselves and their children (Bland et al. 1999; Cordess and Cox 1996; see also for example, Jeffcote and Watson 2004). Or perhaps, speculatively, her condition was Munchausen’s by proxy?Case C is horrendous but does not lend itself readily to the forms of psychiatric classification available. Indeed there is no easy way to describe such actions other than those of someone who is either incapable of understanding the nature and consequence of the actions that he has undertaken, or is simply “mad” in a folk sense. Prima facie this seems to be the result of permanent and little understood neurological damage. However, this case comes closest to the evil that is implied in the term “vice”; and might be diagnosed similarly to a celebrated English murderer, that of Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper. Sutcliffe was diagnosed as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, although the jury at his trial found that he was fit to plead, and he was initially sent to prison, where he deteriorated. He is now, and has for some time, been in Broadmoor high secure hospital.The result of these comments is that I agree fully with John Sadler’s conclusions, but for rather different reasons. DSM-IV categories try and fail to offer a symptomatology for...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:'Psychiatric Dasein'Christopher Heginbotham (bio)Fulford and Colombo's pioneering work (2004)in linguistic analysis offers valuable insights and 'deconstructs' the often inter-related concepts of mental disorder and treatment. Their paper describes a combined philosophical and empirical research program developed to study "the role models of disorder in the community care of people with long-term schizophrenia" (2004, 130). They claim that the approach supplies a key explanatory insight into the nature of the problem presented by models of disorder, a characterization of models, contributions to research design, a theoretical framework—a 'models-grid,' and a basis for turning theory into practice. These claims are not unreasonable in the context of the specific objectives of the research design, but do not necessarily cover everything of importance in the way models are used to describe mental disorder. In particular, this brief response proposes the need to develop an understanding of psychiatric Dasein—mental disorder as presented in the world.Fulford and Colombo are surely right in their claim that representations of mental disorder are high-level concepts not dissimilar to other high-level concepts such as time. These are concepts that we seem to have little difficulty using in day-to-day practice but have great difficulty defining. In their discussion of this point, they suggest that little progress has been made in relation to models of mental disorder over the previous fifty years, that there is a considerable volume of theoretical literature that has had little impact on practice.This assertion does not appear to do justice to the significant progress that might be argued to have occurred in psychoanalytic theory, psychodynamic therapy, and other metapsychological developments of the last fifty to one hundred years. Many of these developments have changed markedly our perceptions of mental disorder. Some treatments, it is true, may not have direct relevance or applicability to serious psychotic behavior, although that is contentious; there are psychoanalytic psychotherapists working with people with schizophrenia who would claim success. Recent developments in cognitive-behavioral therapy allied to other treatment modalities, such as careful use of low-dosage medication, have had therapeutic impact in enabling people with schizophrenia to 'manage their voices' and to understand the complex nature of their own thought processes.Fulford and Colombo also suggest that after this half century of work much of the development of practice has been largely abortive. Is this correct? It is true that we continue to struggle with an understanding of what we mean by mental disorder, which is made much worse, as the authors say, by the multiplicity of definitions of mental illness, models of mental disorder and practical approaches to treatment and management. Multidisciplinary and multi-agency developments of the last twenty years especially have, on the one hand, been a powerful approach to recognizing the multifaceted nature of mental disorder, but, on the other, have tended to a potential fragmentation of effort that has undermined [End Page 147] the necessary focus on the needs of the individual patient.Threefold ExpansionIt is here that perhaps an addition or expansion can be made to Fulford and Colombo's approach. That addition is, to borrow a phrase used by Hilary Putnam for the title of one of his books, a 'three fold cord.' The term comes originally from Ecclesiastes 4.12: "..a threefold cord is not quickly broken." (Putnam subtitles his book, Mind, Body and World, echoing, probably unintentionally, Heidegger's threefold structure of 'Being-In' [Dreyfus 1991. 163]).First, there have been many attempts 'informally' to understand the interplay of differing mental disorders in the operation of multidisciplinary teams. The development of community mental health teams and more recently Crisis Resolution and Out-Reach teams has required staff from varying professional backgrounds and agencies to find some common ground and to negotiate across their various professional, philosophical, and nosological boundaries. These negotiations have not been easy. A first element of the threefold expansion may be to incorporate (or strengthen) an organizational and group dynamic in the model (see, for example, de Board 1978; Hinshelwood 1987)Second, theoretical and practical work by professionals trained in psychoanalytic disciplines have sought to understand the nature of multidisciplinary community provision for people...